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How to Speak of God?

25/4/2021

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One way of understanding religion is that it’s a language that tries to understand and respond to questions which are of themselves unanswerable – what is the meaning of life, where do we come from, where are we going, why is there something rather than nothing, why do we suffer? Each religion responds in its own way through story, scripture, religious teachings and practices which, from my perspective, are not to be taken literally but, like the finger that points to the moon, take us to a dimension of truth that is beyond expression. This intuition is expressed in the language and thought processes of the time in which it was formed. Often, at least in the case of Catholicism, it has been developed in dialogue with the prevailing culture of the time and because of that it can become outdated. My sense is that this is what has happened with the word God.
 
The Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the Bahai faith believe that the universe was created out of nothing by the direct action of God. Human beings, although part of this creation, are the summit of it with unique abilities and responsibilities to care for the created world. Faced with the awesomeness of nature, its unpredictability, its otherness, the dependence on it for life and nourishment it’s no wonder that the answer to the question of where nature came from or how it all began was found in a supreme being who brought it into existence and sustained it in life.  This Being or God was not constrained by the limitations of the created world but lived outside time and space in an eternal heaven or paradise but chose to reveal something of Godself in the natural world, by speaking to people through the Torah in the case of Judaism, the Qur’an in Islam, the person of Jesus in Christianity and Baha’u’llah in the Bahai faith.  This was a personal God who wanted a relationship with his creation, especially human beings. It was an image, a hypothesis that gave life and meaning to many over the centuries but it grew out of a stage of history when people believed in a three-fold universe – heaven above, hell below and the earth in the middle. It was a good answer to the mystery of the world at a time when we did not know how the world began.
 
But we now know how the world began even if the supposed gravitational singularity that started it off is still a mystery. We know about the Big Bang, we know we live in a complex and immense universe that is still expanding, we know there is a direct link between the energy that formed itself into matter and the evolutionary process that brought us human beings from star dust to consciousness. How are we religious people to speak of God in the light of this new universe story? My experience is that sermons still talk of God as a Being separate from the universe in the sense that God loves us, is even besotted with us, God calls us to particular jobs and a way of life, God will answer our prayers, God will reward us in an after life such as heaven.  Attending Church services it would seem that we are still living in the three dimensional world that gave birth to the Book of Genesis.
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Theology of course over the years has recognised that while God is transcendent, God is also immanent in nature, in history and in the human person who according to the Abrahamic tradition is made in the image and likeness of God. While positive things can be said about God they are inadequate and are in danger of anthropomorphising God – so for example God is not so much loving as love itself, God is not so much wise as Wisdom itself, God is not a Being but Being itself. There is what is called the kataphatic tradition that talks in positive terms about God and the apophatic tradition that recognises the impossibility of knowing God and the only response is silence. This is a bit like the God with attributes and God without attributes found in the Hindu tradition. But, for those people who are not interested in theology and mainly go to Church for their spiritual sustenance, the way God is talked about or prayed to does not reflect what they know of the world in which we live. I’m sure that for many young people and perhaps older people too their rejection of Christianity and God is as much because of cosmology as it is because of theology.
 
So what do we do with the word god? We can’t ditch it because it’s ingrained in religions , ie apart from Buddhism which doesn’t accept a creator God but a force for life at the heart of the universe. The way of talking about God that I like best in the Christian scriptures is that of Paul where he says that God is the One, the Reality in which we live, move and have our very being. This seems to me to fit the new universe story and expresses well what Teilhard de Chardin calls ‘the organic centre of the evolving universe’.  But can we use such an expression as part of our Church services and liturgy? It would take a momentous shift in consciousness and practice. We know that language forms our ways of looking and understanding the world in which we live and to continue with the traditional language is to form people in a mindset that reflects a world that we know does not exist.


