SO WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT, THEN (AND NOW)?

a nasty dogma (cf Psalm 59)

A recent discussion with a friend about religion, church, and dogma set me thinking about such things, and trying to work them out. I post the result here in case it may be helpful to some. (NB: A None is not a canonical Hour, but someone who to the pollster’s question about one’s religion answers “None”. A Vaguist is, well, vague.)

 

A. What was the Eu-angelion, the content of Yeshua’s teaching?

 

1.     The Law is fulfilled.

2.     Yeshua bar Yosef from Nazareth is the Meshiach.

3.     Yeshua Meshiach is the (new) Law, and the new Temple.

4.     Our role is to be as children: in the innocence of trust, and the trust of innocence.

5.     Yeshua is present with us, in the Eucharist and in prayer.

6.     Our childlike life is to be governed (as He said to Nicodemus) by the two Great Commandments.

7.     The first we obey in prayer (and sometimes in fasting).

8.     The second is exemplified in the Samaritan: we obey it in giving (as he did).

 

 

B. How does one discuss faith with a 21C None? Very difficult. If the occasion arises, perhaps say “Let me tell you my faith, and then you tell me your reactions to those points.” And tell it more or less in the above form. 

 

The points the None will almost certainly make are 1) Auschwitz and 2) earthquakes or the equivalent.  Possible answers:

1) God is Love, and as such his omnipotence is limited (only) by the nature of Love itself, that cannot suspend freedom.

2) God does not micromanage nature. He has left Nature to us, to our care and our intelligence.

 

C. Now, how does one answer a 21C Vaguist? The Vaguist will say “I believe in a Higher Being [perhaps even God]; I am a very spiritual person; but my contact with the Higher Being happens in surroundings of natural beauty. Do NOT ask me to go to, still less to join, a church – they are full of DOGMAS [which, it is understood, are things that bark, bite and – as the Psalmist says -- grin and run about the city].” Again, very difficult.

 

I might start by saying that I too find surroundings of natural beauty congenial to contact with God: after all, He provided them, so addressing Him when in them seems natural, if only to give thanks. 

 

But then one does have to tackle the topic of the church. I might point out that while Creeds are in the singular, all the ancient Christian prayers, beginning with the one taught us by Yeshua, are couched in the first person plural. The early Christians lived their faith most strongly in a community. “Where two or three are gathered together, I will be in the midst of them.”

 

Yes, but what about those horrid DOGMAS? 

1.     Try to imagine what the first centuries of the Christian community were like. Not only were they persecuted, hunted down and killed, but they were trying to work out just what it all meant. What did the Resurrection mean? What is the God we worship like? Father? What kind of a father? And if Yeshua was the Son of God, what does that mean? And if he said, I will send you the Holy Spirit, who is that? They were totally absorbed in a terrible problem of definition: terrible, because their – eternal – lives depended on it. 

2.     So every time they managed to reach some sort of agreement on one bit of the enormous subject, they would file it with a sigh of relief, saying, OK, this one we can now see as settled, let’s go on to the next one. And so the settled one was filed as “something we are sure enough of to teach it”, the Greek word for which is dogma.

 

Of course the real trouble, for a Vaguist, is not with dogmas as such but with the idea of the Church as a spiritual authority. Which means, supposedly, that it can tell – order – you what to believe. No effing way!

 

This is of course nonsense. Only you know what you believe and whom you trust, unless you tell someone. And the Church – the community of the faithful – cannot tell you what to believe. However, it has (after many centuries and a very great deal of debate) set down the core of its faith, in the Creed – from credo, I believe. The Apostles’ Creed is the simplest: it says

 

I believe in God, the Father almighty, 
    maker of heaven and earth; 
And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord; 
    who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, 
    born of the Virgin Mary, 
    suffered under Pontius Pilate, 
    was crucified, dead, and buried. 
    He descended into hell. 
    The third day he rose again from the dead.
    He ascended into heaven, 
    and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father almighty. 
    From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. 
I believe in the Holy Ghost, 
    the holy catholic Church, 
    the communion of saints, 
    the forgiveness of sins, 
    the resurrection of the body, 
    and the life everlasting. Amen.

