For and against

John said to Jesus, ‘Master, we saw a man who is not one of us casting out devils in your name; and because he was not one of us we tried to stop him.’ But Jesus said, ‘You must not stop him: no one who works a miracle in my name is likely to speak evil of me. Anyone who is not against us is for us.

Mark 9:38 - 40

Letting go is never easy. The difficult farewell as you leave your child for the first time in the hands of carers or teachers is, for some, wrought with stress and emotion. My children never looked back. They loved their carers, they loved their teachers. I especially wanted their teachers to know about their unique gifts, about the things that were important in their lives. I wanted to know if they cared about my kids, if they would listen to their idle chat and make sense of their worlds for them as we had.

Well, their teachers did care and love them in their own way. My sons were ‘characters’ (which is the best way to put it) and my daughter somewhat reticent. Yet they all left school well prepared to take on the next stage of their lives. As parents, we never quite totally let go. I still tell my grownup kids how much they are loved.

For the last four weeks, the letter of St James has featured in the lectionary. Since the Reformation this letter has been attributed the title of ‘Catholic’ since James, a Jewish Christian in the mid-first Century AD taught that faith alone is insufficient for salvation. Good works flow from faith, and they are the evidence. This certainly contradicted the conclusion to which Martin Luther arrived. Our Catholic tradition has maintained this understanding, and from it flows a great sense of, and commitment to social justice.

And so Mark (9:40) reminds us that we are not alone, that anyone who is not against us is for us. It’s hard to swallow, I know, because we can get hung up on what we consider to be immovable principles; it’s hard knowing that if I do let go of my anxieties, my kids will still do well at school, they will (and need to) develop resilience and fortitude. The world is not black and white, there is plenty of grey in between, the realm of collaboration and compromise, and of course, compassion.

Mark does give fair warning, however, if we become obstacles to the truth, to the Gospel, promising apocalyptic terror to those who would destroy another’s faith. Such is the seriousness of the responsibility to nurture and grow faith. This is the same faith that calls us to act with justice, in accordance with the Lord’s decrees.

Responding to those 124 million who live in food crisis nations, the 200 million children labourers (73 million of whom are under the age of 10), the 20 million plus 'modern' slaves (including an estimated 4,300 in Australia), sexual and physical abuse of children, family violence, the extraordinary number those living in poverty, let alone the seas of plastic refuse, global warming, are the clearest evidence that despite all that has been achieved in civilisation (Christian or otherwise) we are no better off, no more charitable, no less needy of salvation than ever. While the kingdom may well be upon us, I suspect that the apocalypse co-exists with it.

This does not mean that we are dealing with overwhelming challenges or that we should just give up. We live in a most amazing, beautiful world. Change of epic proportion can happen (the end of the black slave trade, the end of English colonialism). If God is for us, who can be against? It’s a matter of faith and action.

Peter Douglas

St. John Paul II envisioned a big church. So why are millennials feeling excluded?

by Greer Hannan

I have a postcard of the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro taped up next to my office computer. Picture a near-replica of St. Peter’s Basilica plunked onto a tropical plain in Côte d’Ivoire. Guinness World Records registers it as the largest church in the world, overtaking the original in the Vatican by almost 9,000 square meters. I have never been there, but the postcard reminds me of an observation my favorite philosophy professor regularly made to his students: “It’s a big church.”

In those lectures, he was usually reminding us that the church was big enough for both Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus; for St. Francis of Assisi and St. Louis, king of France; for Opus Dei and Voice of the Faithful. It was an injunction to put our intellectual differences or preferences of piety aside and remember that we have one faith, one Lord and one baptism.

It was a message that John Paul II had a gift for communicating, especially to my millennial generation. Most of my earliest memories of television feature the pope descending from an airplane and kneeling to kiss the soil of places like Auckland, New Zealand; Kigali, Rwanda; or New Delhi, India. His pilgrimages to every corner of the world showed me that the church is as big as our globe: We may speak a multitude of languages, live under different forms of government and be born of every race and ethnicity under the sun, but we are one body in Christ.

John Paul’s zealous canonization of scores of lay people as well as religious illustrated again that it is a big church, big enough for every vocation and walk of life. More than anything, his way of speaking directly to young people, urgently inviting and encouraging my generation to put our gifts to the service of God in the world, taught me that it is a big church, and the church needs us in it—needs our energy, our talents, our questions.

