HERESIES IN RELIGIOUS LIFE 2

Arianism is the most famous and seems to have been the most resilient of the Christological heresies. One of the reasons for its resilience seems to have been the way in which political figures became directly involved in managing it, in the first place the Emperor Constantine who summoned the Council of Nicea but also his successors throughout the fourth century, not all of them on the same side of the argument. You will recall Germain Grisez’s comment that moral theology must now face its fourth century and this aspect of it is certainly true: political leaders nowadays will not become excited about differences in Christology or sacramental theology where they will become very exercised about issues like abortion and homosexuality. These have a real political edge that many other matters no longer have although they did in earlier times.

Another reason for the resilience of Arianism, however, must be its reasonableness. Can we say that heresies will be more reasonable than orthodoxy? At least at a superficial level they seem to be. They are easier to present and understand because by definition they exclude some of the story, reducing the mystery of the faith to something that seems more coherent and acceptable by the standards of human thinking. Not that orthodox faith is irrational – that’s a very common and persistent modern error – but that the truths to which faith introduces us are beyond the capacity of the unaided human mind to understand.

Arius’s difficulty was in seeing how you could at the same time speak of a difference between the Father and the Son while saying that they were ‘consubstantial’ or ‘of one being’ which he understood to mean ‘they are one and the same being’, they are ‘the same thing’. It seemed to him like a form of Sabellianism where there is just one God who presents himself at different times in different forms. He was right to recognize this as incompatible with what the Christian faith teaches and there are scriptural texts that seemed to support his view that the Son is not therefore equal to the Father. Only the Father is unbegotten. This is a quality that is not shared in by the Son, and so they cannot be absolutely equal. And because ‘unbegottenness’ is a divine characteristic, it seemed as a consequence that the Son could not then be God, at least not in the same sense in which the Father is God.  The Son had a beginning whereas the Father did not. The Son is the first of creatures, perhaps a special kind of creature, the one on whom all other creatures depend. Again there are scriptural texts, in the wisdom literature for example, that seemed to support this.

This is not the place for a lecture in Christology however brief. What I’m doing is recalling these heresies to see if there are analogous ways in which we might be erring in understanding and living our Christian, Dominican life. Of course none of us is claiming to have a human nature hypostatically united with the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, so what we are about is very clearly at the level of analogy: how are we to live our Christian, Dominican life in a way that is true to the divine and human vocation that it is?

For Arianism, Christ is neither truly divine nor is he truly human. He becomes a third reality, between the uncreated and the created, a human God and a divine Man, something in between true God and true humanity. It was a kind of rational compromise that, instead of struggling with what the faith required, resolved tensions by coming up with a new category. This is something we might be tempted to do, to live a style of life that will be ‘in between’ rather than being fully one and fully the other, fully focused on humanity and its needs and at the same time fully focused on God and His demands.

We might wonder how we can be fully focussed on two things and the fact that we are seeing them as two things is precisely the problem. This is the form the mystery of faith takes in regard to our living a life that is simultaneously human and divine. We tend to think that the divine and the human must be rivals to each other, that they are natures sharing the same world or field of forces, so that to allow more say to one must imply allowing less say to the other. And this is, of course, quite wrong.

Much contemporary new age spirituality seems to work with a kind of Arianism in the sense that it prefers to speak about ‘the divine’ than to speak about God, as if ‘divinity’ were a kind of in-between category, a nature that can be parcelled out to different degrees among different levels of being. It might even regard this nature as dwelling in us as some kind of spark of the great divine. This takes us a long way from the radical distinction between the uncreated and the creature, a distinction that is crucial if there is to be love between them.

We can compromise in all sorts of ways, some of them obvious and some of them not so obvious. Sometimes the compromise is at the expense of our humanity and sometimes it is at the expense of our divine calling. What I am thinking of are those ways in which we might feel we need to justify ourselves to the world, either in how we speak or in how we live, but which have the effect of turning us into something ‘in between’ our twofold focus, neither fully one nor fully the other. Our celibacy, for example, cannot be explained simply in terms of our human experience. We may try to do that, to say how it gives us freedom for the mission, mobility, readiness to be available, and so on. But we know in our hearts that this cannot be the full motivation for religious celibacy, that it has something to do also with our love for Christ a well as our understanding of how His kingdom is being realised in our lives and of our place within that realisation in the lives of others. Of course that can be difficult to explain, not only to people who do not share our faith. A more easily understood explanation, something more accessible rationally speaking, might seem more sensible but will not do justice to how we truly understand things.

The alternative is to head off into a pious or spiritualistic understanding of celibacy (to stay with that example), one that loses contact with human experience and begins to feel unreal even to ourselves. We might do the same for poverty or obedience or other aspects of our lives. It is difficult to say all that needs to be said, whether in words or in how we live, in order to do justice to the human and divine character of the life we are living.

Let me quote two Dominicans in support of what I am trying to say. Jordan of Saxony speaks very well about it in his encyclical letter to the Order of 1233, speaking about the humanity of our lives but also the way in which that humanity ought to be being transformed by divine grace, by charity in other words. Let me quote from him [Tugwell, Early Dominicans, page 124].

"How often do the sordid, aimless meanderings of our affections lead us along crooked paths, not directed in the way of truth and with no eye on our proper goal. We say a lot, we do a lot, we endure a tremendous lot, which would make us so much richer in virtue, so much more fruitful in merit, if only charity abounded in our hearts, directing and ordering everything towards our proper goal, which is God. But as it is, our minds are too often occupied with futile thoughts, our feelings drawn by futile desires; we do not carry through to its end the sifting and purging of our hearts' purposes, so it is hardly surprising that we are so slow to accomplish anything, so sluggish is our ascent towards perfection."

