Transcript of a speech
by Bishop Greg O'Kelly SJ, at the Jesuit Lenten Series Breakfast, hosted by Immaculate Conception Parish in Melbourne at Kooyong
Tennis Club, 4 March 2010.
We live in an age when the Church seems to be on the back
foot. Particularly when you think of the numbers of clergy, and you think of
the congregations in the churches - I've got more kangaroos than Christians
where I am. We live in a Church pitted with scandal, with the abuse - and we've
got people dancing on our grave. There's a militant atheism around - sort of a
missionary atheism - that's going to advertise on trams even here in Melbourne. People who
don't believe, and who apparently don't want others to believe. And they
possibly want us to be haunted, constantly railing
against someone who they say doesn't exist.
But I think dancing on our graves is no problem to us
Christians, because the grave has never been a difficulty for Christians from
the time of Jesus himself.
What the Church can offer, I think, is vision, affirmation,
purpose and hope, and that's what I want to say here. What we do offer the
secular world is a way of looking at things. You can run schools and you can
run hospitals - and as a Catholic Church we run these based on faith, hope and
vision, and they're conducted because of love. I think once you get that, it's
a quality and purpose out of which the thing comes. Institutions based on
faith, hope and vision, and conducted because of love. That's why we run these
hospitals, that's why we run these schools. Others run schools and others run
hospitals - but that's why we do it, and we have to charge our purpose,
reminding ourselves of why we do it.
I think the ability to rediscover itself is another aspect
of the Church that we have. We offer vision, affirmation, purpose and hope, and
we offer an ability, through our history, to rediscover ourselves. The Church
rediscovers itself following moments of disillusion. And there's a need, on the
other hand, for ourselves as the Church community, to rediscover the
religiously affective in our lives, to animate our works and ourselves.
Benedict, the Pope, speaking at the Gregorian a few years
ago said, ‘Only with reference to God who is love, who is revealed through
Jesus Christ, can man find the meaning of his existence and live in hope, in
spite of his experience of those ills that wound his personal existence and the
society in which he lives'. Our basis is a conviction, the conviction that love
is the creative truth of the universe, it's the basis of all reality. The whole
world exists in the mind of God, and God is love, and so we have that sense
that there is nothing evil, therefore, in anything created. Therefore there is
an openness to the world that must do justice to our sense of the incarnation.
To be fully human, we cannot realise the truth that sets us
free without reference to the creative act of God that put me on this earth,
and we are each of us being an unrepeatable life. And we come out of that sense
of hope because we have been put here for some purpose.
The Pope also said ‘Hope makes it possible for man not to
enclose himself in a paralysing and sterile nihilism, but to be open to a
generous commitment to his society, so as to make it better'. So there you have
hope that both frees us and gears us. Frees us from nihilism, and gears us
towards making our society better - its basis and motivation.
So for us, the words of Isaiah can mean a lot, and we can
resonate with them: ‘For the Lord takes delight in you, and your land will have
its wedding'. And if we can come to our work, and come to our world, with that
view of a graced universe, then we are offering something very special. We have
an attitude towards the world, a vision of it as the theatre of God's presence,
and to confront those who say that the world is simply a collation of physical
accidents then we have this other view charged with hope. The world is our area
of the Church, the Church cannot be patted into a corner, the Church can't be
put onto a nice vase on the mantelpiece, a sort of curio of former times.
St Augustine
has said it so well for us, ‘If the times are bad, then we must be better. Then
the times will be better because we are the times'. And so it's the attitude
and conviction with which we approach the world and can say things. Because we
can offer an attitude or a way of living. In Ephesians we are called to live
through love in his presence. There are many ways of living, but we are called
to live through love in his presence. So many people seem living in a sense of
an absence, leading lives of quiet desperation. For too many, the main
distraction of life is that of bread and circuses. And it takes you back to TS
Eliot - for many of our brothers and sisters, where it is to be distracted from
distraction by distraction. Against that, we bring this Christian attitude to
live through love in his presence. And to counter this we must help them to
rediscover the affective. The religious affective in their lives. But we can't
do this unless we've been shown it ourselves from the community. So any
attitude towards the world demands a revival ourselves about how we live this
life.