I was largely unaware of the contentious theological and political issues that often divide public opinion about a pope. I was not reading encyclicals or following internecine ecclesiastical debates. Ideas matter, but they were not the source of the belonging I felt. What was convincing to me was this shepherd’s evident love and joy, especially in the presence of children my age.

John Paul II died in the spring of my senior year of high school. At the time I was feeling overwhelmed by doubts about my faith, and the sexual abuse scandal had taught me to distrust church leaders. I was battling serious depression, and I was deeply angry at God.

Nevertheless, I crawled out of bed at 3 o’clock in the morning to sit alone, huddled in front of the TV in my family’s dark and silent house, volume turned down low, watching the papal funeral in St. Peter’s Square and weeping despite myself. It was a big church, packed to the gills with all the world’s dignitaries that day. In the center, the book of the Gospels rested on top of his casket, and when its pages fluttered in the wind and its cover blew closed, it looked so lonely and so final.

By all reports, the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro is fairly empty most Sundays, since less than half of the country is Christian. Empty, too, are the more modestly sized parishes I attend in Louisville, Ky., the seat of the first Catholic diocese west of the Appalachian Mountains. Today, the throngs of young people who attended World Youth Days in Denver, Manila and Toronto are largely missing from the pews.

Commentators put forth myriad reasons for the religious disengagement of millennials. I suspect that it is simpler than any of their generational theories: The message that we heard proclaimed by the church’s chief evangelist in our childhoods has been drowned out by other voices in our lives contradicting that message. Too many of us have been told from the pulpit or in a classroom or by a lay minister that we are too gay or too female or too mentally ill or too divorced or too disabled or too brown or too poor or too childless or too sinful to serve the church.

Gay men apply to seminary and are denied entry based solely on their orientation. Developmentally disabled children are excluded from the sacrament of confirmation, their parents told that the kids would not understand what they receive. A theology graduate student diagnosed with P.T.S.D. is informed that her mental illness had undermined her relationship with God and she should withdraw from the program. The altar of nearly every church I have seen is inaccessible to people assisted by wheelchairs or walkers, preventing them from lectoring, cantoring or administering the Eucharist. Some dioceses have closed all their schools in impoverished areas putting a Catholic education out of reach for poor families.

Today’s young adults see the same hypocrisy when they look at the church’s history. Until the founding of St. Augustine’s Seminary in Mississippi in 1920, black men were barred from U.S. seminaries and instead had to seek ordination abroad. In the same era, African-American women were largely excluded from joining communities of religious sisters.

A person’s sense of belonging can suffer death by a thousand pinpricks. A girl sees a column of boys assisting the priest at Mass, the smallest acolyte unable to reach the altar. Being too short to perform the tasks of an acolyte apparently is not a problem but being a girl is. A priest tells his congregation that no one who is divorced—even those divorced who are not remarried—may serve as a liturgical minister. Retreat talks on vocational discernment emphasize commitment to either marriage or religious life. They leave millennials who have not taken either path feeling excluded from God’s work. Couples experiencing infertility hear again and again that the goodness of marriage is illustrated primarily in terms of openness to children. If they have no kids, how good can their marriage be?

There are countless other examples of Catholics who have heard the message that their gifts are unwanted. It is a big empty church, but if you are going to come wearing stained blue jeans or standing with your unmarried partner or carrying a screaming infant or struggling with a disability or in the throes of your own loud weeping, maybe you should sit in the back pew.

Pope Francis has his own evangelical gift for reminding us that it is a big church, big enough for all of us who have been told such things. His humility and his candor are compelling in the same way as John Paul II’s warmth and zeal. But the church is much bigger than the pope, and his message needs to be echoed by words of welcome in our parishes, schools and dioceses. The people who have the greatest power to wound us or encourage us are the people closest to us

More destructive than the newspaper articles detailing the clerical sexual abuse scandals I grew up reading have been the crushing personal experiences of those close to me at the hands of representatives of the church. More powerful than the joyful witness of John Paul II in my life has been the profound witness of my mentors and friends, fellow pilgrims who persist in the church despite being told some of the same discouraging messages I myself have been told. Unfortunately, negative messages are insidious; they become an ear-worm and can deafen people to words of welcome and encouragement.