The other witness I want to call is Herbert McCabe. In a wonderful essay simply entitled ‘God’ he distils the fruits of his lifetime’s contemplation of the mystery of God. Most striking – to return to Arianism – is the conviction he expresses there that to say ‘God is love’ is another way of saying ‘God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit’. This is the crucial concrete significance of the victory of the Nicene faith over Arianism. The way of Trinitarian faith is the only way of taking absolutely seriously the statement in the first letter of Saint John that ‘God is love’. If the Father has no equal to love, and to return his love, then what the Father shows cannot be love in the full sense of the word. It might be compassion and kindness but it is not love. Out of many things Herbert says there I quote just one – [God Still Matters, page 7].

"To say that Jesus is divine and to say that God is capable of love is to proclaim one and the same doctrine. Any unitarian view of God, or Arian view of Christ, immediately destroys the possibility of divine love - I mean divine love in the serious adult sense. ... It is only the doctrine of the divinity of Christ (and thus the doctrine of the Trinity) that makes possible the astounding and daring idea that God can after all genuinely love. He is in love with the Son, and the exchange of divine love between them is the Holy Spirit."

The implication is that if we are Arians then we do not really believe that God can share His own life of love with us. Of course we recite the Nicene Creed every Sunday, but that does not mean that our words are always borne out by our actions, by the ways in which we actually live out the faith we profess.

HERESIES IN RELIGIOUS LIFE I

Germain Grisez drew attention to what he calls the Christomorphic character of the Christian life: it is divine and human in a dynamic unity. An underlying difficulty in moral debate within the Church is, he says, ‘an inadequate understanding of how Christian life must and can be at the same time completely human and completely divine’. Moral theology must now face into its ‘fourth century’, he says, as it tries to develop the best way of speaking about this Christomorphic character of Christian life. He believes that St Thomas (Aquinas) ‘leaves many unresolved difficulties as to how the fulfilment of human persons as such is related to their vocation to share in divine life’. Are we made for this world or for another world, is one way of putting this question. Are we at home here or somewhere else? The answer is both: ‘The call to intimacy with God who definitively reveals himself in Jesus is also a call to protect and promote the flourishing of human persons and societies in the goods which fulfil human nature’ (so Grisez).

So we do not have to choose between Christian responsibility in this world and concern with the world that is coming. But we do find it easier always to choose, or at least to set things up in opposition rather than try to hold them together. We will certainly feel that every way of putting it is inadequate and it probably is. All of this is just a way of recalling also this fact, that the great commandment is twofold and that we must take this seriously, that this twofold commandment is one and this one great commandment is twofold.

The Church eventually arrived at the conclusion (or is it a starting point?) of Chalcedon, with its statement that Jesus Christ, the Only-Begotten Son, is one person and one hypostasis in two natures, those natures united without confusion or change, without division or separation. It follows from what Grisez says that understandings of the Christian life as a divine-human dynamic will likely go wrong in ways comparable to those in which the Christological debates of the first four centuries went wrong. Mistaken understandings of the divine-human dynamic in Christian life will then be analogous to the heresies that emerged in the Christological debates. Applying this to Dominican life, the way in which we believe we have been called to follow Christ, we can then think about these Christological heresies and consider whether such thinking helps in the task of maintaining the balance of our own lives, doing justice to the goals of our vocation, to save our own souls by preaching for the salvation of others.

The first Christological heresy, already mentioned in the New Testament, is docetism. It is a difficulty not about accepting the divinity of Jesus but about accepting his true humanity. We might think that that is not likely to be our problem about our own way of living: to think we are too divine and not human enough. We are more likely to be hypocrites, surely, pretending to be more divine than we are, rather than docetists, having a difficulty about the reality of our humanity.

But maybe it is not as simple as that. Docetism has a problem with the incarnation, the truth of the Word becoming flesh. It had no difficulty with the Word hanging around in our neighbourhood but it could not see how the Word could become flesh and dwell amongst us. The physical body itself was one difficulty and the suffering of physical bodies compounded the difficulty. Divinity cannot dwell in a suffering body: that’s Docetism.

And perhaps we do subscribe to that view also, in our actions if not in our words, finding it difficult to accept that the divine Spirit, the divine Life, is living and moving and acting within suffering bodies. We have no difficulty accepting that the divine Spirit and Life might be in our neighbourhood, close by, but to accept them in the suffering body? I wonder. And the body that is to be discerned is not just the physical body of Christ, or our own physical body, but the body of the community, the Church, and the body that is the Dominican community to which we belong. How sound is our conviction that the Word becomes flesh in those suffering bodies?

A related heresy from the first century is that of Marcion who could not accept that the suffering body of creation could be the work of the God of Jesus. It seemed clearer to him that the suffering body was the work of a bumbling, even malicious, God, the one called Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. His creation is defective and a place of suffering. Christianity, Marcion proposed, reveals another God, one not known before, who is simply mercy and love, and Jesus is a spiritual entity sent by this God to lead us out of the earthly trap. Marcion edited the Bible drastically, only Paul and a radically reduced Luke faithfully present the truth about Jesus, he says, and the rest can be ignored. Considering his views of the body and of suffering, it is not surprising that Marcion’s Christology is docetic.

So how might our living of Christian life be docetist or marcionite? One point has already been mentioned: a refusal to believe that God can be present in the suffering body. The embodied life generally is already a problem, as it was to be for many heresies down the ages. Suffering too was to prove tricky, with Christian understandings and practices of suffering sometimes taking bizarre forms. But to think of this ordinary human living as a kind of charade, a veil, perhaps a Buddhist-style illusion: this seems like what a docetist understanding of human life would be like.

