PEACE begins in PALESTINE
Presented with gratitude for the inspiration and ideas of Dr HENRY
CARSE, and those of many other remarkable people encountered.
This Hall of mirrors
To experience the delerious destabilising sickness of falling helplessly in love but to remain well and standing ...
... To know the fraudulent and fossilised fakeries of humankind's religion yet go on acknowledging the authentic uncreated One...
... To find wisdom knowing you know nothing but still to seek truth
... To realise there is no security in the world, but be assured.
... To know the fraudulent and fossilised fakeries of humankind's religion yet go on acknowledging the authentic uncreated One...
... To find wisdom knowing you know nothing but still to seek truth
... To realise there is no security in the world, but be assured.
GOD DIES, GOD RISES
Uncreated Oneness, you are the silent listener in whom we move
In the vast empty spaces of the universe we see your beginningless reflection unifying and connecting the infinite
Before mystery all our created human speech,
Our flailing human thought and religious formulae remain more unlike you than they are like you.
But we search on for meaning because you are the why which the light of science doesn’t ask - the very reason that there is something rather than nothing.
Despite our ignorance seeking out a window to transcend itself,
We trust in the possibility of perfect good, of ultimate reality.
Because we do still believe that it is not from us this web of life originates.
We may have mastery but we are not in control.
We may have need for certainty but we never own it.
In ourselves we only own separation, suffering.. a shame.
But in surrender our goodness and innocence is restored to us.
You are Life, as death does not hold you back,
You are Unity, as separation evaporates before you,
You are Sinless, as shame disappears in you,
You are Authentic, as you endure both pain and abandonment.
Our personal stories unfold in his-story as we intuit how it is not enough to worship you. In some way, we are you, our highest Self, our Way, a Truth endlessly Living for us.
So who are you?
Not an ideology, a book, an institution, an experience, a tradition, or an empire. Not wrath. Not zeal.
Much more than morality.
You remain as the image of the invisible in our Lord Jesus Christ living right here inside around and beyond us, Amen Amen Amen.
© R.D.F 25/02/08
‘We are invited not to remember the events of the gospel but to be present at them … we are in God’s now, and this experience should transform our lives.
We do not seek to convince by argument, by logic, by any appeal to believe the unbelievable. We speak of what we know experientially. [This] does not make us slaves to a book … of an infallible prelate, or an academic process that reduces and deconstructs … created beings cannot understand the infinite.
Bigger! Further! Wider! Greater! God is beyond anything we can begin to understand with our finite minds. His paradise is not on the scale of a palm fringed Caribbean island. His thoughts are not confined to the Bible, nor to the canons; his presence is not confined to the church building.
To believe that our mental capacity is such that it could one day understand everything in the created universe, let alone the uncreated … is not a logical idea.’
© Gillian Crow, extracts from "Orthodoxy for Today" London SPCK 2008
Speak to Reason
Why is it reasonable to believe in and speak to the creator of the universe?
We empirically trace the expanding stuff of the universe back to a point of singularity sometimes called the Big Bang, and all of our experience and normal reasoning patterns are stacked against material just coming from an absence.
Now if a rabbit just appeared on your desk, there is no way you would think it had literally come from an absent nothing. You would look for a reasonable answer to where it came from, because you know and act like stuff just doesn't appear out of an absence.
No one thinks that a magician makes things appear and vanish; we all know that there is a trick, even if we don't know how it is done. If there was no reasonable ordinary explanation for this experience of appearing rabbits, we would consider a psychological answer, hallucination or drink or hypnosis etc.
We don't! So the atheist has only one example to back up a claim for the world appearing from an absence, and that comes from Quantum Mechanics, where subatomic particles can be interpreted as seeming to come in and out of existence.
Although some of them posit purely theoretical parallel universes, Physicists themselves do not conclude subatomic particles come out of absent-ness. Einstein said that the Theory of Quantum Mechanics leaves us with an epistemological problem and not an ontological problem. In plain English, subatomic particles do not come into and go out of existence, it is just that we currently do not fully understand the cause of this situation.