My own pilgrimage has taken me to places I never expected to set foot and shown me the vastness and diversity of the church. I’ve walked four miles up a dirt road to hear the Divine Liturgy of the Byzantine Rite celebrated in a little wooden church perched on a Ukrainian hillside. I’ve been prayed over by people who were sleeping on Dublin’s streets. I’ve been welcomed to eat, pray and celebrate with L’Arche communities. I’ve had candles lit for me at a shrine an ocean away by friends who knew I was struggling. In the name of Christ, a pair of friends gave me a home and a sense of safety when I lost my own. On the occasions I’ve been confounded by doubt, others have told me they have faith on my behalf.

I have found the Eucharist and been offered belonging on every journey I’ve made. It keeps me coming to the church, even when the church’s pews are empty, even when I’ve been made to feel that I belong in the last row.

It is a big church, and I have seen enough of it to know there is still room in it for me and for anyone who has felt like they were turned away at the door.

First published in on-line America on 21 September 2018. This article also appeared in print, under the headline "It's a big church. Why don't millennials feel like they belong. ," in the 1 October 2018 issue of America.

The first shall be last

They came to Capernaum,  and when he was in the house he asked them, ‘What were you arguing about on the road?’ They said nothing because they had been arguing which of them was the greatest. So he sat down, called the Twelve to him and said, ‘If anyone wants to be first, he must make himself last of all and servant of all.’

Mark 9:33 - 36

Trump wants to 'make America great again', while Clive Palmer similarly still wants to make Australia great despite failing in his first parliamentary putsch.  The desire for nations, races, political parties, corporations, ideologies and individuals to make themselves great is most often done at the expense of others. There's always a loser. And, it's at odds with Gospel leadership in which servanthood, service and humility are the hallmarks of true greatness.

The Church itself with its ancient, masculine hierarchies and exalted titles has been filled with those who sought both greatness and self-aggrandisement (remember the Borgias and Medicis), and corruption. Such misuse of power has had its ultimate end in the sexual abuse of minors.

The extreme policies of elected and non-elected governments of those who believed in the rule of the select, racially pure, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-black, anti-Asian, anti-refugee have led to: black slavery (12 million transported, 1.4 million died during transportation), the Holocaust (6 million Jews, 11 million Poles, Roma, Slavs, Soviet citizens and prisoners of war, the disabled, gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, mentally and incurably ill); various despots including Stalin, Mao, Haile Sellasie, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Amin, Pol Pot, and the genocides of Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bangladesh, Guatelama, Armenia and the list goes on. And there are innumerable such horrors from every century, from ancient history to the white Australia policy and Aboriginal genocide and the misery of Burma today.

You see, attempts at making me, us, you or them great come at a cost. Usually the cost is borne by others.

You may well consider my extension to genocide well and truly overreached, and yet, at the heart of the disciples' desire to be the greatest among the disciples of Jesus is the displacement, the demoting and ultimately the devaluing and removal of those unequal to me, us, you or them. Being the greatest is a perversion of the call to service.

Luke's (1:46 - 55) Magnificat puts greatness into perspective:

My soul magnifies the Lord,

and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,

for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.

For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

for he who is mighty has done great things for me,

and holy is his name.

And his mercy is for those who fear him

from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;

he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;

he has brought down the mighty from their thrones

and exalted those of humble estate;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and the rich he has sent away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel,

in remembrance of his mercy,

as he spoke to our fathers,

to Abraham and to his offspring forever.

God alone is great.

Peter Douglas

  

Spirituality without platitudes:

an interview with Erik Varden

by Maggie Fergusson

Ever since he was a boy in Norway, the son of a country vet, Erik Varden has felt a sense of longing – of homesickness “for a homeland I recall but have not seen”. There were decades of “rudderlessness, pain and questions” before he discovered where this was leading him: before, 17 years ago, aged 26, he arrived at the enclosed Cistercian monastery of Mount Saint Bernard in Leicestershire, where he is now Abbot, and where he hopes to die.

The Shattering of Loneliness, shortly to be published by Bloomsbury Continuum, is the fruit of his years of searching. It is that rare thing: a book that had to be written. It could change lives.

“Must I have personal experience of something to say, in truth, that I remember it?” Varden asks in his introduction. It is a question he has pondered all his life. The six chapters in his book dwell on six biblical exhortations to remember – remember you are dust, for example, remember you were a slave in Egypt, the disciples remembering the Last Supper on the road to Emmaus. He presents these not simply as invitations to learn about things that happened long ago, but also as invitations to live them and be personally involved in them. He weaves them into “a narrative of redemption that not only reaches back to time’s beginning, but remembers forward, into eternity”.

