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Enlightenment Values?

23/4/2017

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Here in Scotland there’s plenty of opportunity for dialogue but not so many opportunities to reflect in a faith context the whys and wherefore of interfaith. I was at a conference this week which gave participants the opportunity to do just that. It was interesting, enlightening and challenging. For me most insights came from the input of Ed Kessler, the Jewish director of the Woolf Institute.  I’m sure I’ll have things to say about his input in future blogs but what I have been left pondering is the talk, entitled Christian Theologies of Other Religions. Given that title, the presenter focussed on the traditional categories of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism, suggesting that these were outdated, rather 20th century and reflected enlightenment values.  Well, I wondered ………

What’s wrong with enlightenment values and what are they?  I’m glad to see from surfing the web that I’m not the only one to wonder about this and that there’s some debate about them. Like everything else people with different philosophical viewpoints see enlightenment values differently and use them to bolster their own position. But we in the West live in a post-enlightenment world and the desire for freedom, autonomy, rationality (which some would accept as resulting from the Enlightenment) is part of our thinking.  We’ve moved on but cannot dismiss the culture from which we’ve come and in which we live. I can’t guess what the presenter meant by suggesting the traditional categories of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism are reflective of the enlightenment – perhaps they’re too rational and analytical, not faith based enough. They may be 20th cy and there might be need for a new approach and a new theology but I think these categories still have a part to play in facing Christians with assumptions and beliefs about their own faith as well as that of others. They are like a mirror which can reveal positions and stand-points that often influence us unconsciously and I think show a development in Christianity’s relationship with other faiths.

In the past Christianity lived and flourished in a world that was mostly Christian. Its contact with other faiths was minimal and, where there was contact, others were seen as the focus for missionary endeavour. A belief in the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the one path to salvation made the need for conversion imperative and compulsory.  It was an approach which came out of a well –meaning desire for the salvation of those who would be lost if they did not accept Christianity. It ignored other religions, denigrated them as being in error and having no salvific potential, often having no knowledge of the other faiths. It’s an approach which I can’t sustain because I’ve come to recognise the wisdom in other faiths, I’m helped by many of their teachings but above all I’ve met people who are obviously close to God and living a good and holy life. And this has come to them through the faithful practice of their own faith – how could God deny them salvation? 

The inclusivist approach takes this holiness seriously but tries to reconcile it with belief in the uniqueness of Jesus so that the grace and holiness which comes to those of other faiths through their own beliefs and practice is grace made available to all through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Karl Rahner coined the term anonymous Christian to describe this reality.  Now we find that a difficult term because it seems to denigrate others – who wants to be called an anonymous anything? I’m inclined to think it gets a hard press. Rahner was trying hard to keep the integrity of his own Christian faith while being open to the obvious goodness of others. Muslims believe that we are all born muslim so, in a way, if we live in submission to God we could be seen as anonymous Muslims. Some Buddhists believe we all have an innate Buddha-nature so we could be seen to be anonymous Buddhists. They too are trying to be true to the integrity of their own faith while being inclusive of others. Where Christianity seems to overstep the mark is suggesting that without Christianity and Jesus these religions are ineffective for salvation. It denies them their autonomy or salvific potential. More than any other religion Christianity seems to have a compulsion to analyse and rationalise, to explain the workings of its faith rather than just live it –other faiths seem happier to do this. 

The third category, pluralism, is I think misunderstood. It’s often dismissed as outdated. It’s assumed to mean that all religions are equal, are the same, one is as good as another etc.  This is not what I’ve been taught. Rather I understand a pluralist approach to mean that all religions offer the possibility of salvation to their followers. It’s not a judgement on the religions. Why? – because God is  generous and merciful, because all are made in the image and likeness of God, because God calls all of us into wholeness and well-being and God can only do that in the concrete reality of our lives. But this only happens if people have found what I would call the pearl of great price at the heart of their religion. There’s good religion and bad religion. Often religious systems, including Christianity, have obscured the kernel of faith.  Sometimes people have to work quite hard to find that salvific core. But it’s there, I believe, in all faiths and is one of the reasons why mystics so often find a unity in religions that theologians with their analysing and critical approach do not.  We do need on-going theologies of interfaith relations but we shouldn’t be too quick to cast aside categories that hold a mirror up to who we think we are and what we believe about God and others. 