Christian, Dominican, life can become unreal in various ways, can be idealistic in a way that is mistaken, seeking a pure place or experience, one that does not involve a full entry into the body with all it entails, one that looks instead for a way out of the earthly trap. Marcion also then gives us permission to drop certain periods in history, certain moments in the unfolding story of God’s people, as if some periods of time or some aspects of the cultural journey undertaken in the body could be simply cut away and ignored. Other moments or aspects can then be privileged as if they are the only ones that count. It is what we all tend to do in relation to the body that is the community – whether it is our own history, the Church’s history, the Order’s history – to be partial and selective, to choose some things and ignore others, to refuse to enter fully into the body, to embrace it fully, with all that entails.

So what does that mean, to enter fully into the body? Well it means above all understanding and accepting suffering and sin. For docetism the Word cannot become flesh because the flesh is about suffering and sin. What are we to do about suffering? Understand it in terms of the paschal mystery is the obvious answer, which is why the Church’s faith as expressed at Chalcedon, about who Christ is and who it was therefore that suffered, is central to our salvation.

We tend to accept that suffering will come our way, that there is no need to go looking for it, and that our task is to accept what comes and not seek it out. The third way of prayer of St Dominic is a real difficulty now, the one in which he is beating himself with the discipline. In our culture such behaviour is associated in the first place with sado-masochistic sexual practices so it is best that we not engage in it, at least until the culture changes.

But the Order was renowned in the beginning as a penitential order, an Order that took the suffering body seriously (again not just the individual human body but through that the body of the community, all who suffer and are in distress, particularly through sin: that’s what the third way of prayer is linked with, reparation for sin). I was struck at finding in Humbert of Romans a description of the key elements of Dominican life as prayer, study, preaching and asperitas (penance) – I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before – whereas we now speak of the four pillars of prayer, study, preaching and communitas. Instead of penance, community. Instead of something bitter, something sweet, the precious oil upon the beard. Well, hardly. Perhaps living faithfully with each other is enough for us to enter fully into the suffering body.

We learn compassion through suffering and we are called to follow Jesus by taking up our cross each day, being prepared to share his sufferings so as to share his glory. The task is to find the divine life within the human life, suffering and sinful, not above it or below it or before it or behind it, but to find the divine life within the suffering human body, of the individual, of the community that is the Church, of the community that is the Order. I was hungry and you gave me food, thirsty and you gave me to drink, naked and you clothed me.

‘Every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God’ (1 John 4:2) and ‘many deceivers have gone out into the world, people who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh’ (2 John 7). These are the anti-docetic passages in the Johannine letters. And Paul wrestles with the twofold destiny of Christian life in his letter to the Philippians:

It is my eager expectation and hope that now as always Christ will be honoured in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If it is to be life in the flesh, that means fruitful labour for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. Convinced of this, I know that I shall remain and continue with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith, so that in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus (1:20-26).

EVANGELII NUNTIANDI

These past few weeks I have been talking about the ‘preaching moment’, offering some reflections on what it involves and how that calls for a way of living and a spirituality that is ours: the Dominican job in the Church requires the Dominican way of life to support it. We have considered three aspects of this preaching moment: the Word, the speaker of the Word, and the hearers of the Word. We have considered the mysteries of light as a way of meditating on the ministry of Jesus as a sustained preaching moment. Last week I spoke about the ridiculous 1970s and about some of the difficulties across the years, as styles and emphases change. It can seem that people – even the brethren – are engaged in something quite different when, in fact, all share the same task: preaching the gospel to people. All Dominicans, I presume, think of what they are doing as an instance of that central activity.

Perhaps the greatest Church document of the 1970s was Evangelii nuntiandi [EN], which appeared in 1975. It is an apostolic exhortation of Pope Paul VI following on the synod of bishops in 1974 and issued to mark the end of the holy year of 1975 as well as ten years since the end of Vatican II. Just as one might legitimately argue that the work of Vatican II is heralded and in many ways anticipated in the great encyclicals of Pope Pius XII on the liturgy, on the bible and on the Church, so the focus on a new evangelisation that came to prominence in the second half of Pope John Paul II’s pontificate is heralded and more than anticipated in this document from Paul VI. It is worth looking at, or looking at again if you have read it before.

For EN Jesus is the great evangeliser who gathers round him a community of evangelisers, the Church, whose task is to evangelise and to send out evangelisers into the world. ‘Evangelisation’ often seems to me to be one of those magic words at the sound of which everybody nods in approval but which is actually difficult to explain when you are asked to do so. What does it mean? What does one seek to do in seeking to evangelise another person? What entitles a person to think they have the right or duty to attempt such a thing? EN speaks of it like this: to bring the good news everywhere so that it might transform humanity from within, to sow the seed of the Word in the hope that it will take root and blossom in the hearts and lives of those who come to believe in it.

Bringing the good news everywhere refers not just to geography but also to every aspect of human culture. Every generation is a new continent to be won for Christ: so Paul VI. The task of the  evangeliser, he says, is to ‘upset’ humankind, to question our criteria of judgement, our determining values, our points of interest, our lines of thought, our sources of inspiration, and our models of life, whenever these are in contrast with the Word of God and the plan of salvation.

EN also contains an early response to the theologies of liberation that had emerged, confirming a legitimate use of the term ‘liberation’ as a way of speaking about a goal of evangelisation but warning about identifying human liberation with salvation in Jesus Christ.

The world pays more attention to witnesses than to teachers: this is perhaps the phrase most often quoted from EN. If teaching is to be effective it must be supported by a way of living, confirmed as it were by the way of living of the preacher or teacher. Preaching is still important and necessary, even in a culture of too many words and too many voices. ‘It is the Word that is heard that leads to belief: St Paul said this and it is still true whether it happens in the liturgical homily, in catechesis, or in one to one teaching as Jesus with the Samaritan woman, with Nicodemus, and with others, or St Dominic staying up all night arguing with the innkeeper, bringing the word to bear on individual circumstances and situations.

