OUTLINE FOR A PERSONAL CATECHISM

 

What is a personal catechism, and why make one? In the Roman Catholic Church, and for all I know in several other churches, one is emphatically not encouraged to define the elements of one’s faith individually. Criticisms of “smorgasbord Christianity” prevail: one is told that it is bad to pick and choose among the truths and dogmas of one’s religion, and that one should accept the lot both intellectually and in one’s manner of living. 

            This is a principle, and perhaps even admirable; but it is not a reality. I gravely doubt whether even the Pope and his closest advisers truly accept and follow everything contained in the Catholic Church’s dogma. For example: Pope Leo XIII formally proclaimed Anglican priestly orders to be null and void. From this, it follows that every Anglican priest is a charlatan, and that every time he or she gives Communion, he helps a soul to damnation. Were the Catholic hierarchy actually to believe this, they would refuse all contact with the Anglican Communion. In reality, relations between Canterbury and Rome are perfectly friendly, and conducted with mutual respect. 

            I posit that in reality all Christians (Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox) who are serious about their religion work out for themselves the elements of their faith, and give considerable thought to the reasons for such belief. In other words, all of us have, inchoate or detailed, a private catechism. Such a catechism is necessarily an elaboration of the basic Creed: virtually all Western churches accept the Apostles’ Creed as the foundation of their faith (though many individuals, if pressed, will confess to being quite unsure of several of its bits).

            In view of all this, I have been working out the elements, the building-blocks, of a personal catechism, which I here share with others who may be pondering such things themselves. 

 

1.     There is nor was a beginning. God is, was, and ever shall be, in His own dimension, which we neither know nor would comprehend. 

2.     God did decide to create our Universe. (There may be others.)

3.     Within this Universe, either we are alone, as a planet with intelligent life, or there are others.

4.     If there are others, God will have acted there in, perhaps, different ways, which we do not (yet) know about.

5.     If we are alone, it is reasonable to assume that God chose Terra as an experimental unit.

6.     Upon this planet, He let life grow and eventually produce something like humans, who had in common a growing potential of thought and action, and a sense of a/the Divine. (And yes, they also had in common a capacity for badness.)

7.     At a certain point, just as He had chosen one planet, upon that planet He chose one people, for the next stage of development: Israel. 

8.     With them, He conducted a long experiment of relationship, in the key of Law and Obedience, rebellion and salvation.

9.     At a certain point, He went to the next stage and gave them His Son as the Meshiach, to initiate them in a new relationship, of fusion with Him in sonship.

10.  By way of the crucifixion of the Meshiach and His resurrection, this fusion of sonship was a) extended in space, from Israel to all humanity, and b) extended indefinitely in time, recreated and thus accessible in every Eucharist.

11.     The key of this fusion is Love. The sine qua non of Love is free will. Hence the continuing existence of evil and of indifference: God cannot compel man to return His love, because He cannot go against His own nature (the only limit to His omnipotence).

12.     Man’s language for the fusion is Prayer, in three kinds: Petition, Thanksgiving, and Adoration.

13.     God does not micromanage His creation, hence the casualty lists of earthquakes, tsunamis etc. This is particularly hard for us to comprehend and accept. The other such thing is the origin of evil (perhaps a combination of nos. 6 and 11, above). 

FROM WHAT OPPRESSION?

"And now, Lord, what is my hope : truly my hope is even in thee.

Deliver me from all mine offences . . ." (Psalm 39)

This Psalm text illustrates with startling precision the difference between two concepts of the Meshiach current at the time of Yeshua's youth. The first was the image of the new King David, a David returning at the head of an army to rout the Romans, deliver Israel, and institute a new reign of peace, justice, and devotion to the Lord. This was probably the dominant image, and it corresponds to similar dreams in other nations: in Portugal, for instance, there was long a legend of a return of the good King Sebastian, and in England, of the great magician Merlin. 

In contrast to this, Yeshua delivered a new image of the Meshiach: an itinerant rabbi in a remote Northern provice, walking from town to town or arriving by fishing-boat, preaching in small-town synagogues and showing a miraculous talent for healing the sick. Admirable, of course, but in what way could this be The Meshiach? One can see why a number of educated people found it unlikely. Only those who were deeply permeated by the Scriptures yet at the same time of an open mind would have understood. They would have seen that he had based his idea of the Saviour on an eclectic reading of Zechariah, Ezekiel and especially Isaiah and the Psalms. From such a reading he would have deduced that, in the first place, the Meshiach would be a man of deep humility and simplicity, who would arrive riding on a donkey; that his basileia, his kingdom, his kingship or reign, would not be that of a worldly king but in and of some other dimension; and that any liberation he would bring would not be political or involve the Roman occupation. 