Even if a subatomic particle can apparently come out of absent nothing, it is one amazing leap to an entire universe apparently coming out of absent nothing... if even a rabbit appearing out of an absent nothing is not on the cards, why would anyone think that something capable of producing the whole universe (by "chance") could be an absent nothing?
A Transcendent God in the miracle of creation creates out of nothing, but that nothing is a mysterious presence, and not an mysterious absence.
And if it is reasonable to believe in this One God beyond the senses, it would also be reasonable to communicate with him, even if the words to describe his presence are human and provisional. In fact, it would be unreasonable to fail to commune with this same One. Life might even take on a new dimension, a fifth dimension.
In the New Testament, the Reason and Wisdom pervading the universe from beyond it is called the Logos. The Logos was in the beginning, and the Logos is still penetrating the universe from beyond.
NOWADAYS (and not just nowadays of course) PEOPLE SAY THE UNIVERSE IS ITSELF ETERNAL. BUT EVEN IF IT IS, IT STILL HAS TO DERIVE ITS ULTIMATE MEANING FROM SOMEWHERE – AND ACKNOWLEDGING CREATION CAN MEAN NOTHING OTHER THAN ACKNOWLEDGING OUR TOTAL DEPENDENCE ON THE INFINITY WHICH IS GOD, WITH OR WITHOUT THE SHARP ONTOLOGICAL DISTINCTION BETWEEN CREATOR BEING AND CREATED BEING. IN OTHER WORDS, WE DIDN'T JUST GET LUCKY. THERE IS ETERNITY AS OUR ULTIMATE AND AUTHENTIC NON-PHYSICAL GROUND.
May wisdom become you..
Giving birth to God
So here we are in Advent, a time of waiting.
What are we all waiting for?
I’m waiting for the end of this talk – so we’ve got that in common. Write a sermon about waiting, they said, and about a cradle, about expectation, and about hope.
How will you judge it worth waiting for? Do you require some traditional reverence for Jesus and Mary or a popular culture dash of Homer Simpson and Bruce Forsyth?
Who will be judge?
In Psalm 146 the Creator of Heaven Earth and Sea is doing all the judging, and we are told not to put our trust in human leaders. So you have Biblical permission to stop listening to me now.
But just in case you are still with me, in Isaiah, texts which we read during Advent we again hear much about God’s judgement.
But is God’s judgement something you’re hoping for?
Would you like Christmas presents with cards reading: “Happy Judgement day!”
Nowadays you’re as likely to get “Happy Crimbo” or even “Happy Xmas”.
Because we live in a world where Christmas is experiencing a divorce from Christ. People accuse the church of trying to get in on the act.
I remember producing a radio programme in the 90’s, when there was surprise at proposals by the council in Wolverhampton to publicly rename Christmas as Winter-val. Fast forward to 2007 and in Glasgow and Aberdeen it is already called Winter-fest.
I don’t begrudge us a Happy Winterfest but I do wonder about this public divorce of God from his world.
It’s seems such an articificial and enforced break with reality that it reminds me of Homer Simpson when he’s been kidnapped and is desperately seeking money to secure his own release – he telephones Flanders and says: “Flanders I’ve been kidnapped and I need $50,000."
‘I’m not sure I have that much money Homer, but I can pray for you if you like?’
‘Oh go suck a Bible!’ Homer says.
But his expectations of a good release would have changed in prayer. In the same episode, Homer and Lisa are looking for a missing orphan. The people who run the orphanage try to reassure them: “Don't worry, we have lit a candle and said prayers for her every day.”
“MMM” says Homer. “But have you tried looking for her?”
Is there a point of action without prayer? What is the point of waiting without expecting? What is the point of Christmas without Christ? I wouldn’t blame you if you also asked yourself is there a point to this sermon in the absence of me telling you? But keep waiting.
All of us here grew from babies, and we all absorbed many stories on the way here, for better or worse. One of these stories tells us how God also grew from a baby, but did not just absorb the world.
