There are some events in life that are of such significance that we can’t help asking ‘what if that had not happened?’ How differently would things have turned out. Such an event was a 20-minute meeting that a Jewish historian, Jules Isaac, had with Pope John XXIII in June 1959 that changed forever the relationship of the Catholic Church to the Jewish community. This changing relationship is a story of hope and transformation spelled out last week for the Scottish Catholic Bishops’ Committee for Interreligious Dialogue at their annual seminar, entitled ‘A Tale of Two Sisters: Church and Synagogue’ which was led by Sister Maureen Cusick, a Sister of Our Lady of Sion, a religious congregation that is committed to witnessing to God’s continued and faithful love for the Jewish people through education and dialogue.  

We began by reflecting on a series of illustrations of statues found in many medieval cathedrals around Europe, sometimes carved standing side by side, sometimes standing on either side of the entrance They depict two women. One is weak and drooping, blindfolded and carrying a broken lance with Torah scrolls that are often seen slipping from her hand. The other is strong, often wearing a crown and looking to the future with confidence and open eyes.  The blind woman represents the Synagogue, blind to the truth and now lost to salvation because the Jews rejected and crucified Jesus. The confident woman represents the Christian Church upon whom God has bestowed the promises God originally made to Israel so that Christians now possess the truth of salvation and have become God’s chosen ones, the new People of God.  One particularly horrendous statue is found in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris where the blindfold over the ‘Synagoga’ statue is in fact a snake with the implications that has for Judaism being under the sway of the devil.
 
These statues reflect the attitude of the Christian Church to Jews in medieval Europe and are indicative of a theological approach called supersessionism or replacement theology which is a belief that God has rejected the Jews because they rejected and crucified Jesus. God has now bestowed the promises he made to Israel on the Church that now becomes the New People of God. This theology is very influential. It can affect the way the Christian scriptures are interpreted. For example, in stories such as the wise virgins – the ones who are alert to the coming of the bridegroom are taken as representative of Christianity and the ones who slept and missed his coming taken as representative of Judaism. It influenced the prayer in Catholic churches on Good Friday which prayed for the conversion of the perfidious Jews. It influenced the tradition in the Sisters of Sion who daily prayed that God would forgive the Jews for the death of Jesus for they knew not what they did. It influenced the various pogroms and sermons forced on the Jews over the ages. It influenced the whole history of Christian antisemitism which the Vatican acknowledged was the seed bed in which the hatred that resulted in the Holocaust was able to flourish. It influenced the belief of some Christians that the State of Israel doesn’t have the right to exist. It is, I suspect, something that is deep in the psyche of both Christians and Jews and influences some of our interactions and maybe needs to be addressed at some point. Is there perhaps an incipient suspicion of Christianity on the part of Jews and an incipient superiority on the part of Christians?

Thank God that this attitude to Judaism and this theological approach has been acknowledged, dismissed and disowned by the Catholic Church in the Vatican II document on the Churches Relationship with People of Other Faiths. And it all came about because of that 20-minute interview that Jules Isaac had with Pope John XXIII.  Jules Isaac was a historian and educationalist who sought to understand the roots of antisemitism when he experienced the Nazi occupation of his native France. He wrote a book on Jesus and Israel as well as one on The Teaching of Contempt in which he showed that antisemitic interpretations of the scripture were a wrong understanding of the Gospel. It was the meeting with Pope John XXIII that led the Pope to put the Churches relationship to Judaism on the agenda of the Vatican Council and eventually led to Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Churches Attitude to Non-Christian Religions which was promulgated by Pope Paul VI in October 1965, two years after the death of Jules Isaac. Section 4 of the document which declares,” in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone” brought about a profound change in the Church’s relations with Judaism. Indeed, Rabbi David Rosen says he knows of nothing else in history that has brought about such a profound change.  

And that brings us back to our original question. What if Jules Isaac had not visited Pope John XXIII? Would we still be promoting a replacement theology? What if Jules Isaac had not been for a walk when his wife and two children were taken by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz? Would the Church have reflected on its teaching of contempt and still be antisemitic? Who knows. But we can be sure that Jules Isaac’s escape from the Nazis and his visit to the Pope were of such significance that they have changed the history  of Catholic – Jewish relations, hopefully forever. 