 

This, of course, may need some explanation to those who are new to the material, which is why the various churches created catechisms. But simply speaking these are the essentials:

 

1) God exists. God is the Maker of everything and the Father of everyone. He is all-powerful. Jesus of Nazareth is His (only) Son. Together with the Holy Spirit (the old word was Ghost from Germanic Geist, spirit) they form the Trinity: three Persons, one God. (That one is notoriously difficult to get one’s mind around. But never mind.)

2) Jesus was conceived by the Spirit, he was born of (as the child of) Mary, who was virgin at the time. He was a real man, a real human being (not a disguised god): he suffered at a specific time and place in history: in Jerusalem, under the government of Marcus Pontius Pilatus (d. ca. 38AD). He was a real man, and so he died a real death: he was buried, and he went down (according to Jewish belief) to the “hell”, Sheol, the place of the dead. 

But on the third day after his burial, he was resurrected. After a brief return to earth and to his disciples, he went to heaven, where he recovered his place as God’s Son “at the right hand” of the Father. 

At the end of time, he will return, and there will be a final judgement of those then alive and the dead. 

3) The Holy Spirit exists – he is the third Person of the Trinity. He is the one who is always with us to defend us. 

·      The universal (“cath-holica”) ecclesia, church, community of believers, exists for all who believe. It has been entrusted with a communal (not individual) and historic (grown over the ages) knowledge of God, which gives it a certain authority, a certain claim to respect and attention.

·      All those who trust in God are part of one organism, and share their strengths: the living and the dead. (The “communion of saints”.) This means that we can benefit not only from each other’s spiritual experience and wisdom but also from that of those who have gone before and who are now close to God: I, now, can learn from St Theresa of Avila (1515-82), from St John of the Cross (1542-91), and from the late Michael Lonsdale (1931-2020).

·      Sins – offences against love, against God’s love – are grave but can and will be forgiven if that is sincerely asked for. 

·      We shall all die, but that death is not definitive. We too shall be resurrected, and with some sort of “body”, though we do not know where or with what kind of “body”.

·      And finally, if we truly want it, we will live in God’s presence (“Heaven”) where there is no such thing as time (“the life everlasting”).

 

This is not what the Church tells you to believe, but a complex of astounding truths it invites you to discover, to ponder, the pray about (on your mountain top, for instance), and eventually to take on board, with the extraordinary joy of knowing that you are loved: “Ransomed, Healed, Restored, Forgiven”. Every single day.

 

HOPE AND STRENGTH?

“God is our hope and strength : a very present help in trouble.” (Psalm 46)

If one has faith, this is stirring; and instinctively one feels it’s true. But it it? And if so, how? 

First of all, the Psalm says that God is our, not my, hope and strength. As always, the original referent is the people of Israel; as always, for a Christian, the Psalms’ people of Israel is now the Church. 

As members of the Church, then, we can say that God is our hope. Between faith and charity; between our belief in the Resurrection and our active love for our neighbour, there is hope. Hope is symbolised by an anchor: it is what prevents us from drifting on to a lee shore. Hope is what permits us not to give up. Hope is what sustains us when we see the decline of Christendom, when we are depressed by the oceans of complete indifference to religion around our battered fleet. And our hope is – God. Is it our hope that He will, magically, act? that he will come flying into history on the wings of a divine wind and take over? We may daydream of such a dénouement, but we are pretty sure it will not happen. If our hope is God, it is perhaps rather that He will give us the strength and the stamina to carry on regardless; that He will continue to be the well of life, where we can go to draw the living water of renewed faith and energy.

As members of the Church, again, we can say that God is our strength. He is our strength, the strength of the Church: and the Church, in turn, is the strength of its members. There are times when our belief in this is sorely tested: when the Church, through its leaders, singularly fails to cope with the travails of modern life; when the Church, through some its visible groups or individuals, shows itself foolish or sinful or both. And yet – anyone who has tried to maintain an active and lively faith for a long time on his own knows how much the strength needed for that surpasses his little private store of resources. Within the Church, through the liturgy, through the Eucharist, but also through the sharing of thought and feeling in both theology and devotion – within the Church there is strength in abundance, available to all. 