He also transformed it, healed it, gave us hope for a spiritual life within it. I don’t know if you have ever tried to imagine life without the story of God’s becoming a human being, but ask yourselves who passed this story onto you, and how has it made a difference to you?
There was a Breakfast news report recently claiming that 4 out of 5 primary schools no longer tell the nativity story. So how might you be able to pass this story on to another person in a way they can accept it, and what difference might this make to them. Ask yourselves this now in the silence of expectation…..
In our childlike helplessness, the uncreated spirit is with us. One of us. We are in him. We allow self-judgement other judgement and fear of other judgement to be replaced by mercy and acceptance for ourselves, for others, and for the Other of all. In this story Christ does not arrive as physical might or temporal power. As a baby God is not independent, he is dependent, interdependent. Just like us he has been conceived helpless, just like us he will die helpless. But that can be good.
St Gregory of Nazianzus puts it like this: The very Son of God, older than the ages, invisible, incomprehensible, incorporeal, beginning of beginning, light of light, fountain of life and immortality … perfect likeness … he it is who comes to his own image and takes our nature for the good of our nature, and unites himself to an intelligent soul for the good of my soul, to purify like by like ... He takes on the poverty of my flesh, that I may gain the riches of his divinity. He who is full is made empty … that I may share in his fullness ... What is this mystery that surrounds us?
This mystery is Abba, intimate enough to be called Daddy, but in our emptiness he is greater than our abilities, our companions, our mid-winter, and our universe. His best things are not things. He suffers nature, but nature cannot explain his existence. The best thing in our nature is no-thing, but One supreme spirit who holds all things together, silently, eternally, expectantly.
We need to communicate to Homer Simpson that to pray is to act, to expect and be expectant, to pray for others is to act from God’s motives and to lose ourselves - and therefore find ourselves. To pray is to act in the hope that actions work out, despite their looking like they are not working out, and even though it does seem like a very long wait indeed.
On Strictly Come Dancing Bruce Forsyth can regularly be heard to tell us “and now the moment of truth!” I take this on trust as I can’t get near the television for writing essays.
But the moment of truth is now – because the place where our sustainer is born is not in a stable, not in the Middle East 2,000 years ago, not in the Bible, but here in us. The Mind of God in our minds and the birth of God in ourselves.
We haul trees into our houses and wait for the day on which we celebrate the birth of God in us. The true cradle is our life, as we helplessly allow Abba into the world around us.
We can never divorce ourselves from this incarnate reality because it is not ours. Christmas is not about buying and receiving the God of presents we can afford – but about freely accepting the presence of God who we can’t escape.
As Psalm 146 says, no human being can save you. When they die, they return to the dust, and all their plans come to an end … We are helpless, like a labour coming on, but helplessness is good if it is giving birth.
At last then, the point of my sermon. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place but does not take place in myself? What good is it to me if Mary is full of grace and I am not? What good is it to me for the creator to give birth to his or her Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture?
Awaiting in childbirth is a crisis but when we cease our labouring, this is Christ’s best opportunity to appear, and then to smile.
And this then is the fullness of time, when the Son of God is begotten in us.
Amen.
Sacred stillness
Some NRSV Biblical texts concerning Contemplation
And on the seventh day God finished the work …
and he rested.
Genesis 2.2
God formed man from the dust of the ground
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;
and the man became a living being.
Genesis 2.7
the Lord is about to pass by … but the Lord was not
in the wind … not in the earthquake … not in the fire … and after the fire; a sound of sheer silence.
1 Kings 19.11
When you are disturbed, do not sin;
ponder it on your beds, and be silent …
offer right sacrifices, and put your trust in the Lord.
Psalm 4.4
Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently on him
… refrain from anger … do not fret.
Psalm 37.7
Be still, and know that I am God.
Psalm 46:10
For God alone my soul waits in silence, from him comes my salvation … for God alone my soul waits in silence.
Psalm 62.1,5
Return, O my soul, to your rest,
for the Lord has dealt bountifully.
Psalm 116.7
I have calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child.
Psalm 131.2
Come my people, enter your chambers, and shut your
doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until the wrath is past.