His frame of reference is formidable: he draws with ease on the Old and the New Testaments, as well as writers from Virgil to  Stig Dagerman. And he explores the lives of remarkable men and women; some of faith, some of none. If this suggests a weighty tome, take heart. The book is just 164 pages long, written in short, clear sentences of exceptional sensibility. And the difficulties and temptations it explores are startlingly contemporary – sexual addiction; “disposable selfhood”; inertia.

Varden is slim, his close-cropped hair giving way to a frosting of grey. His slight accent gives his words precision, and he speaks, and listens, with concentration. It is as if he is constantly travelling between this world and his world of prayer, carrying messages. Yet there is a lightness about him, too; he is quick to laugh.

Sitting on a bench in the monastery garden, we begin by talking about an intriguing problem he dwells upon in the book – the problem of “getting stuck”. “Not to move forwards on the path of life is to move back,” wrote St Bernard of Clairvaux, an exponent of a reform movement in Benedictine monasticism that resulted in the Cistercian order, and Varden warns that “the fearful possibility of stalling should motivate us until our last breath”. “Stalling”, or “lingering”, is, he believes, “a professional hazard for monks”.

“You’re in this place, you know you’ll be here till you die, you have a view of the cemetery, the horarium is the same day after day, and the temptation is to think, ‘Now I’m here I’ve just got to stay put and wait.’ Whereas I like to think there is a dialectic tension intrinsic to monastic life. Benedictines take three vows: of obedience, of stability and of conversatio morum. I see this last as precisely a vow not to get stuck.”

What are the signs that one is stuck?

“A loss of joy.”

And how do you get unstuck?

“It’s said about St Anthony of Egypt, often thought of as the first monk, that he started each day by saying, ‘Today I begin.’ When you endeavour to live life seriously, and zestfully, it is constantly new: every day is a bit like the first day of creation. We start our day, at 3.20am, with Vigils, and the first psalm St Benedict would have us sing is Psalm 95 – ‘Today, if you hear his voice, harden not your hearts’. Today! When monastic life works, you recognise it in a sort of energy, an ebullience.”

And what about when it doesn’t work? What about the unravelling of sexual misconduct in the Church? In The Shattering of Loneliness Varden links the Desert Fathers with Freud in suggesting that libidinal passion is very often a symptom of spiritual malady.

“I think in a lot of cases it is. We must not spiritualise or psychologise away terrible misdeeds; and certainly there are recognisable pathologies that pertain to medical diagnosis. But this surely can’t answer for everything. I think that monastic tradition sits on, as steward, such a tremendous wealth of insight and wisdom – practical wisdom – that the Church and the world has not just forgotten but has probably never known about,” says Varden.

Part of this wisdom is the need for every monk to have a spiritual guide, or confessor, with whom he must talk freely and regularly about the darkest recesses of his heart or mind.

Meantime we – perhaps particularly journalists – must not wallow in evil. As an adolescent, Varden was for a time obsessed with the Holocaust. Now, he says, “I see the darkness still … but it has lost its fascination”.

What about the victims of evil? “The anguish of the world”, he writes, “is embraced by an infinite benevolence investing it with purpose.” How to communicate that to someone suffering acutely without enraging them? “One can only try to communicate it by trying to embody the benevolence without naming it. As St Francis is said to have said, ‘Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words when necessary.’”

From evil, we shift to goodness. In his book, Varden quotes St Seraphim of Sarov as saying, “Only a good deed performed in the name of Christ brings the fruits of the Holy Spirit” – and this has unsettled me. I tell him of a friend of mine – one among many possible examples – who is married to a banker, and could live a life of luxury. Instead, she spends her days helping single mothers in tower blocks. She has no faith. Are her deeds therefore futile?

“There’s an important categorical distinction here. Seraphim certainly doesn’t say that a good deed not done in the name of Christ doesn’t do any good. Goodness is always a participation in the source of all good, whether you recognise it or not. But what Seraphim talks about is the conscious breaking open of the heart in order to embrace that in-dwelling of the Spirit and make it personal.

“And this is one of the great paradoxes: the Lord exercises immense courtesy. He never imposes himself, never forces himself upon anyone. If I don’t let him in, he’s not going to force his way in. But that is not to say that someone who does good blindly, but who’s open to that imperative of goodness, isn’t vulnerable to a sort of propaedeutic of the spirit – an inward preparation of the heart that, whether in this world or the next, will bear fruit. Good is always good.”