A help in trouble. That is where it comes to the nub. Trouble is always with us, and may emerge from any shadow at any moment: for the community and/or for the individual. In what way is God our help in trouble? First, as hope: it is our hope in God that gives us strength and stamina. That hope is what is expressed in prayer. When we beg and beseech, we do so hoping. Because we know that, if we do not ask for fishhooks but for the force that will allow us to do His will whatever befalls, He will not let us down. 

Second, as strength. In trouble, God is our strength. Our strength. If we face trouble as a body, as members of the Church, as the Church, we will have the strength needed to survive and overcome trouble. This means unity. This means solidarity: not (only) in the now usual sense of helping the poor, but of knowing how to bury our differences and metaphorically link arms, watch each other’s back, and deal with it, whatever it is. And if God is our strength, that means that we receive it through prayer.

Finally, God is a very present help. Present, here; present, now. Not absent, not future. I often find it hard to remember, to realise, that God is with me here and now. As air is. As radio waves are. As light is. So, in trouble, prayer does not have to be elaborately organised and anticipated. It can be hurried, panted, cried, whispered; and if there are more of us, physically, it can be remembered and recited, or improvised, together. 

If I am in trouble, let me remember that I am not alone, but that I am a member of a body, the Church, the new people of Israel. And let me remember that as such, I have at all times the ear of our heavenly Father, Almighty and everlasting God. Through – per, by means of, by way of, through the mediation of -- Jesus Christ our Lord. 

COMFORT YE MY PEOPLE?

Fernandel as Don Camillo

Is Christianity no longer a religion for ordinary people?

 This sounds peculiar, I know; but it has been haunting me for a long time. There is, I admit, a splendid congruence between St Paul on the one hand and, say, Pope Francis on the other: both keep hammering away at the extraordinary nature of discipleship, the total availability expected of all followers of Christ, the complete scission beteen them and the “world”, the prodigies of charity we are called upon to perform, the complete solidarity we are expected to show at all times of day, week, or year with the world’s poor and miserable, the entire purity our motives and behaviour must exhibit, and the fact that, as disciples, everyone calling himself a Christian is expected to follow the Master to the Cross, to be nailed there like St Peter or stoned like St Stephen.

 This is the voice of the 21^st-century Church, faced with minority status, massive desertion, indifference on the part of both bond traders and jobless single mothers, and the loss of everything that gave its members simple joys and pleasures.

 Now go back to Giovannino Guareschi’s Don Camillo. Or to the Dutch novelist Aart van der Leeuw’s I and my Minstrel. They show a world – admittedly not in a mode of gritty naturalism – where a village can have a Catholic priest and a Communist mayor, where the former can discuss with the figure on the Cross, where a Sunday can begin with a Mass and end with a dance, where ordinary life (in other words) can be blessed by the priest’s holy water and where ordinary folk can be encouraged, shriven when penitent, and feel that their daily round, with all its difficulties, is regarded by a Father’s benevolent and smiling eye.

 Could it be – I sometimes wonder – that we have put the cart before the horse? That the changes in our Church are not, in fact, a reaction to its desertion by thousands but that said desertion is, on the contrary, at least in part a reaction to the changes?

 There were hundreds, if not thousands, that were touched, healed, fed by Jesus, all over Galilee and points South. There were twelve – count them, twelve – disciples, eleven of whom skedaddled on Good Friday; there were at most 72 apostles, sent to convert the planet. What about the others? What happened to the Roman officer, to the Samaritan woman, to the healed epileptic, to the diners at Emmaus, afterwards?

 To want to re-institute a Church that will bless daily life, expect confession but offer absolution, accompany ordinary people in their problems while projecting a timeless and benevolent authority, is nowadays to put oneself beyond the Pale. I find it deeply sad that not only the Anglican Eucharist but the Catholic Mass no longer offers absolution following the General Confession, giving the worshipper instead only the thin gruel of a conditional.

 The world does not consist only of wealthy financiers on the one hand and immigrant drug dealers in the housing projects on the other. The world mostly consists of simple people doing their best in difficulties ranging from indigence to Alzheimer’s. What they need from the Church is, among other things, a sense of stability, of visibility, of serenity, of being there for them – not (as Pope Francis said at the beginning of his Papacy but has largely negated since) as an activist NGO but as the father and mother they lack, as the kindly encouraging parent or grandparent missing in their world. Not the urgent and absolute love of a saint ready to be stoned for them: the comforting practical love of a family member ready to take them in for a meal, a song, a dance, and a good sleep. They need priests visible in cassocks, nuns visible in habits, timeless liturgies, and a blessing at the end of the day.  