Isaiah 26.20
In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness
and in trust shall be your strength.
Isaiah 30.15
Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength
They shall mount up with wings like eagles;
They shall walk and not faint;
Listen to me in silence; O coastlands
Let the people renew their strength.
Isaiah 40.31
The Lord is good to those who wait for him
To the soul that seeks him, it is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
It is good for one to bear the yoke in youth:
to sit alone in silence.
Lamentations 3 25-28
The Lord is in his holy temple;
let all the earth keep silence before him.
Habakkuk 2.20
Be silent, all people, before the Lord;
for he has roused himself from his holy dwelling.
Zechariah 2.13
Whenever you pray, go into your room* and shut
the door and pray to your Father who is in secret;
and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
*from Gk ‘tamei’on’
(secret room or storage chamber)
Matthew 6.6
Come to me, all you who are weary
and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.
Matthew 11.28
Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves
and rest awhile.
Mark 6.31
When the lamb opened the seventh seal
there was a silence in heaven for about half an hour.
Revelation 8.1
I think not mate
When I came to theological college I came with the willingness to question everything which was put to me - this is exactly what the 'person in the street' should do to me, I figured. And if Christianity is true, then it should be able to withstand wholesale rigorous scrutiny, I also figured. Only then would it be worth following.
After the questions, all I was left with was two propositions still standing in the ring - Jesus was a real man - and there are enough 'secular' facts to make this unassailable - and the default secular materiaist view of the world is just ignorant. It is from these two facts that I began to re-build, like any child who knocks a wall down only in order to test it and to put all the building blocks neatly back into place and see it rise up again.
So I find out that indeed, Christianity is true..... like the other day as I was in a mental health ward, taking communion with people who themselves were being crucified in one way or another, physically shaking, mentally incoherent, subdued, slightly psychotic, pacified having manged to survive another suicide attempt, unlike the G.P and the psychologist I have been hearing about recently.
Jesus was in the room. Through sheer necessity, and there was no working out how he was, or where he was coming from, but Jesus was in the room.
There are those who would say I simply have no evidence for this experience, as if the direct intuitive experiences perceptions and emotions they take for granted every single day of their lives were evidence enough for them, whilst my experience of Jesus in the same way is not evidence enough for me.
But just how do these more 'realistic' people know that the material world is even there when they are not looking at it? They either don't, or they just completely take this kind of knowledge for granted. It does not require evidence, even though there is no evidence for the physical world being there when you shut your eyes.
We sleepwalk in a world of unquestioned assumptions, and we think we exist as autonomous individual thinking beings who can forever manipulate the environment to suit. This is a conceit based on the idea that thought is certainty - I think, therefore I am, as Descartes said. I have a rational self.
But let me tell you a good joke about him. Descartes goes out for a meal and the waiter comes up and asks him if he would like the house soup of the day - asparagus. "I think not", replies Descartes, and promptly disappears in front of the whole cafe!
I am aware of thought, of perception and of sense evidence, but it is the 'I am' who really exists.
And without any evidence too - because the 'I am' is the experiencer. God the uncreated is just Being there, and what's more, he is perfecly reasonable.
If you can't accept this just try widening your shrunken notion of rationality a bit. You really won't have to believe in the Great Pumpkin and Rumplestiltskin.
Bless you and all you love, and all who need love - in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
One Lord, now and forever.
Amen.
God at the Ritz - Being or Nothingness?
Intriguing but too long video i/v with Christian Mystic Priest & former physicist Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete - so edited transcipt below!!
A FULL LIFE
We are all trying to figure out what it means to be alive and to deal with the circumstances of our lives in two ways, in a satisfactory way, and in a responsible way. Certain questions keep coming back.
I say where can I find justice, where is beauty, and what is true? These are needs of the human heart and I find traces of them here and there, but is there a source of them? I do not know, so I search for it. I want a beauty that does not end, a justice that does not have to be fought for again and again, but can be lived. So I demand a reasonableness that corresponds to my heart, and I want more.