When a person is facing their death, what they say or choose
to do is significant. We look at the last acts of Jesus, and how he sent us
back into the world. He did three things, and he said one thing. What acts did
he choose to do at the very end? He washed the feet of his disciples, and said
do likewise. He took bread and wine - the stuff of ordinary life - and said do
this in memory of me. And then he showed them his hands and his side. His
hands, the works of justice and kindness, the heart the signs of compassion.
And then he said to them go out and teach others. So those three things he did
and the one thing he said give any Christian an orientation to the world.
It's a cardinal point - at times in the spirituality of the
Church there has been a certain gap between the sacred and the profane. People
have written about it as two theatres, two existences - meaning the secular.
But against that the basic tradition of the Church has been that of
integration, as in Augustine - the times will be better because we are the
times. Ignatius, in the Exercises,
asks us to see how God dwells in creatures, in the elements giving being, in
the plants giving growth, in the animals giving us sensation, and in the
humankind granting the gift of understanding, and how he dwells also in me,
giving me being, light and sensation, and causing me to understand. To see too
how he makes a temple of me, as I have been created in the likeness and image
of his divine majesty.
So we're coming out of a vision and affirmation of who we
are, and with that sense of confidence that Emmanuel, God is with us. And all
this reflects the profound teachings of Scripture, from Genesis, where God saw
that it was good, he made us and saw it was very good, and the teaching of St
John that God so loved the world that he sent his only son. The world. He
didn't like just some people, but God so loved the world. The totality. And
hence this incarnational view that we have, that the world is a theatre of
God's presence, and the secular is the place of the incarnation. Paul tells us
that all creation has been renewed. Jesus walked in this world in which we also
continue to walk. Jesus moved amongst sinners, tax collectors, prostitutes, and
failed fishermen. The enrichment the Church offers is to invite the
non-religious in our world to look beneath the surface of the secular, to see
its deeper meanings.
And how often are we invited, in fact, by the Church to do
this? I think there are questions of reform for ourselves as community. Some of
us were brought up in a spirituality that said we should pray as if everything
depended on God, and work as if everything depended on us. But in fact to be
true to Ignatius it would be the other way around. We pray as if everything
depends on us, and that gives an urgency to our prayer, and we work as if
everything depends on God, and that gives a sense of hope and confidence.
We also know disillusion, we're not people with heads in the
clouds. Constantly the Church is having to rediscover, like the disciples from
Emmaus going off in some sort of sadness. You remember that photograph from
1986, when John Paul II went to Alice Springs
and he held up a little Aboriginal baby and he put a woolen coloured cap on
that boy. That little boy grew up in the Alice Springs
community, he was a nephew of Miriam Ungunmerr, and his nickname was Pope. He
killed himself three months ago. And so we come back from moments of
disillusion, where we have to reconstruct and go on, and in many ways like
that.
Because we go to Christ, and Christ sends us back again. He
points us back to the world all the time. And we cannot say it any clearer than
when we say he came not for the righteous but for the sinners and the sick. And
this includes all, because all are made in the image and likeness of God. It
includes the dropouts, the gay culture, the asylum seekers, all people of other
races. The lesson of the good Samaritan cannot make it any clearer. And we look
at Jesus with the crowds, they shouted ‘Hosanna' to him at the beginning of one
week, and at the end of the same week they were shouting, ‘crucify him, crucify
him'. He knew the fickleness of the crowd, but he did not falter, and he sends
us back to it again and again.
He said to the disciples, they are hungry go feed them
yourselves. And this idea of being sent always back to the world as a sign of
hope for it. To be drawn to Christ is to be sent out by him on mission. Go feed
them yourselves.
And what we must offer our brothers and sisters of the
non-religious world is a conviction of human beings in God's likeness. And we
must challenge any shallow description of humanity, because human nature was
not made to be seduced or be restricted to economic rationalism.