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A Wild and Precious Life

11/4/2021

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Mary Oliver has a poem, The Summer Day which ends with the question: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? This notion of a wild and precious life has been on my mind this week in the light of two deaths, the Jewish remembrance of Yom Hashoah and a television programme on a Benedictine Monastery in Leicestershire.
 
One of the deaths has been that of Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth whose death now brings his life into focus. Being such a public figure Prince Philip was fair game for the media and he was associated with blunt embarrassing remarks that were not exactly politically correct. Now his achievements are being recognised and even his bluntness is being interpreted as a desire to be friendly and put people at their ease, often backfiring on him. He gave up a promising military career and made a life for himself in a situation where he always had to play second fiddle to the Queen whose role was clearly detailed and defined.  Now the media is acknowledging the difficulties he overcame, his decades of public service and commitment to issues such as the environment and the welfare of young people through the Duke of Edinburgh Award which has now been awarded to over three million young people. It was a life well lived.
 
Another controversial figure – at least as far as the Catholic Church is concerned – who died on 6th April is Fr Hans Kung. Fr Kung is one of the last theologians who attended the Second Vatican Council as an expert advisor to the Bishops. His work on infallibility brought him in to conflict with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the designation Catholic theologian was taken from him in 1979 which meant losing his job in the catholic theological faculty of Tubingen. What happened then was that he moved to the Protestant faculty of the same university where he continued his work, desiring more than anything the reform of a church he loved. He was also involved in interfaith issues and is responsible for the maxim, “no peace in the world without peace among the world religions, no peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions and no dialogue between the religions without investigation of the foundation of the religions”. Later he added “no dialogue among the religions without global ethical standards” when he wrote the document on a “Declaration Towards a Global Ethic” which was presented and adopted by the 1993 Parliament of World Religions in Chicago.  Kung’s commitment to Global Ethics then became a lifetime’s work and the need for such an ethic was echoed last year at the Edinburgh Book Festival by the late Lord Jonathan Sacks in conversation with Amin Maalouf. Another life well lived.
 
Yom HaShoah, which also happened this week, is the moment when the Jewish community remembers those murdered by the Nazis. Unlike Holocaust Memorial Day, which is a political and national event, Yom HaShoah is a community affair. It is very moving to see displayed page after page the names of those family members related to the local community who died in concentration camps. For the Jewish community the Shoah is a family affair and a present reality. The two speakers this year were remarkable.  

Noemie Lopian grew up in Germany but knew nothing of the Holocaust from her family and unbelievingly asked her mother if such a thing could possibly be true when she was told about it in school. It was only when she was in her mid-thirties that she read her father’s memoirs and understood for the first time the suffering her father endured when as a teenager he was sent to a series of concentration camps and took part in a number of death marches. His parent and two younger sisters were murdered in Auschwitz. Noemie realised this was a story that needed to be told, translated her father’s memoirs “The Long Night” into English and committed herself to telling his story at events such as Yom HaShoah.  This she does with the second speaker, Derek Niemann and what is remarkable about their work is that he is the grandson of a Nazi perpetrator. Derek was brought up in Scotland and only found out about his grandfather when he and his wife decided to visit Germany and trace some family history. Looking up the address of the family home on the internet he discovered that his grandfather was SS Hauptsturmführer Karl Niemann, a former SS Officer and concentration camp overseer who had been tried and found guilty at Nuremberg for  crimes against humanity and use of slave labour. Derek too has written a book, “A Nazi in the Family”, and is determined that his family’s secret should be brought into the light. Speaking as he does with Noemie is really powerful and they are determined to use their precious life to work together to educate people about the atrocities of the Nazis with the hope that such a thing should never happen again.
 
My last reflection of a wild and precious life came from a television programme about the Cistercian Abbey of Mount St Bernard in Leicestershire. Here was a community of monks who lived a very unadventurous life committed totally to praying for the world and honouring God away from the glare of publicity. Their genuineness, simplicity, dedication and love visibly showed a life well lived even if not understood by most. More on this another time but what more could we ask for in living our own wild and precious life?
 

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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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