Life is a passion and as it tastes what it is looking for it gets stronger and wants more. This is what I call religion. It is the impetus that drives humanity. The sexual quest is one of the first expressions of the religious quest.
Just lust is not sex however, it is possession and power. Both the sexual quest and the religious quest generate culture, and the religious quest is broader.
TAKING MEASUREMENTS
See the existential questions do not pertain to science. I don't want my scientists to sit around asking about the 'Why' of the universe. Because the results of science should be measurable, and that is fine, but that cannot apply to ALL of our experiences of life. When you say 'I', what does that 'I' stand for? There is one I that can be explained in terms of brain functions, but there are other experiences for which the brain function explanation is inadequate. Obviously it is there! But it is not exhausted by a scientific explanation, and taking science out of its realm is a violation of scientific rules.
Darwinism is true, within its scope, but if it is the only question you are asking, then you are depriving yourself of a human experience. In Darwinism, beautiful stuff is discovered for sure, but the price is to exclude certain things from the enquiry. As long as we are aware of the exclusion, that is fine, but when you take life and treat it the same way - by ignoring what has been excluded from the enquiry, that is a tragic narrowing.
REAL AND IDEAL
Darwinism, or creationism or any 'ism as an ideology that accounts for all human experiences and as a proposal for organising your life in all its dimensions, I cannot accept. Science accounts for everything within its own sphere only. Sooner or later, the Darwinians in their own lives do not act as if Dawinism explains everything, as if there is no inherent meaning in the universe. So scientific reasoning is a form of reasoning. Without it, you do not abandon reason, you expand your form of reasoning.
In the same way, I say there is meaning in the universe. But if that faith proposal I make rules out a scientific discovery that makes sense in is own terms, then I am prepared to abandon it as absurd. The question is, do explanations correspond to my experience of life?
SHUT UP!
I embrace that which accounts for the experience of my heart, but do it in a reasonable way. The Church cannot get away with saying: "This is it and shut up." It has to invite you to verify it.
In order to find out what the words: 'Jesus is the son of God' mean, I have to explore, to ask, to question. If at any one time I have put the matter down and said: 'No more questioning', then I am at the level of the Mystery itself, and that is self-defeating.
So there are two types of understanding - comprehension and certainty. It is the teaching of the church that the doctrines and the dogmas are signposts, not the reality. But striking with reality always launches you. As you react to the circumstances that determine where you are, you fall back. You may crash or run out of energy, but I would say the religious impulse, the desire for the infinite, is the impulse making science possible. I will not say anything unless I have verified it. Does it make sense? I have to decide every day whether I believe what I believe.
Any contact we have with Reality will launch us in a quest for meaning and purpose.
SIN BIN
You can see this progress interrupted many times, by a total collapse, and many steps back. The whole Bible too can be seen as an educational process like this. In it, there is the hurtling of babies against the wall, the using of women as property, and there are certain things which you just don't say anymore. God is educating our ideas of God, and so he has to use whatever ideas are there. What is being educated is our freedom, and so you have to work with what you have.
God has to purify our idea of God, but there is another direction, which is opposite to this direction. It is the direction towards selfishness and pride, lived out in my relations with people and with nature. Even the name of God is used in this direction. In the name of God, the more I know of God, the more intolerant I become.
God works through us, through our reason, our minds and heart. The Bible is a divine inspiration, but it is not dictated. It is a concrete people with a history of understanding of the mystery and of reaction to the mystery. At any one time the people are advanced, or they are behind. There are many theologies of God in the Bible, it is like a scrapbook. But what they all have in common is the history of a people, and now we can look back and see if there is any direction in the sensitivity of a people, as time passes.
THE PARTICULAR versus THE UNIVERSAL
Today we see a particular revelation to one person or people, and an openness to all manifestations of the human search, as contradictory. This is valid and understandable and it should be. In concrete cases, certain actions are proposed that are not actions which open us but which narrow us and our sensitivities, so then that privileged revelation should be rejected as intolerant.