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Holy Thursday Revolution

17/4/2017

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A report came out today showing that Church attendance has decreased and suggesting this is a crisis for Christianity. Well it might be - but it might not be.  In the past there was a tendency to go to Church for cultural rather than religious reasons. It was the expected thing to do. What we used to refer to as Christendom is certainly breaking down in our secular, multi-faith age. This means that the people who do go to Church are likely to be committed Christians who want the support of a Christian community and find Church an authentic expression of their faith. This change of circumstance was foretold many years ago by a Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, who spoke of a diaspora Church, a small but faithful Church, one that would be alive in faith and service to the world. As happens with such reports people begin to look for reasons for the decline and one given was that the Church was not seen as relevant and did not speak the language of ordinary people.  I agree with this and think the Church has much to learn but my experience this Easter has been very different from the picture painted by the report.

In the Catholic Church the three days from Holy Thursday to the vigil of Easter on Saturday evening is called the Sacred Triduum – it’s a time for Catholics to remember and enter into the rich meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The liturgy is different from the usual Eucharistic celebrations and the symbolism gets to the heart of what Christianity is about.  The Church I attended was packed for all of these services, no decline here, and if people didn’t come early they didn’t get a seat and had to stand – as many did on Good Friday. It was heartening to join a steady stream of people making their way towards the Church. It was as though the whole area was making their way there. The congregation was made up of old, young, middle aged, men, women and children. We welcomed refugees from Syria, a couple from Uganda recently moved into the area, a newly married couple, a couple who had recently had their first baby, people grieving the recent death of loved ones – in fact we were a microcosm of the  whole of humanity with all its joys and sorrows, hopes and fears. We couldn’t be self-satisfied or feel isolated from the reality of our world which at the present time feels a very dangerous place. These liturgies were definitely communal celebrations in which the whole world was present in our hearts and prayers.

Part of the Holy Thursday liturgy is the retelling and acting out of the story of the Last Supper when the priest washes the feet of twelve members of the community. We’re used to seeing pictures of Pope Francis doing this, usually in a prison and this year at a high security prison for mafia informers but it happens in all Catholic Churches throughout the world.  It reflects what Beatrice Bruteau calls ‘The Holy Thursday Revolution’ when the dominating, hierarchical relationships of our society are turned on their head - when one who is the Lord turns servant, not simply to show humility but to show that those hierarchical relations don’t matter anymore. For Christians this action is seen within the context of John’s account of Jesus’ sermon before he faces his death, when he calls his disciples friends, acknowledging his intimate relationship with them. He speaks of mutual indwelling between friends as well as with the source of Life which he calls The Father – reminiscent for me of Thich  Nhat Hanh’s interbeing. We ‘interbe’ with one another, we indwell one another, we share the same life force, we love others as we love ourselves because others are ourselves. There is a mutuality and interconnectedness at the heart of life and Jesus came as one who did not just serve but also allowed himself to be served. Jesus washed the feet of his disciples and an unnamed woman washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair.  Perhaps this mutuality should be included in the liturgy for Holy Thursday.  

Good Friday brings us face to face with the horror and helplessness that comes with death. Christians follow someone who was executed as a criminal for challenging the institutions of religion and politics in that he lived out his belief in mutuality, in getting to the heart of what religion is all about, in putting people before institutions.  He’s not the first or last to suffer such a fate. It’s as though society cannot cope with truth, with justice, with compassion, with selfless service, with forgiveness.  We all know the agony of bereavement, of loss so it’s easy to enter into the spirit of Good Friday which shows us that God, however we name or image God, is present in our suffering and pain. God is with us as we face the powerlessness and helplessness of powers beyond our control. We are totally impotent in the face of the emptiness of death and bereavement in whatever guise it comes. But for Christians this is not the whole story for the corollary of this is Resurrection – new life, celebrated symbolically at the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday. Easter is essentially a celebration of new life, that new life is possible even in the most dark and drastic of situations, that we can have hope and offer it to the world.
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So the three days ended in joy and hope, in energy and celebration. It was a profound experience, one that brought us back to the essentials of Christianity – equality, mutuality, service, love, interconnectedness, self-abandonment and life in its fullness. Surely the world needs more of this. Religion might seem to be declining but it’s message is a powerful one and if lived out could lead to the transformation of society.   