If we ask ourselves what, then, that "liberation" would be, what oppressor it would unseat and in what way it would do so, the above text from Psalm 39 gives us a clue. "Deliver me," the Psalmist begs, not from Rome and its armies; not from the Assyrian kings, not from the bulls of Bashan; no, "deliver me from all mine offences". The tyrant, in other words, is Sin; and the oppressed are not just the Jews but all humankind. And so this mild provincial itinerant with his modest program of teaching and healing turns out to be a giant, with a giant's ambition: to deliver the whole of humanity from the tyranny of Sin.

He can do this by taking the Law, that immense gift of God to His favourite nation, and "fulfilling" it. Fulfilling, in this case, means internalising it. I have written a series of posts on the Sermon on the Mount that show this. Concomitantly, the Temple is no longer central: upon Yeshua's death on the Cross, the Temple veil rips apart. Yeshua himself is the new Temple; and he is the Temple not just for the Jews but for all humanity. He contains in himself the Law and the Temple, and fulfils both in an immensity of divine Love that has become immediately accessible to ordinary humans.

This accessibility is confirmed as permanent by his Resurrection; which means that this Meshiach’s liberation is no longer limited to one moment in history but continues to operate even now, just as the Adversary does. Each of us can and does feel the tyrant’s grim presence in our life; but each of us can also pray the Psalm verse above and thus, in being heard, reach safety. 

 

FOR WHIT MONDAY

To be read aloud, with strong accents:

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.                                      Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur"

BATTLEFIELD?

Last week we travelled over 500 miles to see Peter Brook’s new production, Battlefield, a brief (70-minute) excerpt from the immense Mahabharata – which last he produced as a 9-hour stage performance 30 years ago. Battlefield is set after a vast battle that left “millions dead” and brought a new king to power after a bitter struggle between two clans. In the aftermath, the new king confronts his predecessor and uncle, his mother, and a variety of other characters that include the god Krishna and the personification of the River Ganges. All is done on a virtually empty stage with four actors and a Japanese virtuoso drummer. The review in Singapore’s  Straits Times gives a good idea of it.

What interested me particularly was the grave fatalism expressed. Man has no choices, but (and) must accept the full weight of responsibility. The new king is told that he will reign virtuously and happily for 36 years, and will then pass on the kingdom to a youth who will be the only survivor of a battle. At the play’s end, 33 years have passed, and the dreadful signs and omens are massing for a new apocalyptic battle – and we learn that the succession will be like the former one, and that there is nothing that can be done about this. Death rules every man; fate rules the life of humanity. Nevertheless, responsibility is all.

It is like a strange related version of existentialism. There, absurdity rules all; yet again one must accept responsibility and act with courage and virtue. The universe is, for the existentialist, nonsensical; for the mournful kings on the corpse-littered battlefield, entirely closed. “This victory is a defeat” says the winner, with infinite sadness.

It brought home to me, in this third week of Advent, the utter astonishment of what we are preparing for. That the closed, ineluctable universe of Fate should be cracked open by God is one thing; that God should decide to do so by entering into human life is another; that He should do so, not in glory or power or cosmic war or starring on CNN but as an anonymous infant in a remote pub’s stable on the East coast of the Mediterranean, cared for by a slip of a girl and a carpenter and visited by a few shepherds; that is completely astounding. Et incarnatus est, de spiritu sancto, ex Maria virgine, et homo factus est. And with that, the terrible cycle of fate, the unyielding melancholy of the kings on the battlefield, is broken. Light floods in. Angels sing.

In paganity, Yuletide celebrates the return of the light; but there will always be a return of the dark. The glass is half full, but half empty also. There is no escape, no opening in the pagan universe. We can celebrate, briefly, but the cycle is unending.

Et homo factus est announces Emmanuel, “God with us”. Not to depart again. It announces the Cross; but the Cross issues in the Resurrection. Death does not rule all. We may celebrate cyclically; but what we celebrate is done. It happened, once and for all, in specific, knowable and known, points of time and space.

Right now, it’s still dark, in every sense of the word. Days are short, horrors happen, hate and foolishness abound. But there is a glimmer of light, and in the distance, very faintly, a sound as of angels rehearsing.