But, on the other hand, the way people progress is always very concrete. A teacher comes, he is ahead of the people, like a Martin Luther King. This seems to be the way human beings are educated and live together. In science, economics, ethics, politics, and because no-one is an expert this method of preference and election and particularity in this way does not worry me. It is not necessarily conflicting with humanity.
THE GREAT LIZARD
I believe Jesus to be THE saviour of humanity, but, I am assuming this is all somehow originating in the Reality which I call the Mystery. It is behind the human heart, wherever the human heart is. This Mystery is what unites us.
Even if you are a criminal, you are responding to the needs of the human heart. This is what we have in common. And the religious proposal says that at the heart of it all, at the origin of this, is this great Mystery which unites us, which you can call God, the Creator, or the Great Lizard, whatever you want to call it -- it is this Reality which educates us.
And what does God reveal? He reveals himself.
(SUPER)NATURAL SELECTION
But when you reveal yourself, you have to work with what is there, through personal interests, and so on. So this God follows this educational method of selecting all of these people. And as a Christian, and this is what makes me a Christian, I come to believe that the concretisation of all of this, at one point in time, and the manifestation of this Mystery, not just the manifestation of any other teacher of the Mystery -- as authentic as they may all be -- but OF THE MYSTERY ITSELF, is the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
And this is what I hold, but this does not close me...
...I do not say that those who do not accept Jesus are damned or excluded, of course not, because the purpose of Jesus is precisely to move us to the next stage, which is all embracing. And so I read the Bible in its context and I will tell St Paul, OK I say Yes to anything, but what do you mean by: "You must believe in the Son of God."?
A Buddhist or an atheist may get to heaven faster than I do. Even St Thomas Aquinas would say a person has to follow his (OR HER) conscience.
Be honest to your heart. It is not the morality that gets you to heaven. It is not because the atheist does good things.
IF THEY ACCEPT IT, FINE
It is the heart that is important. This is very important. A Christian can fulfil every moral law there is and still end up in Hell - that is the doctrine of the Church. It is not what you do, it is your stand with respect to other-ness. It is your ability to respond in a way that gives of yourself. It does not even have to be formulated in the mind. Being is Love in the Mystery of the Trinity. That is what it means.
And a truth that inspires you to do violence, is not truth. You are being guided by something else, something horrible which is the other energy, whatever you want to call it, satanic or original sin, or whatever. It is a distortion of the truth. In the fourth Eucharistic prayer, we pray for those who seek God with a sincere heart, as much as we pray for the Church. I do not think I am being a liberal Catholic, this is just the doctrine of the Church. The word catholic means universal, and I don't think that there is a conflict between the particular and the universal.
The particularism itself will move in that direction because it is the dynamics of Love. Love's very particularisation broadens it. As a follower of Christ and believing he and only he is the centre of the universe, I do not find this particularity in any way conflicting with my desire to be open to every manifestation of humanity. If I come with any threat, or suggestion of powerfully imposing this or its consequences, I am against that. The purpose of Christ is universal. I just rejoice and follow what I have discovered. I offer it to the people. If they accept it, fine, but if they do not, they are not my enemies.
BUT GO TO THE MOVIES
I would like all to believe in Christ, but what salvation comes can come without someone knowing it, because what it requires is not moral achievement but purity of heart. I do not love humanity because I love Christ. I love Christ because I love humanity. In spite of its horrors, and all its negative challenges, I turn to Christ because Christ makes sense of all this, so I say yes. It corresponds to the desires of my heart. If it didn't, I would be out of my mind to continue with it, that is crazy, like a self-hatred.
So in the country we have people who are non-believers, Buddhists, Jews, whatever, but I say be faithful to your atheism, see where it leads you. I have total confidence that it will lead to the Mystery, because we are structured that way.
We do have to talk about these things - but we are not made to talk about them all the time. And in the end, you have to go to the movies.
A FULL LIFE
We are all trying to figure out what it means to be alive and to deal with the circumstances of our lives in two ways, in a satisfactory way, and in a responsible way. Certain questions keep coming back.