In the Same vein, I wonder what Varden feels about people of non-Christian faiths. He responds without hesitation: “One can certainly and obviously learn from them.”

His Shia Muslim room-mate at Atlantic College in Wales was to be an important influence on his journey. It was a Buddhist monk who introduced him to “silence as a possible mode of expression for spiritual yearning – my awakening to prayer, in a way”.

And as he prepared to become a Catholic, the Second Vatican Council document that impressed him more than any other was Nostra Aetate – “I thought to myself, ‘Gosh! A faith that can express in a dogmatic statement such a clear statement of what it holds to be true and yet extend a hand of friendship to what are apparently rival truth claims – that faith has something going for it’.”

The Catholic Church’s claim to be the steward of the fullness of truth, he goes on, “isn’t the same as claiming a monopoly on truth. The truth is always greater. As monks, we’re prepared to extend a hand of friendship to any hand prepared to extend itself in our direction. This holds for the way we relate to people who believe differently.”

He speaks of his admiration for the monks at Tibhirine in Algeria, whose story is told in the film Of Gods and Men, who lived in harmony with the largely Muslim population, increasingly realising that they were risking their lives for the sake of that friendship.

To encounter such clear and rock-like faith as Varden’s, coupled with a complete absence of spiritual pride, is rare and moving. He talks in his book about the need to grow in humility, but how can we do this? How does it work? In the Benedictine sense, he says, “humility is a function of the truth”; and in the monastery “we try to live a preferential option for the truth”.

Embracing the truth can be “as I know only too well, deeply unpleasant. There are so many things one wants to try to dress up, even to oneself.” But St Benedict “outlines a way to self-knowledge. His concern is to free us from the need to seem more than we are. He would root us in the real, rescue us from self-elevation.”

It strikes me, listening to him, that humility is a kind of liberation; that the feeling of freedom Varden emanates, despite the apparent constraints of his life, has its roots in his not needing to prove himself in any way at all. I think of Etty Hillesum, staring through the slats of a cattle truck at a strutting Nazi soldier, and asking, “Which of us is free?”

It is tempting, visiting a community so apparently vital as Mount Saint Bernard, to think one can leave the spiritual heavy-lifting to the monks. But Varden is clear the call to holiness “is addressed to all of us. It’s a matter of having an ear to hear that call, a will to heed it.”

Occasionally in The Shattering of Loneliness there’s a bat squeak of frustration about the way some of us – monks and nuns included – seem to regard our faith “as if Christianity were some sickly sweet glaze you smear on life, rather than an invitation to transformation”. He talks, for example, of “the atrophy of charity” – what does that mean?

“There is always a risk that we reduce charity to an observance, putting a Cafod envelope in a tray, or whatever it is, and forgetting to actually try to live and embody charity – though I’m not saying I succeed in this,” he says. “To live charity is dangerous: it involves an investment of self, and a shedding of self, that is heroic.”

And when he says that “Christian life fails to convince because it lacks ‘incarnate credibility’”, what does that mean? “We Religious, for example, we moan and moan about the vocations crisis, when really what we need to ask is, ‘What do people see when they look at us? Do they see men and women fired with good zeal and energy and a life in movement? Or do they see something stagnant and lifeless?’”

And what is “platitudinous spirituality”? He laughs heartily – “I have a bit of a quarrel with the word ‘spirituality’. I occasionally use it as an abstract noun, spirituality being a human being’s capacity for life in the spirit. But I find the word spirituality with an adjective attached to it just nauseous. If someone asks me to give a talk about ‘Cistercian spirituality’, I say I don’t know what that is.”

Our time is up. Varden fetches two bottles of dark, loamy Mount Saint Bernard beer before we climb into the monastery Ford Fiesta and head for Loughborough. Varden has told me that during his years of searching he visited Caldey Abbey in Wales where he met a monk who made a deep impression: “We talked about nothing at all, but there was something about him that was just luminous. I thought, ‘Whatever it is he has, I want.’”

My meeting with Varden has made a similar impression on me. As the train chugs south, I dwell on the words spoken by Jesus to the Samaritan woman in the heat of the midday sun – “If you but knew the gift of God”.

This article appears in The Tablet of 15 September 2018.