With Year 12 RE I used to use the Cro Magnon man, those
caves in France
which are the oldest European cave paintings. And if you look there you'll see
nothing has changed much. You've got the paintings on the wall, showing man the
toolmaker, with the axe which unfortunately becomes the weapon. There's man the
lover, because the flowers are laid around the bodies of the dead. There's man
the thinker, because the scratchings and calculations made on the wall, and
there's man the artist in the paintings. And there's man the worshipper in the
subjects he paints. So you have that quite strong, humanistic view, an abiding
description of the human being. There can be no full humanity without those
dimensions of creativity, of love, of thought, and of worship.
Worship is as much part of our human identity as is
creativity, love or reason. And we should push that as they are part of being
whole persons. To be fully human we must develop on all fronts. We are called
to be worshippers, the question is whom do we worship. And we have to be
prepared to make what Teillhard de Chardin called the most difficult of
journeys, the journeys within.
Vision, affirmation, purpose and hope. The glory of God is a
man or woman fully alive. Affirmation - God so loved the world. Purpose - we
are the times. Hope - see I have overcome the world. I put three adages before
people which summarise the Christian thing, they come from James Wilson Hogg -
a headmaster in Sydney
- who lived in the terror of having a hall named after him, Hogg Hall, but it
never happened. The first adage is, ‘What a man believes in is crucial. A
belief in Christ will produce one kind of society, a belief in Lenin another'.
The second one from Leonardo da Vinci, ‘the artist is always painting himself.
The interior flows the exterior'. And the third one, ‘the beauty of stained
glass can only be seen from within the Cathedral'. I think those adages
summarise it. What a person believes in is crucial, a belief in Lenin one sort
of society, in Christ another. We are painting ourself, therefore we focus on
the self. As Ignatius says, less poetically, the interior flows to the
exterior. And the other one says the beauty of stained glass can only be seen
from within.
It is an indication of what we must offer the world. A
vision of what it is to be a human being, and a challenge to those who want to
stay at the surface of secularism. People of little or no faith know that
education without values, and knowledge without ethics, is a false education.
And if they agree with that, that it is false, then what are they being invited
to contemplate more deeply beneath the surface of secularism? To see the God
within.
To be listened to, the Church must deal with people with
different views with integrity too. We can't just go to the world in a bullying
fashion. I would think of issues like abortion and euthanasia. Is it too much
for us, as a Church, to expect that proponents of views other than ours are
acting in good faith? We must respect integrity. They may not have the whole
story - we must do everything we can to educate and give our vision of life, to
do what we can within the democratic process. But we must respect the fact that
Christ proposed, always, he never imposed. And it is a very important
distinction when we face the world.
The good shepherd is a very good model of Jesus - he walked
in front of the sheep and they followed. The Christ proposed, he never imposed.
And we speak on these vital issues to the world, but we
don't manipulate the system. We hope the truth will set people free.
Also if we are to be heard, we have to work for a model of
the Church that takes it away from being a Renaissance institution to being a
model of a home or a community. I think if we can see the Church as the home of
the Word - because Scripture feeds us, and the Church formed the New Testament
-where you hear the Word most is in this community. As the place of the saints
as well, despite scandals. Mary MacKillop knew it more than most. The saints
abide. The Church as surely the carer for the vulnerable and the outcast, and
we see that in so many ways. And lastly the Church as the giver of the bread of
life - you can't get the bread of life elsewhere, and we have to have that in
order to live.
We can ask our brother and sister in the world, ‘What do you
feed on if you haven't got this bread of life, this sense of community, this
view of a world charged with the grandeur of God?' I think that shift into a
Church modeling that community that is life-giving, that feeds us, that
inspires us - that's what we need. And that's why we have to do a lot to
discover the religiously affective.
So remember the words of Augustine, which mean so much: ‘If
the times are bad, then we must be better; then the times will be better,
because we are the times.'