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Mother Earth 

7/4/2017

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I read an interesting article on the BBC website this week. It reported that a court in India has declared the river Ganges a legal "person" in an effort to save it from pollution. Nor is the Ganges the only natural phenomenon to receive this designation. The Yamuna river, glaciers, including Gangotri and Yamunotri (where the Ganges and Yamuna originate from), rivers, streams, rivulets, lakes, air, meadows, dales, jungles, forests wetlands, grasslands, springs and waterfalls have all been declared legal “persons”.  This is an attempt to look upon nature as an entity with fundamental rights rather than as a resource to be used and abused. According to the report “environmental laws only focus on regulating exploitation. But this is now changing, with calls for the inherent rights of nature to be recognised, both in India and around the world”. For example “in Ecuador, a new constitution mandates that nature has the right to exist, maintain and regenerate. New Zealand recently granted the Whanganui River personhood status, the culmination of a 140-year legal struggle by the Maori people”.

There are, as you would suspect, complications in applying these rights but it does call into question  whether we human beings are capable of caring for this earth on which we depend for life. So many of us are now divorced from nature and see the earth’s resources as ours to use for our own benefit and comfort. We hear of global warming and even experience it in the changes of our weather patterns, we hear of species of animals likely to be extinct in the not too distant future because of wanton killing, we hear of environmental disasters, the overuse of fossil fuels, pollution, deforestation, household and industrial waste, the depletion of the ozone layer. The list seems endless.  Yes we are now encouraged to recycle, monitor our carbon footprint, buy fair trade etc but sometimes it seems such a little in the face of the disasters we know are happening to our beautiful world.  And we are all implicated in these disasters and contribute to them – some in big ways as in industry and business but all of us in little ways. I heard someone call this the Great Unravelling.  Our beautiful planet is suffering  but if the Gaia hypothesis is correct and it is a self-regulating  organism, the ones who will suffer in the end will be human beings . We are in fact destroying ourselves.  Perhaps one day there will be a move to declare the earth itself a legal person.  I doubt if this would make much difference unless we recover a sense of the sacredness of the earth.  

This sense of sacredness is a gift that indigenous and pagan religions have to offer us all – even the major religions.  Aloysius Pieris, who is a Catholic theologian from Sri Lanka, speaks of cosmic religions and meta- cosmic religions.  He suggests that the meta-cosmic religions, that is the major world religions, succeeded because they incorporated into themselves aspects of the indigenous, so called pagan religions, in the societies in which they flourished. It is true that many of the world faiths have their sacred places including sacred mountains, sacred wells and sacred rivers. But many of them, especially the monotheistic religions, have also traditionally rejected paganism as polytheistic and nature worshipping.  Now- a- days modern paganism is part of  interfaith dialogue and no-one, I think, would dismiss the indigenous religions of North America, Australia or New Zealand. These traditions remind us of our connectedness to the earth, of our responsibility for it, of our gratitude to it for our very livelihood, of its inherent sacredness, of our ability to care for it and bring it healing.  As Thich Nhat Hanh has said – we think it’s a miracle to walk on water but the real miracle is to walk on this earth and we should do this with reverence and respect.  

Perhaps more than the Abrahamic religions Hinduism and Buddhism have much to teach us about our attitude to our planet.  Buddhism realises the interconnectedness of all things and the need for compassion, not just for our human brothers and sisters but for all sentient beings.  Hinduism is still in touch with its indigenous roots, recognising the sacredness of certain animals and places and seeing them as manifestations of the divine, sometimes associating them with particular deities.  This personification of the sacred can lead to a sense of respect and reverence though seeing the Ganges as a Divine Mother has not stopped the pollution that has led to the ‘legal person ruling’.  But it has possibilities and I like the idea of thinking of the earth as a living organism, as an expression of the Sacred, as our Mother who provides for us and is the source of our life. If we could adopt this attitude perhaps we could embrace her suffering, look upon her with new eyes and work for her healing and well-being.