Evangelisation is another way of talking about the mission of the Church, its responsibility to preach the gospel to every creature, seeking to bring it to new believers, to strengthen those who already believe, and to bring the truth of the gospel into dialogue with unbelief and secularisation.

Who evangelises, EN asks? The Church, in the first place, so wherever the gospel is preached the Church is present. Evangelisation cannot be just the inspiration and initiative of individuals since each individual who preaches the gospel acts in communion with the Church as a whole.

EN 63 says that evangelisation loses much of its force and effectiveness if it does not take into consideration the actual people to whom it is addressed, if it does not use their language, their signs and symbols, if it does not answer the questions they ask, and if it does not have an impact on their concrete life. But on the other hand, evangelisation risks losing its power and disappearing altogether if one empties or adulterates its content under the pretext of translating it in order to make it ‘relevant’. This is the tension I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, in the argument about preaching at the Krakow general chapter.

Certain internal attitudes ought to animate the evangelisers. Above all – and this is simply the teaching and example of St Paul as recorded in 1 Thess 2:1-8 – they must love the people they seek to evangelise. Such love is made up of the following: concern to give the truth, concern to bring people into unity, devotion to the proclamation of Jesus Christ, respect for the religious and spiritual situation of those being evangelised, respect for their tempo and pace, respect for their conscience and convictions, concern not to wound the other person, and the effort always to transmit solid certainties anchored in the Word of God. The preacher of the gospel ought to be living in joy, the joy of his own belonging to it, even when he is sowing in tears, confident of greater joy when the harvest comes.

So off you go on your summer placements when the time comes. You will be out and about, with opportunities to see what it is like, what is possible, what people’s situations and questions are, how the preaching of the gospel might be undertaken, what way of living is required if teaching is to be effective. Holiday time is never completely such for us, of course, because even among family and friends one is the religious, the priest, the Dominican, and inevitably people will be relating to you and thinking of you in those terms. That may seem to mean not very much at times but at other times it may come to mean a lot. If on pastoral placements you get opportunities to speak to groups of people – and I hope you do – in other circumstances you may well encounter a Nicodemus or a Samaritan woman, and a one-to-one conversation will be important for them and for you.

We seek to go about our work as St Paul did, out of love, and not from error or uncleanness, nor out of guile or flattery or greed, nor to seek glory from the world. We do it to please God who tests our hearts, and he will test our hearts as we do it. St Paul’s final comment is startling: his preaching to the Thessalonians was not for any of the reasons mentioned (error, uncleanness, etc.) but because he fell in love with them, full of affection and desire to share not just the gospel of God but his very self with people whom he came to think of as his beloved.

THE MOST RIDICULOUS DECADE

William Frazer’s Golden Bough begins with an account of the priesthood of Diana of the Woods at Nemi, near Castelgandolfo, a priesthood one attained by killing the incumbent and a priesthood in which one was succeeded by the man who managed to kill you. The prophecy of Malachi ends with the prediction that Elijah will come before the great and terrible day of the Lord to turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers (Mal 4:6). The angel Gabriel quotes this when he tells Zechariah that he is to be the father of John the Baptist, the Elijah who was to come, one of whose tasks is to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children (Luke 1:17). Why would it need to be done? Ought it not to happen naturally, that the hearts of fathers and sons should be turned to each other?

One reason, we can speculate, is because a father’s children represent his mortality as well as his potency. He brings them to be but in doing so is preparing the way for his own demise: to paraphrase John the Baptist at another moment, ‘the children must increase as the father decreases’.

Where the fathers are celibate and do not have natural children of their own this situation is likely to be more fraught. The fact that these are one’s own sons and daughters helps to temper the normal handing over from one generation to the next: in some way one continues to live on in them. But where the succession is celibate then this natural consolation is not present – the threat remains, the reminder of mortality is there, but without the consolation of knowing that these replacements, these successors, are the fruit of your own body. Even if they are not out to kill you off physically (although what restrains them?!) they will want to kill you off in other ways. And it seems right, only natural, that it should be so.

So what happens? Well hatred is one of the things that can happen, in stronger or milder forms. There are likely to be difficulties in relating easily, in working together, and in sharing responsibility. On the other hand people may attempt to establish something like the relationship of natural fathers and sons in this celibate succession. Because it is not natural, this can take strange forms: sponsorship and patronage as older men try to ensure that their particular way, their preferred ideas, and their approach to living our life, is sown in the minds and hearts of the next generation.

It can happen (so my experience tells me) that those who are two generations apart can establish easier relations than those who are just a generation away from each other. Those who are two generations apart have a common enemy, I suppose, the generation in between, whose limitations, weaknesses, compromises and general mediocrity they are each well positioned to appreciate. The grandfathers will be happy to see their sons experiencing some of the problems from the grandsons that they had experienced from them. The laws of action and reaction that seem to govern human life generally, not least in ecclesiastical affairs and theological preferences, will ensure that grandsons will sometimes feel more at home with those two generations away than they will with their own ‘fathers’.

These thoughts come to me in reflecting on my reaction to comments about the 1970s, that most ridiculous of decades. There was a feature in one of the Sunday magazines this week that described the 1970s in just such terms, as the most ridiculous decade of the past fifty years. It was referring to the fashions, music, and general cultural preoccupations of those years. Within the Church you find a similar analysis of the contribution of the 1970s. Naturally I am a bit sensitive about this, since these were the years when I was a student in Tallaght, formed during the second half of the pontificate of Pope Paul VI. Just a year or so after our ordination in 1978, when Pope John Paul II was beginning to show his hand, one of our teachers at Tallaght apologised to a classmate and myself for having prepared us for ‘the wrong church’.