It’s back to auld clothes and porridge for me after the holidays and my recent retreat (see previous blog) which turned out to be all that I expected. The retreat was organised by the Dominican Sisters who run An Tairseach, an ecological centre in Wicklow that explores spirituality in the context of an evolving universe and an endangered earth. Because of travel difficulties I had opted to link in with this through zoom while living by myself in a self-catering flat in a nearby Carmelite monastery. This gave me plenty of time for prayer and reflection with the opportunity to walk by the river Clyde and savour the beauties of nature.
 
At the outset we were introduced to and invited to reflect on the amazing journey of this universe that we inhabit. For those in An Tairseach there was the opportunity to do this physically in the form of a cosmic walk set into the ground in the shape of a large spiral with hand painted stones representing some events, arbitrarily chosen but designed to give a sense of the universe’s unfolding process.  Unlike a labyrinth the cosmic spiral begins at the centre from a point that represents the Flaring Forth of life and takes the pilgrim through significant moments in evolution, giving a sense of the unfolding universe story to the last and outer stone which brings him or her to the present day. Luckily, I had been able to experience this cosmic walk in an earlier visit to An Tairseach but on this retreat had to be content with reflecting on each of the stages set out for us in the cosmic walk booklet.

 This didn’t feel like a second-hand experience because if gave me time to reflect on each stage and stay with any one for as long as I wanted. The universe story is amazing and wondrous. Even more wondrous is that it is also the story of each one of us and is part of us.  At that moment of the flaring forth of light and energy when the universe came into being 13.7 billion years ago it held the potential for everything that would come to be, including me and you, the reader. The hydrogen and helium set forth at that moment is still with us, the universe is still expanding, evolution continues its journey. From that moment of flaring forth stars, galaxies and planets have been formed, our own planet earth forming an atmosphere that sustained life. From the formation of simple cells, the earth has developed in many diverse and complex ways resulting at this moment in time in conscious human beings who have been described as the universe conscious of itself.

Two moments in this journey have stayed with me.  One happened 3.9 billion years ago - the process of photosynthesis when the earth learned to take nourishment from the sun, when plants and simple celled organisms learned to capture solar energy, convert it into chemical energy and store it for further use. This is a process that powers the planet’s living systems, this is what gives us the oxygen that sustains us, that set out the pattern for all future life forms where each receives and gives nourishment from and to the other. Giving and receiving is intrinsic to how we do live and should live in our daily interactions. What if it hadn’t happened? There would be no life as we know it, a refrain that could accompany each stage of evolution.  The second significant moment that has stayed with me is 1 billion years ago when life was drawn towards union and simple-celled organisms began to reproduce sexually, a process that meant they relinquished their immortality to facilitate the growth of multi-celled organisms. What if that hadn’t happened? Well sex but also death might not have become a condition for the creation of future life. For me this makes death meaningful. We cannot live forever even though some artificial intelligent experts talk as though it is one of the last barriers to be overcome. There would only then be stagnation. For life to continue and develop we must die, we must learn to let go when it is time for new and younger generation to contribute.  

Thomas Berry has said we, and he’s talking to Christians, need to know and live by the story of the universe. I also think we need a spiritual practice to help us realise that we are indeed children of the universe, part of this great evolutionary journey, interconnected with all life. One of Thich Nhat Hanh’s mindfulness gathas could  help with this. The one I like is, “I have arrived, I am home in the here, in the now”. Often, I begin by reminding myself that I am a child of the universe, become aware of my family and religious ancestors, pray they may be well, may be happy, may be free from suffering.  Then as I breathe into ‘I have arrived I am home’, I am aware of how I hold that evolutionary journey and those ancestors within me to arrive at this present moment, aware of where I am both physically and mentally. As I breathe into ‘in the here and the now’ I am aware that the here and now in the world in which I live is both a loving and painful one with wars, conflicts, violence, greed, pollution, climate change etc and I pray for all sentient beings, our wounded planet, and its warring nations that they may be well, may be happy and free from suffering. This is a practice that works for me. It links me into the universe story, connects me with the rest of life and hopefully awakens my compassion and desire for the well-being of future generations. Perhaps it would work for others too. 