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Where is God

1/4/2017

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Last week I was asked to take part in a parish education day.  I was asked to reflect on the question:  ‘Are you still there God – Christian Faith in a Changing World?’.  It was a challenging question but one that was good for me to consider.  I’ve been reflecting on it ever since.  My first thought was to ask why the question in a day given over to considering such things as the parish and the world.  But of course I understand why – or at least I think I do. I don’t think I’ve ever known a time when people speak of fear and depression when they consider the state of the world as much as they do today. The future is very insecure and uncertain and certain political developments suggest the world is less safe now than it has been in the recent past. I know people who can no longer bear to look at the news, who want to live in their own bubble, stick their head in the sand to protect themselves from the reality of the world in which we live. Others seem to be developing a kind of fortress mentality with a closed identity that sets them against others.  It’s this kind of mentality, I think, that is behind the rise of populism, radicalism, right wing politics and religion.

We do live in a troubled world and sometimes its brokenness is overwhelming. It’s not easy to understand. Someone who has helped me reflect on the state of the world and come to some understanding of it is Beatrice Bruteau, particularly her book ‘The Holy Thursday Revolution’.  Bruteau suggests that the world view which affects where we’re at is domination. There are those who wish to dominate and those who are afraid they will be dominated. It’s this that gives rise to war and conflict, inequalities, pollution, consumerism, individualism and other ills that are so evident. Religion too has been implicated in this. Most religions have grown up defining themselves over and against others. Christianity and Judaism grew apart by consolidating what made the two movements different from one another. Hinduism only defined itself after the invasion of Muslims when it needed a name to differentiate itself from Islam. Before that there was no name for the religious paths of India. Religious systems too were inclined to separate followers into orthodox and heretics, even feeling free to kill those considered heretical. Many religions felt free to impose their truth on others and demand obedience from their followers.

So no wonder people are asking where God is in all of this.  Christianity is very clear about the answer – God is in the middle of it all and as Christians move towards Holy Week, when they remember the death of Jesus, they are aware of how God entered into the suffering of the world.  This is the meaning of incarnation.  I was once at an event when the audience was asked about the sacred language of Christianity. Some said love, compassion, Greek, but the answer given was flesh because it says in the Gospel of John that the Word was made Flesh.  For Christians the best example of God enfleshed in a human person is Jesus but Christian belief is that there is no separation between the sacred and the secular. All nature is graced and God is to be found in ordinary everyday life – in its difficulties as well as its successes. God is not absent from the problems of our world.  Jesus shows that God is part of the suffering but the Resurrection also shows that life can come out of death and that no situation is so desperate that it cannot be transformed.  Christians should be people of hope in spite sometimes of the evidence to the contrary and perhaps this is the gift it has to offer the world today.  Last week’s funeral of Martin McGuinness highlighted for many of us that what at one time seemed a doomed situation in Northern Ireland can be changed through a refusal to give up and a commitment to dialogue.  
For Beatrice Bruteau the Holy Thursday Revolution is that Jesus overturned the relationship of domination to one of service and friendship.  This, she says, is the new paradigm that will transform the world. It’s a new way of relating to one another that will do away with hierarchies and opposing identities. It might take generations to come about and it will only happen when we look upon the world with new eyes – eyes that take seriously the findings of modern science. At heart this is that we are all interrelated, not only with other human beings but with the whole of creation.  If you think that our DNA goes back in an uninterrupted line to the beginning of life then we all come from the same source.  As Bruteau would say we must love our neighbour as our self  -  because our neighbour is our self. If we took this seriously our mode of relating would be cooperation rather than domination.
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Bruteau shows that a new mode of being is possible, that it’s already growing, that we can all contribute to it but it’s a slow process. I like the analogy which compares the history of the world to a year. According to this image human beings only arrive on the scene at about two minutes to midnight on the 31st December.  This should teach us patience and give us confidence that in the end all will be well.

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    I am  a Catholic nun, involved in interfaith relations for many decades.  For me this has been an exciting and sacred journey which I would like to share with others.

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