Since I’ve come to live here at Blackfriars (Oxford), comments made in passing, or even directly to me, by clerical students, not all of them Dominicans, nourish my thinking about this. These have included references to the 1970s as the time when things ‘went to pot’, and as a kind of silly season in liturgical and other theological matters. People nod with sad, knowing smiles when the preoccupations of that time are recalled. I know that men from that generation and the one just before are experienced in some places as completely set in their ways, intolerant liberals, obstacles now to progress. ‘Thank God’, one student said to me some years ago, ‘good priests are beginning to be ordained again’. I wasn’t sure how far back the ‘bad priests’ went and may have simply been paranoid in assuming that he included all of my generation in his condemnation!

Where does it leave us? Well, it leaves us where the human race has always been, I suppose, living with the same realities, the same questions, except that we must face them in the form in which they present themselves to us. I can remember when the 1950s was regarded as the most ridiculous of decades so the day may come when people will be nostalgic for the 1970s. Those who imagine that life before Vatican II was some kind of ecclesiastical paradise are as much out of touch as some of the people who taught me and for whom life before Vatican II seemed to be unrelieved and unmitigated nonsense.

I think the 1970s, coming after the 1960s, raised questions and difficulties particularly about authority. All authority and leadership came to be regarded as flawed, ambiguous and invariably self-serving. The revolting students of Paris had obliged General de Gaulle to come to the television screens and explain to France what was going on. Nixon was exposed as a crook and a liar. The reaction to Humanae vitae opened questions about authority in the Church that rumble on to this day.

A film that captures the concerns and problems of the 1970s very well is The Ice Storm, with Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver. Made in 1997, it is set in 1973. The pullovers are ridiculous, the music is sad, and the teenagers are obnoxious. The adults are appalling: they seem unable or unwilling to grow up, they want to be as young as their children, they have become self-conscious about authority and any exercise of it, and so find it impossible to become adults. It seems like a generation that wants to be teenage forever. You are probably in a better position than me to talk about the impact of that period on later generations and to assess how much truth there might be in what I am saying.

We live from the Word of God in the first place, finding our foundation and our bearings from there. But the history and texts of our own and recent times help us to put shape on the ways in which we must live out some perennial questions: about fatherhood, about authority, about leadership, about relating across generations, about understanding, about love. If I end by quoting Scripture it is not to suggest that our recent experience and the questions it raises are simple to understand or to answer, but simply to point to what ought to be the foundation of our lives and the guiding criterion of our judgements. In the sermon on the mount Jesus says, ‘you have heard that it was said to the men of old, ‘you shall not kill, and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment. But I say to you that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment, whoever insults his brother shall be liable to the council, whosever says ‘you fool’ shall be liable to the hell of fire’ (Matt 5:21-22). Whatever we find ourselves thinking about people of another generation, or people of different styles and preferences, we need always to submit our thoughts to the refining judgement of Our Lord’s teaching.

THE MYSTERIES OF LIGHT

In Catholic piety the Rosary has a special place as a way of meditating on the mysteries of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. It has been cherished and promoted particularly by the Order of Preachers as a method of contemplating and preaching those mysteries. John Paul II’s decision to add five new mysteries to the Rosary, the so-called mysteries of light, has alerted people to how strange it was before, that in meditating on the important events of the life and work of Jesus one passed from the finding in the temple (recounted in Luke 2) to the agony in the garden. Was there no significant mystery between these two moments, nothing of essential spiritual, theological, revelatory or salvific importance? Thomas Aquinas says in his commentary on the Creed that all the mysteries of Christ are for our instruction. People were encouraged to meditate elsewhere on these other mysteries: healings, miracles, parables, discourses, vocation stories, meals and other encounters, all that Jesus said and did during the time of his conversation among human beings.

But picking out these five new mysteries of light – the baptism of Jesus, the wedding feast of Cana, his proclamation of the kingdom of God and call to conversion, the transfiguration, and the institution of the Eucharist – gives content to the description of Jesus’ public ministry as a sustained ‘preaching moment’: something is being communicated to people by Someone and the something that is communicated is the Someone who communicates it. It is a matter of deeds and words, as these five mysteries bring out, things said by Jesus the preacher and prophet, things done and undergone by Jesus the sign-maker and artist.

Jesus the preacher is anointed for his ministry at his baptism by John in the river Jordan. This marked the moment when his ministry began. An apostle, Acts 1 tells us, is one who can witness to the events from the baptism of Jesus to his resurrection. This provides the content of the Christian kerygma just as the baptism marks the moment when Jesus himself went public and began to proclaim the Word of God throughout Galilee and the surrounding countryside. The theophany at the baptism is for the Baptist or for those standing by (so Matthew), or it is for Jesus himself (so Mark and Luke), but either way the entry into his ministry involves Jesus in a clearer conviction about his vocation. It may be that one should refer here also to his temptation in the wilderness and to the moment of the Baptist’s arrest. Then Jesus, in his human nature, comes to realise something about himself, that he is to be this representative figure for Israel – the servant of God, a prophet and even the prophet, the anointed one or messiah, the son of man.

The gospels recount in different ways how Jesus appropriated (or revealed) his vocation as a preacher and teacher, as priest, prophet and king. As with many later moments in the public ministry of Jesus, the gospel of John gives a distinctive account of the beginning of that ministry. At the wedding feast of Cana, recounted in John 2, Jesus gave his first sign and the disciples believed in him. His work is underway even though his hour had not yet come. Cana begins the fulfilment of Old Testament promises of the eschatological age, the banquet of fine wine given in abundance, the out-pouring of the Spirit that is bountiful and indiscriminate, the meal offered by wisdom to her devotees (Is 25:6; Joel 3:1-5; Acts 2:13; Prov 9:1-6). But Cana also echoes beforehand the moment of Jesus’s death as John describes it (19:xx-xx): the hour has now come, there is blood and water flowing, there is thirst (now his own rather than that of the people around him), his mother is present and is again addressed as ‘woman’ (the new Eve), and there is glory, the glory first revealed in the sign of Cana, finally and definitively revealed as the glory of the only Son, giving his life on the cross.