I say where can I find justice, where is beauty, and what is true? These are needs of the human heart and I find traces of them here and there, but is there a source of them? I do not know, so I search for it. I want a beauty that does not end, a justice that does not have to be fought for again and again, but can be lived. So I demand a reasonableness that corresponds to my heart, and I want more.
Life is a passion and as it tastes what it is looking for it gets stronger and wants more. This is what I call religion. It is the impetus that drives humanity. The sexual quest is one of the first expressions of the religious quest.
Just lust is not sex however, it is possession and power. Both the sexual quest and the religious quest generate culture, and the religious quest is broader.
TAKING MEASUREMENTS
See the existential questions do not pertain to science. I don't want my scientists to sit around asking about the 'Why' of the universe. Because the results of science should be measurable, and that is fine, but that cannot apply to ALL of our experiences of life. When you say 'I', what does that 'I' stand for? There is one I that can be explained in terms of brain functions, but there are other experiences for which the brain function explanation is inadequate. Obviously it is there! But it is not exhausted by a scientific explanation, and taking science out of its realm is a violation of scientific rules.
Darwinism is true, within its scope, but if it is the only question you are asking, then you are depriving yourself of a human experience. In Darwinism, beautiful stuff is discovered for sure, but the price is to exclude certain things from the enquiry. As long as we are aware of the exclusion, that is fine, but when you take life and treat it the same way - by ignoring what has been excluded from the enquiry, that is a tragic narrowing.
REAL AND IDEAL
Darwinism, or creationism or any 'ism as an ideology that accounts for all human experiences and as a proposal for organising your life in all its dimensions, I cannot accept. Science accounts for everything within its own sphere only. Sooner or later, the Darwinians in their own lives do not act as if Dawinism explains everything, as if there is no inherent meaning in the universe. So scientific reasoning is a form of reasoning. Without it, you do not abandon reason, you expand your form of reasoning.
In the same way, I say there is meaning in the universe. But if that faith proposal I make rules out a scientific discovery that makes sense in is own terms, then I am prepared to abandon it as absurd. The question is, do explanations correspond to my experience of life?
SHUT UP!
I embrace that which accounts for the experience of my heart, but do it in a reasonable way. The Church cannot get away with saying: "This is it and shut up." It has to invite you to verify it.
In order to find out what the words: 'Jesus is the son of God' mean, I have to explore, to ask, to question. If at any one time I have put the matter down and said: 'No more questioning', then I am at the level of the Mystery itself, and that is self-defeating.
So there are two types of understanding - comprehension and certainty. It is the teaching of the church that the doctrines and the dogmas are signposts, not the reality. But striking with reality always launches you. As you react to the circumstances that determine where you are, you fall back. You may crash or run out of energy, but I would say the religious impulse, the desire for the infinite, is the impulse making science possible. I will not say anything unless I have verified it. Does it make sense? I have to decide every day whether I believe what I believe.
Any contact we have with Reality will launch us in a quest for meaning and purpose.
SIN BIN
You can see this progress interrupted many times, by a total collapse, and many steps back. The whole Bible too can be seen as an educational process like this. In it, there is the hurtling of babies against the wall, the using of women as property, and there are certain things which you just don't say anymore. God is educating our ideas of God, and so he has to use whatever ideas are there. What is being educated is our freedom, and so you have to work with what you have.
God has to purify our idea of God, but there is another direction, which is opposite to this direction. It is the direction towards selfishness and pride, lived out in my relations with people and with nature. Even the name of God is used in this direction. In the name of God, the more I know of God, the more intolerant I become.
God works through us, through our reason, our minds and heart. The Bible is a divine inspiration, but it is not dictated. It is a concrete people with a history of understanding of the mystery and of reaction to the mystery. At any one time the people are advanced, or they are behind. There are many theologies of God in the Bible, it is like a scrapbook. But what they all have in common is the history of a people, and now we can look back and see if there is any direction in the sensitivity of a people, as time passes.