 It has been rather a busy summer for me with the opportunity to visit friends and family and have a holiday in one of the most beautiful parts of Scotland.  This has been the first since the Covid restrictions came in two years ago.  Now I am about to go on retreat for six days. The retreat is being organised by the An Tairseach Ecology Centre in Wicklow which is run by a community of Dominican Sisters who practise sustainable living and are committed to educating people of the importance of care for creation and the link between ecology and spirituality, something which is growing in importance within religious and non-religious circles. Unfortunately travel arrangements became difficult so I’ve had to opt for the zoom version but the use of a flat in a local Carmelite monastery will give me the silence and separation from phone calls etc that I need. The retreat is entitled ‘Everything Ablaze, Encountering God’s Generative Love and Abiding Presence Within and Around Us’ and is advertised as reflecting on the work of people like Thomas Berry, Teilhard de Chardin and the poet of creation, Mary Oliver.
 
Central to it will be the universe story, recognising this great universe of ours, including our planet, as a self-organising system which has its own wisdom and laws from which we have evolved and whose future we now hold within our hands. In the light of climate change and the loss of biodiversity can we humans change our attitude from seeing the resources of our planet as infinite and there for our comfort to recognising our interdependence with all living things and that our future and way of life is intimately bound up with its future. It’s only with this change of perspective will we come to love the world we inhabit and act in ways that will sustain its life.
 
The idea of the universe as a single self-regulating system was developed by James Lovelock, a scientist and inventor who died on 26th July this year, on his 103rd birthday. It was his friend, the author William Golding who suggested using the metaphor Gaia for this hypothesis as a more imaginative way of describing it. In Greek mythology Gaia is the goddess of the earth and mother of all life and thinking of the universe in this more personal way helps us to see it as a living organism which regulates its environment to create the best conditions for the advancement of life.  It is to recognise that there is no distinct, separate identity for all are interrelated and depend on one another for life. So, we breathe in the oxygen expelled by trees who breathe in the carbon dioxide expelled by us. We need one another for survival. But so often human beings seem to forget this and the statistics for the destruction of rain forests that are the lungs of our planet are frightening. Surely Gaia must weep over the control some of us humans exert on the natural world and long for us to recover our rightful place in it so that we might work together for its well being and advancement. The welfare of our planet is in our hands.
 
The Gaia theory was ridiculed when James Lovelock first proposed it but it is now recognised by many as the foundation of much of climate science and movements such as The Work that Reconnects, established by Joanna Macey and the  Deep Transformation Network set up by Jeremy Lent as well as centres like An Tairseach. To link into these is to feel part of a movement which recognises the dire critical state of our planet but gives hope and a motivation for action. There are many people out there reflecting on our connectedness and interrelatedness with nature and trying to steer us away from greed, desire, and the belief that the resources of nature are inexhaustible and there for our benefit and comfort.
 
 I was privileged to be able to link into a conversation organised by the Deep Transformation Network between Ursula Goodenough and Andreas Weber. Both of them are lovers of life and nature, who see reality as oriented towards and yearning to give life. To be alive said Weber is to generate life and this desire comes from the inside of nature not from without. Individual subjects are driven by something within which craves for more existence, something the theologian Karl Rahner called ‘supernatural existentialism’ but related it to a christian understanding of salvation. Life itself is a miracle and, I suspect for Weber, needs no Creator who planned and set the whole process in motion – something I have some sympathy for.  This is not to reject a religious perspective, but it is to reinterpret it in the light of what we now know of the universe story – something that will be well reflected on during this week’s retreat. It is also to recognise that we humans must listen to that drive towards life and respond accordingly for, says Weber, “humans will be run over in the search for life” but what will bring about our salvation is love which he describes as “the impulse to establish connections, to intermingle, to weave our existence poetically together with that of other beings. The fact that we disregard this principle lies at the core of a global crisis of meaning that plays out in the avalanche of species loss and in our belief that the world is a dead mechanism controlled through economic efficiency”.
 