The task of preaching is to bring people to see, by faith, this glory. It is a call to conversion, to turn away from sin and believe the good news of Jesus Christ, to have a new mind and be renewed, to turn away from the worship of dead things to a spiritual worship of the living God. The third mystery of light is Christ’s proclamation of the kingdom of God with the call to conversion. It is an invitation to enter into the mystery of Christ’s ministry of preaching. Paul will explain all this at length: those who have been reconciled by Christ become ambassadors of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:20). They receive grace to announce the good news and to invite to the banquet. No particular moment in the gospel accounts of his ministry is picked out in this third mystery of light, which makes it different from the other nineteen mysteries of the Rosary. It could easily have been the Sermon on the Mount, but instead people are invited to meditate on the entire teaching ministry of Jesus, all that he said and did (Acts 1:1; Lk 1:1-4) in announcing the kingdom.

The glory that is being revealed yet remains hidden, and the transfiguration is often understood as a moment in which the veil of Jesus’ humanity slips and a hidden divinity is revealed. But what happens is just as much a breaking in of the future, when the glory that is to be his as the exalted Son of Man, the glory of his resurrection, is glimpsed beforehand by his chosen disciples. Our preaching moments are for the most part mundane, ordinary and routine but they are also moments of insight, illumination and revelation for someone who is listening. At least they are always these things potentially (and perhaps often the one brought to fresh insight through our preaching is the one who is preaching).

If preaching were just a human message, our ideas and experiences, then we would be telling people what they know, or potentially could know, for themselves. But it is the Word that we preach, of course coming through human channels (earthen vessels at that) and so taking flesh in terms of our ideas and experiences as it takes flesh in terms of the language and accent in which we speak but with a character, depth and significance far beyond the channel through which it is communicated. As Paul says, ‘we preach what Scripture calls “the things no eye has seen and no ear has heard, things beyond the mind of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him”’ (1 Cor 2:9). We speak in words not taught by human wisdom (1 Cor 2:13). But where it happens that someone hears, through our preaching, what St John of the Cross calls ‘the silent music of eternal love’, then it is not we who speak (even though it is) but the Spirit of the heavenly Father speaking through us.

So people are taken up into a process of transfiguration, from one degree of glory to the next (2 Cor 3:18), and this is happening particularly as we partake in the daily bread of the Eucharist. The fifth mystery of light is ‘the institution of the Eucharist as the sacramental expression of the paschal mystery’. This too is a strange mystery compared with all the other mysteries of the Rosary. It is not just the last supper, as it might have been, but ‘the institution of a sacramental expression’. People are asked to meditate here on a theological doctrine, the meaning of the last supper in its relation to the death of Jesus, and our remembering of it until He comes.

This final mystery of light now links the joyful mysteries of Christ’s hidden childhood and the luminous mysteries of his public ministry with the sorrowful and glorious mysteries of the paschal event. This is where his public ministry is leading as Luke most clearly teaches in the structure of his gospel. If it is to the paschal mystery, to Jerusalem, that Jesus’ ministry moves it is also to Jerusalem, to the paschal mystery, that Christian preaching points. This is the climax and the heart of the story of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the climax and the heart of Christian preaching: this paschal mystery, sacramentally represented in the Eucharist, which is, as Vatican II describes it, ‘the source and summit of the Christian life’ (Lumen gentium 11).

The Word is Flesh and Blood

Launch of The Word is Flesh and Blood*

St Mary's Priory, Tallaght

16 February 2012

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We launch this book for Wilfrid just ten days before the Academy Awards in which it seems that the most successful film will be a silent one, The Artist. I have not yet seen it but have been struck by what it might mean for us, that people are ready for a silent film. We can at times feel ambivalent and even negative about words. Words are meant to facilitate communication and communion between people but they can also be experienced as a hindrance to that communication and communion. Like other currencies, the value of words can fall and rise: ‘words are cheap’, we hear in one context; ‘thank you for these precious words’, we hear in another.

In all the deeper experiences of life – love and birth, suffering and death – words become inadequate, and we turn instead to silence, to music, perhaps to poetry, a kind of musical speaking, or to prayer, and we struggle on. The most wonderful things, the most terrible things, leave us flabbergasted, gob-smacked, at a loss for words.

What about the Word, then, the ‘Word of God’? Professor Dawkins’ hair will fall out completely because not only do we believe that there is God but also that we have been addressed by God, that God has spoken and speaks to us: in creation, in scripture, throughout history, through the Church, above all in Christ. Are we mad?

When the Dalai Lama came to Blackfriars he said he agreed with everything the Christian speakers had said about the human search for ultimate reality through meditation. A perceptive questioner put this to him: ‘Does ultimate reality seek us?’, to which the Dalai Lama replied ‘no, we seek ultimate reality but it does not seek us’. Christians however believe that God does seek us: ‘this is the love I mean’, we read in the first letter of Saint John, ‘not our love for God, but God’s love for us’.

A book about Scripture that was still valued when Wilfrid was teaching us here was The Word of God in Words of Men. How can we dare to think that any of our human words – the language we use for commerce and war, for technology and politics – that these same words can be put at the service of the Word of God, that they can be made to carry a meaning that is transcendent, human words lifting us to the infinite?

But our speaking can aspire to be a speaking of the Word of God because God has first spoken to us. To adapt the text from 1 John, ‘this is the speaking I mean, not our speaking to God, but God’s speaking to us’. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The Word is flesh and blood for we believe that Jesus of Nazareth, prophet and teacher, is the revelation and the presence among us of the Eternal Father. It is a strange translation, not just from one language to another, but to call a person ‘the Word’, or to call ‘the Word’ a person. We do it easily because it is so familiar but it is mighty strange.