THE PARTICULAR versus THE UNIVERSAL
Today we see a particular revelation to one person or people, and an openness to all manifestations of the human search, as contradictory. This is valid and understandable and it should be. In concrete cases, certain actions are proposed that are not actions which open us but which narrow us and our sensitivities, so then that privileged revelation should be rejected as intolerant.
But, on the other hand, the way people progress is always very concrete. A teacher comes, he is ahead of the people, like a Martin Luther King. This seems to be the way human beings are educated and live together. In science, economics, ethics, politics, and because no-one is an expert this method of preference and election and particularity in this way does not worry me. It is not necessarily conflicting with humanity.
THE GREAT LIZARD
I believe Jesus to be THE saviour of humanity, but, I am assuming this is all somehow originating in the Reality which I call the Mystery. It is behind the human heart, wherever the human heart is. This Mystery is what unites us.
Even if you are a criminal, you are responding to the needs of the human heart. This is what we have in common. And the religious proposal says that at the heart of it all, at the origin of this, is this great Mystery which unites us, which you can call God, the Creator, or the Great Lizard, whatever you want to call it -- it is this Reality which educates us.
And what does God reveal? He reveals himself.
(SUPER)NATURAL SELECTION
But when you reveal yourself, you have to work with what is there, through personal interests, and so on. So this God follows this educational method of selecting all of these people. And as a Christian, and this is what makes me a Christian, I come to believe that the concretisation of all of this, at one point in time, and the manifestation of this Mystery, not just the manifestation of any other teacher of the Mystery -- as authentic as they may all be -- but OF THE MYSTERY ITSELF, is the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
And this is what I hold, but this does not close me...
...I do not say that those who do not accept Jesus are damned or excluded, of course not, because the purpose of Jesus is precisely to move us to the next stage, which is all embracing. And so I read the Bible in its context and I will tell St Paul, OK I say Yes to anything, but what do you mean by: "You must believe in the Son of God."?
A Buddhist or an atheist may get to heaven faster than I do. Even St Thomas Aquinas would say a person has to follow his (OR HER) conscience.
Be honest to your heart. It is not the morality that gets you to heaven. It is not because the atheist does good things.
IF THEY ACCEPT IT, FINE
It is the heart that is important. This is very important. A Christian can fulfil every moral law there is and still end up in Hell - that is the doctrine of the Church. It is not what you do, it is your stand with respect to other-ness. It is your ability to respond in a way that gives of yourself. It does not even have to be formulated in the mind. Being is Love in the Mystery of the Trinity. That is what it means.
And a truth that inspires you to do violence, is not truth. You are being guided by something else, something horrible which is the other energy, whatever you want to call it, satanic or original sin, or whatever. It is a distortion of the truth. In the fourth Eucharistic prayer, we pray for those who seek God with a sincere heart, as much as we pray for the Church. I do not think I am being a liberal Catholic, this is just the doctrine of the Church. The word catholic means universal, and I don't think that there is a conflict between the particular and the universal.
The particularism itself will move in that direction because it is the dynamics of Love. Love's very particularisation broadens it. As a follower of Christ and believing he and only he is the centre of the universe, I do not find this particularity in any way conflicting with my desire to be open to every manifestation of humanity. If I come with any threat, or suggestion of powerfully imposing this or its consequences, I am against that. The purpose of Christ is universal. I just rejoice and follow what I have discovered. I offer it to the people. If they accept it, fine, but if they do not, they are not my enemies.
BUT GO TO THE MOVIES
I would like all to believe in Christ, but what salvation comes can come without someone knowing it, because what it requires is not moral achievement but purity of heart. I do not love humanity because I love Christ. I love Christ because I love humanity. In spite of its horrors, and all its negative challenges, I turn to Christ because Christ makes sense of all this, so I say yes. It corresponds to the desires of my heart. If it didn't, I would be out of my mind to continue with it, that is crazy, like a self-hatred.
So in the country we have people who are non-believers, Buddhists, Jews, whatever, but I say be faithful to your atheism, see where it leads you. I have total confidence that it will lead to the Mystery, because we are structured that way.
We do have to talk about these things - but we are not made to talk about them all the time. And in the end, you have to go to the movies.
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