What better foundation for a retreat could there be than this. 

 Recently I was asked to do a short podcast on the Lord’s Prayer. The Our Father or the Lord’s Prayer is the prayer that identifies the followers of Jesus, yet there is nothing Christian about it. There is no mention of Jesus, the Church, the sacraments or creeds and yet it is universally recognised as the distinctive Christian prayer.
This is not surprising because Jesus was a Jew, he lived as a Jew, he worshipped as a Jew, he prayed as a Jew so any prayer that he would have left to his disciples would have been a prayer that came from the heart of his faith, the Jewish faith but also expressed his own understanding of that faith.
The prayer is divided into 2 parts. The first part addresses God and honours His name

• Our Father who art in heaven
• hallowed be thy name thy name
• thy kingdom come
• thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven

The second part is a prayer of petition

• give us this day our daily bread
• forgive us our trespasses as we forgive others
• lead us not into temptation but
• deliver us from evil

The two phrases I reflected on are in the first half of the prayer
Our Father who art in heaven and Thy kingdom come.

As 21st century Christians we understand this prayer differently from Jesus who was a 1st century Jew. For Jesus the world would be seen as a 3-tiered universe with heaven above, hell below and earth in between. We now know from modern cosmology that in fact we live in a vast universe made up of billions of galaxies which has evolved over time. So where is the  heaven where God dwells. It’s reported that in 1961 when the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin—the first human launched into space—returned to Earth he had a simple, Soviet-style message: “I looked and looked and looked, but I didn’t see God.” I don’t know if this story is true but if it is Yuri Gagarin was looking in the wrong place.

The catechism, that many of us were brought up on tells us where God is – everywhere. In the Acts of the Apostles St Paul in a debate with Greek philosophers tells us that “God is the reality in which we live and move and have our very being” and in the gospels Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of God, the dwelling place of God is within and among us.
So, when we say Our Father who art in heaven, we are not suggesting that God is in some distant place but rather recognising God’s mystery and otherness, the source of life of all of us, the bond that unites us with one another, here amongst us.

 This is a prayer we that we never say as an isolated individual. For some people the ‘our’ represents the Christian community but if our God is the God and Source of all life then the ‘our’ applies to all beings. And today we know so much more about our interconnectedness and interdependency with the natural world so that the ‘our’ in fact includes all sentient beings, all of creation including the stars and the planets.  

From this prayer we know that for Jesus ‘Father’ was a favourite image of God. But it is only an image and shouldn’t be taken too literally. An image is like a finger pointing at the moon; if you look only at the finger, you will miss the moon. So too with the image of father. If we take it literally, it can obscure the mystery and greatness, the otherness and closeness of a God who does not reside in heaven but amongst us and within us.

Addressing God as father does not mean God is a big man, certainly not with a white beard, and yet that is a dominant image of God.  I only learned recently, when I went to see the Sistine Chapel exhibition, that Michelangelo’s depiction of God in the creation of Adam and Eve was the first time that the human form was used and, as in the depiction of the creation of Eve, the first time and perhaps the only time that God has been depicted  standing on the earth. But this male human image has come to dominate our imagination.

And so, we come to the second phrase, Thy Kingdom come. For me this is the heart of Jesus message. According to the Gospel of Mark Jesus begins his ministry with the words, repent, believe the good news for the Kingdom of God is among you. Scholars have debated what Mark meant by these words. Is he suggesting that the Kingdom has come in Jesus or with Jesus? Whatever, this kingdom is not to be found in another dimension such as heaven but amongst us. I once heard someone say that Christians should be Kingdom spotters; then cooperate wherever they find the Kingdom. Today we live in a world where everything seems to be falling apart and unravelling - climate change, wars, a global pandemic, the rising cost of living. How easy it is to be depressed.

But this is not the whole picture. There are many people working for justice and peace, struggling to live a good and honest life, desiring, praying for and working to make our world a better place for our children and succeeding generations, spreading goodness around them in all sorts of ways. The kingdom of God is all around us - if we have eyes to see it. And sometimes, it’s to be found in the most unexpected places - outside the church, outside religion. 