Wilfrid taught us that the Hebrew word dabhar, for a word or a name, when it was used of God speaking was always a creative word, for God’s word brings into being the reality it signifies. God’s word is always, as the prophet Isaiah puts it, ‘a word that does not return empty but succeeds in what it was sent to do’.  God’s final Word, God’s most profound Word, God’s eternal Word, is the utterance of Himself that is the Son, and we believe that this Word, the Eternal Son of God, became flesh in Jesus Christ, our brother and our saviour.

The Word is flesh and blood. Jesus Christ is the Word of God for us, in his human nature, in his acts as a human being, in his teaching, in the impact he had, in his healings and exorcisms and forgiveness of sins and restorations to life. Wilfrid’s work takes him back again and again to the gospels, texts he describes as realistic and wise, gracious and spiritual. Even when he is writing about parts of the Bible that seem far from the gospels Wilfrid remains focused always on the God of the Bible, already being revealed to the patriarchs and prophets and wise teachers of the Old Testament. The God of the Bible is definitively revealed in Jesus of Nazareth who teaches us, and shows us, that God is a prodigal father, prodigal in compassion and love.

So the answer to our question, how can we dare to think that human words can ever aspire to carry the Word of God, is Christ. Speak of him and you are speaking human words; tell of him and you are speaking of the divine Word. By a nice coincidence here is what Saint Ambrose of Milan has to say about this in today’s liturgy:

‘It is also written: Open your lips, and let God’s word be heard. God’s word is uttered by those who repeat Christ’s teaching and meditate on his sayings. Let us always speak this word. When we speak about wisdom, we are speaking of Christ. When we speak about virtue, we are speaking of Christ. When we speak about justice, we are speaking of Christ. When we speak about peace, we are speaking of Christ. When we speak about truth and life and redemption, we are speaking of Christ. Open your lips, says Scripture, and let God’s word be heard. It is for you to open, it is for him to be heard. So David said: I will hear what the Lord says in me. The very Son of God says: Open your lips and I will fill them.’

We believe that our lives find their meaning in this conversation, the communication and communion that unite God and humanity, the marriage of God and God’s people. There is the further mighty strange translation of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, the living bread giving his flesh for the life of the world, the Lamb sacrificed from the foundation of the world. Our loving service of the Word of God obliges us to enter also into communion with his sacrifice, the fate of the Incarnate Word at the hands of a world dominated by fear and division.

The book we launch this evening is as much about the Eucharist as it is about the Bible. Jesus, the bread of life, is also the living bread, his flesh given for the life of the world and his blood poured out for us and for our salvation. The creative words of God find their way to the lips of human beings as sacramental words that not just describe or indicate but that bring about the realities of which they speak.

But that’s enough, an aperitivo for the book. These and other themes are considered with care and scholarship in the chapters of The Word is Flesh and Blood. The book was edited and written joyfully. Wilfrid can take responsibility for that. It was a very easy task to undertake. Busy people responded immediately and enthusiastically to our invitation to write something in Wilfrid’s honour. That in itself is testimony not only to how well respected he is as a colleague and as a scholar, but also to how well loved he is as a friend and as a brother.

*The Word is Flesh and Blood: The Eucharist and Sacred Scripture, edited by Vivian Boland OP and Thomas McCarthy OP, Dominican Publications, Dublin, 2012. This book is a festschrift in honour of Wilfrid J. Harrington OP on his 85th birthday.

THE PREACHING MOMENT

Of Martin Luther King’s famous speech I have a dream, Gary Younge says that ‘like all great oratory its brilliance was in its simplicity. Like all great speeches it understood its audience. And like all great performances it owed as much to delivery as content’.

Simplicity, understanding one’s congregation, delivery … in applying these criteria to Christian preaching we might be inclined to dismiss the idea that the last has any relevance. To think of preaching as a performance is surely to introduce a misleading analogy for what is involved? But we should not dismiss it simply out of hand. Certainly simplicity is something to be sought after in any speaking or teaching, and the same is true for preaching. Understanding one’s listeners is crucial if there is to be any true communication. And we need to come back to what is involved in ‘delivery’.

The ‘preaching moment’ may be understood to refer not just to the giving of a homily during a liturgy but to any of the situations where Christians engage in what is one of their characteristic activities, preaching the Word to people. But the preaching of the homily at a liturgy has a kind of archetypal significance for thinking about preaching in other situations.

There are then three parts to what I am calling the preaching moment, what is said (simplicity), who it is being said to (understanding one’s audience) and who is saying it (delivery). We must attend to each one in thinking about what that moment involves and it will be a constant concern for us that we become ever more effective in each of these ways. Each one demands on-going study, reflection and care.

Reviewing a book recently that had the term discourse in its title and in the titles of most of its chapters led me to reflect on how trendy words, or buzz words, become increasingly empty of meaning the more they are used. The book made no attempt to explain why this word was used and only two of the contributors even acknowledged that it required explanation. Discourse too, whatever it means precisely, clearly it requires content, a speaker and a listener.

We will of course want our teaching or preaching to have content. We want it to be theological and prophetic as our brother Carlos [Aspiroz, Master of the Order] says in his 2002 letter to the Order on preaching. The Master says our preaching should be theological, compassionate, inculturated and incarnated, prophetic, undertaken in poverty, itinerant, communitarian, and shared (by which he means undertaken in collaboration with other members of the Dominican Family). Brother Carlos has written few letters to the Order in his time as Master, taking the view, it seems, that we have enough to be getting on with: one of the first things he did was arrange for the re-publication of letters to the Order from his four predecessors. It is all the more striking that he has given us a letter on preaching, then. Following Paul VI’s exhortation Evangelii nuntiandi evangelisation was named as one of the four priorities of the Order (by the General Chapter of Quezon City, 1977). We can take it that preaching and evangelisation always have been, and always will be, priorities for Dominicans.