P.S. The original of Guareschi's Don Camillo, Don Camillo Valota, was not only a parish priest but a fighter with the Partisans during World War II and a prisoner in two concentration camps.

UNDERDOGS UNDER GOD

            All over the Western world, the Near East, the Middle East, what in Britain is known as South Asia, Australia and elsewhere, there is a marked rise in various forms of populism. I remember asking my father, when I was a teenager, why populism was such a Bad Thing. After all, we believe in democracy, which means rule by the people. So why is finding out what people really think and want, and ruling accordingly, not to be countenanced? And my sainted father (whose intelligence, good sense and limpid explanations I still miss 12 years after his death) patiently explained that people in the mass and their ideas (feelings, usually) in the raw all too easily constitute a mob; and that proper democracy provides the filters of representation and time: elections and the interval between them. It also entrusts the actual responsibility of governing to those who, we hope, are better educated for the task.

            He was right, of course; and yet the problem of populism, and the problems that underlie populism, remain. Most obvious among is the frustration, even the anger, that fuels this current. A French journalist recently showed that in his country this anger, which pushes an increasing number of people to the far-right National Front, aligns with a certain demographic: the “petits Blancs”, the “little white people”: those who have little education, who are in the front line for job loss, who have small and precarious incomes, and who see not just the world but their world changing from year to year. (NB: in other parts of the world, these look different – the “Arab Street”, for example – but their feelings are the same.) They don’t understand the changes and even when they think they understand them they don’t like them. Their children or grandchildren don’t do well in school, but nobody accords them the indulgence and the extra help that (they feel) the children of dark-skinned immigrants get. And when they express these frustrations, the “cultural elite” – not just the politicians, but the intellectuals, academics, and media -- just looks down on them, calls them reactionary or fascist, and basically tells them to shut up. The political Left and Far Left, which used proudly to represent the underdogs, no longer represents them, so they drift off to the Far Right which at least tells them it’s listening and that they aren’t always Wrong.

            What can be done about this? The first thing, from a Christian point of view, is to recognise that they are people, that they are God’s children, that they are hurting, and that they are in need. When we do that, we realise that the next thing is to listen, without impatience and without arrogance. Once we have listened, we can perhaps begin a conversation, since they will have noticed that we don’t look down on them. And in such a conversation, certain points can perhaps be gently raised. Example: almost everyone who dislikes a certain group of people – an ethnic group, a nationality, a social class, a professional group – will make an exception for one or two individuals, or families, from that group that they know personally. That’s a start. Perhaps some volunteers running ultra-cheap and cheerfully friendly courses on specific and practical modern-world problems would help: these already exist, here and there. Priests and ministers can help, by on the one hand showing that the Others are images of our Saviour, who died for them, and on the other hand being extremely firm about certain kinds of behaviour among their congregations. (In the Central African Republic, the Catholic Archbishop and the Imam work together closely, but I haven’t yet heard the former thundering against the murderous militias who call themselves Christians.)

            As for the problems of the economy and job losses, they too may need an approach that allows for some additional values. To cite my father again, his field of interest and research was “the Social Responsibility of Business”. (He was both an economist in a multinational and a university professor.) Nothing could be more topical in this day and age. The business of business is business, true: but as a French thinker wrote recently, perhaps today’s business people should be more involved in politics. Then they could help work out a model of society that manages to maintain well-run corporations without “downsizing” at the drop of a share, and that can create new technologies that do not always end up replacing manpower. That, as the World Council of Churches has long recognised, merits the creation of serious thinking on “Church And Society” which, if goodwill can be created on all sides, could replace the corrosive antagonisms that pollute the air.

            Sometimes the underdogs are not (only) who we think they are, or who the media have selected for the role. And charity, i.e. love, should go where it is needed.

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;

Where there is hatred, let me bring love;

Where there is offence, let me bring pardon;

Where there is error, let me bring truth;

Where there is doubt, let me bring faith;

Where there is despair, let me bring hope;

Where there is darkness, let me bring light; 
And where there is sadness, let me bring joy.