There's more to be said and perhaps there will be a later blog on that but this reflection shows that there are many ways of understanding the Lord's Prayer and further study on a familiar prayer could be a good thing. 
 

Today, 26th June, Professor Amy-Jill Levine will be awarded the first ever Seelisberg Prize set up by the International Council of Christians and Jews and the Centre for Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religion at the University of Salzburg. It is to be given annually to “a person who has contributed to Jewish-Christian understanding through their academic excellence and the outstanding communication of their research and insights to a wide audience.” The establishment of the prize marks the 75th anniversary of a conference that took place in the small Swiss village of Seelisberg in 1947 to consider the roots of an antisemitism that had led to the Holocaust but still survived in Europe. The conference faced the 1900 years of Christian antisemitism, and its famous 10 points laid the foundation for future Christian – Jewish relations and saw the beginning of the International Council of Christians and Jews.

The ten points of Seelisberg were in fact a distillation of eighteen points put forward by the Jewish historian Jules Isaac whose conversation with Pope John XXIII fifteen years or so led eventually to the Vatican II document ‘Nostra Aetate’ which while focussed on the church’s relations with non- Christians had begun its life as a statement on the Church’s relationship with the Jews. The ten statements stress that it is the same God that speaks in the Old and New Testaments; that Jesus, his mother and the first disciples as well as the first martyrs and members of the Church were all Jews; that the fundamental command to love God and neighbour, found in the Old Testament and confirmed by Jesus, is binding on all Christians and Jews;  that Jews are not responsible for the death of Jesus and the Passion of Jesus should not be presented as though they were; that language which  uses the word Jews in an exclusive sense of the enemies of Jesus or any suggestion that the Jewish people are reprobate or accursed should be avoided. These are elements that eventually did find their way in to Nostra Aetate and further catholic teaching such as the document based on Rom. 11: 28 – 30:  They are beloved for the fathers' sake. For the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance.

Professor Amy-Jill Levine is a worthy recipient of the prize. She is Jewish and a recognised scholar of the Christian New Testament. Her CV is impressive. She is University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies, and Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School, Graduate Department of Religion, and Department of Jewish Studies; she is also Affiliated Professor, Woolf Institute, Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations in Cambridge UK. In 2019 she was the first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute. Her list of publications is also impressive including the co-editorship of The Jewish Annotated New Testament, the editorship of the 13-volume Feminist Companion to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings. She is also the New Testament editor of the new Oxford Biblical Commentary Series and sits on the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia of Christian-Jewish Relations.

 I have read some of her books and been privileged to hear her speak on several occasions, all made possible because of zoom. I have learned such a lot about the Jewishness of Jesus, how the Gospels could be seen as a kind of midrash, that is a reflection in the light of the early disciples’ experience of Jesus on traditional Jewish teaching and stories.  I have learned that Jesus lived as a faithful Jew. He kept the law, he ate kosher food, he was circumcised like all Jewish boys, he went to the Temple in Jerusalem, he attended the synagogue, he read the Jewish scriptures and would have prayed and even sung the psalms. He would have prayed three times a day wearing phylacteries, he would have worn fringes on his outer cloak. He kept the Sabbath. And like other Jews of his time, he would have debated what it meant to be a good Jew. In fact, if Jesus set out any guidance it was how to be a good Jew, rather than a good Christian.

Professor Levi loves the New Testament and is fascinated by it. She also loves Jesus. I have heard her say this often while admitting that she doesn’t have faith in him in the way Christians do. For Professor Levine Jesus is a faithful Jew and nothing in the New Testament would contradict this. And she wants both Christians and Jews to recognise it. Speaking of Prof. Levine’s nomination for the prize Prof. Gregor Maria Hoff of the University of Salzburg said, “Her astonishing productivity stems from her lifelong commitment to bringing the fruits of her scholarship to the general public and to promoting positive interactions between Jews and Christians.”
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As she receives the first Seelisberg prize at a ceremony in Frankfurt today Prof. Levine will deliver an address entitled, “Learning about Jews by Reading the New Testament,” reflecting her conviction that in studying the New Testament she enriched her own Jewish identity. I look forward to reading it.
here to edit.