We can take this lesson at least from thinking of preaching as a performance – the preaching (or teaching or other speaking) is not the text on the page even if we use a text, the preaching is the act of communication itself, a human being speaking to other human beings about important matters, a human being speaking to other human beings in words through which (they believe) the Word of God is spoken and heard, a Word made flesh again through the human act of communication that preaching is.

So the training of young preachers will be concerned with practical and technical matters like voice production, a good public address system, knowing how to use microphones, maintain eye contact, and all that. There is still some point in giving a theologically rich discourse even if nobody is listening – John Chrysostom says somewhere that preaching simply has to continue even if nobody is listening, just as the liturgy has to be celebrated even if nobody is present apart from the clergy – but there is clearly a qualitatively different point to giving a theologically rich talk which people can hear, understand and gain from.

Most of the trainee preacher’s time might seem to be focused on content. They study the Bible and theology in order to have something worthwhile to say when the time comes. But the other two parts of the preaching moment need study and attention also during the years of formation: who is speaking and to whom are they speaking.

Martin Luther King understood his audience. The preacher has to do the same, get to know the people to whom they are to speak. They must be conversant with them, know what is going on in their lives, and speak their language. What does it mean, to ‘speak their language’? One of the early Dominican general chapters (Paris, 1236) encouraged the brethren to ‘learn the language of the people nearby’, the language of their neighbours. In a superficial sense it means preaching in a language shared with the people to whom one is speaking in order to be understood. But it has a deeper significance also – it means being aware of what their lives are like, knowing their preoccupations, being familiar with their anxieties, understanding their questions. If the preacher shares those preoccupations and questions, so much the better.

The supreme example for the Christian preacher, in this as in everything else, is Jesus. Thomas Aquinas paints a portrait of Jesus as a mendicant preacher, sharing people’s lives so as to be able to speak the truth to them (Summa theologiae III 40; III 42 also for Christ’s teaching?). It is about what Aquinas calls Christ’s ‘conversation among human beings’, an older use of the term conversation, his intercourse with them, his being among them and being in relationship with them with a view to teaching them.  Nowadays we would probably call it his lifestyle or his form of life. Aquinas’s main point is that Jesus lived as he did because his mission was to speak God’s truth to people. To be a preacher of the Word of God demands a particular lifestyle to support it, a form of life to sustain it. This is what I want to invite you to reflect upon, that if we are to do well the task of preaching that is ours in the Church then it is not just a question of having something to say and having techniques for saying it, it is also about a way of living and a spirituality that establishes us in a certain relationship with God and with people.

A recent discussion among Dominicans about preaching strategy revealed what seemed like very different views about how the preaching moment should be understood. One side of the argument stressed simply the preaching of Christ, of truth, of the Word whereas the other side of the argument believed the first thing to be thought about was the ones who are being addressed, who they are and where they are at. One side thought in terms of bringing the gospel to people, giving them something they do not already have, the other in terms of uncovering the gospel for people, illuminating what they already have. (I was not directly involved in this argument which happened at the general chapter of Krakow: each side will probably feel I am not doing justice to its concerns!)

It seems clear that there ought not be any need to choose between these and that the argument is about emphasis only. Reflection on what is involved in the preaching moment makes it clear very quickly that both elements need to be kept in mind, what is to be said and who is being addressed. This is precisely what the craft of preaching is about, to speak the Word to these people. If it is not the Word but simply something people know well enough already then the Christian preachers are not doing their job. If it is the Word (exegetically literate and theologically sound) but presented in such a way that it fails to connect with people’s hearts and minds, then they are not doing their job.

This is where the third part of the preaching moment comes in. One part is content, the Word that is preached. Another is the listener, speaking to them that they may share the joy of the gospel. And the third part is the speaker, the preachers themselves, the one who is speaking. Each part must be acknowledged, understood and constantly studied, not just what is to be said, not just its reaching a particular congregation, but the channel through which this communication is to take place and what that channel needs to be in order to be good at what it is for.

The preacher too needs to be ‘in the preaching’. This is not to recommend a kind of egocentric introspection and self-consciousness on the part of preachers. Nor am I suggesting that the preacher’s problems are everybody’s problems: a preaching that is too personal can quickly become mawkish and embarrassing. But what seems to be true is that the best preachers are the ones who are clearly speaking in the first place also to themselves, who have brought their own questions and anxieties to the Word of God, have allowed the Word to illuminate and judge those questions and anxieties, who do not regard the listeners as ‘them’ but regard both themselves and their listeners as constituting a ‘we’.

If we are to learn the language of the neighbours then the neighbour nearest to us is oneself. The strange thing is that if people listen compassionately, patiently and honestly to their own hearts, and are courageous in acknowledging the demands the truth makes on themselves, they will find themselves speaking very directly to others also. The preacher is an effective bearer of the Word to the extent that he or she has allowed that Word – cutting more finely than any double-edged sword – to reach between bone and marrow in himself or herself. In this the art to which preaching is closest is poetry: the labour of trying to find exactly the right words.

We live always, of course, within the paschal mystery of Christ. By our baptism the pattern of his death and resurrection has become the pattern of our lives and of all our experience. That mystery entails limit and transcendence, a breaking out (of Egypt) and a breaking through (into a promised land) and so all our words and actions reach a strange fulfilment in being ‘broken’: the disciples recognised him in the breaking of the bread, theology is closest to its goal at the point at which it has nothing left to say, when preaching breaks down (as did Paul’s on the Areopagus and the preaching of Jesus in John 6) then something of the deeper truth is being glimpsed – cutting across our words, cutting across our actions, and yet confirming them to be bearers of his life, fruitful in their breaking.