Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1975. (507 pages, Hardback)
(Online price for paperback from $AU21).

Reviewed by Ted Witham

George Steiner reminds us what a wonderful and impossible task translation is.  Steiner takes us to the source of the problem, which is our ignorance of what language is: neither the philosophy of language, nor the science of linguistics has come close to unravelling this mystery.

Words are certainly not a one-for-one description of an object.  There is nothing simple about the relation between the word "dog " and the animal lying at my feet.  In addition, every word comes with its history, some of its inscribed on its surface, and some of it in deeper resonances.

Language is certainly not the simple giving of information, like the alarm signal one chook gives to the group that a hawk is overhead. Animals, Steiner claims, never lie.  In contrast, most human speech utterances are designed to conceal as much as they reveal.  As social animals, human beings present their best face by shaping their words for many and mainly hidden purposes.

Even the  instant interpretation bilinguals provide for their monolingual friends which has the addition of facial and bodily gestures is a very loose communication.  It reminds us, however, that language is far more than words on the page.  Written language is analogous to a musical score.

Steiner illustrates history’s ambivalence about translation from the history of Bible translation. There have always been those who claim that Hebrew (or is it Greek?) is God's language, and any attempt to translate it into the vulgate will despoil its sacredness.  Against those have always been others urging the translation of sacred texts as part of spreading the good news contained in them.

So translation is a daunting task.  If every word has its own history in its own language, then how can it be translated into the words of another language?  Playwrights in English, for example, have echoes of Shakespeare.  If you are translating a modern playwright into French, the Shakespearean allusions will inevitably be lost.  One solution is to make the French translation thick with invented resonances like those of an invented French Shakespeare lending his echoes to the current translation.

How can translators know all the context of a text they are translating into their own language?  Many years ago I took it on myself to translate Ionesco's Le Roi se meurt into English.   I think I was aware of the psychological dimensions of the piece – the King as self – and I was immersed in Ionesco's existential contemporaries, like Camus and Sartre.  But I knew very little of Ionesco's Romanian history and only a tiny bit about the Dadaist and absurdist sources for his work.  How could I, or any one translator, be deeply immersed in all of that?

Translators need some grasp of how we understand, that is, hermeneutics, and consciously use that knowledge in their translation.  Specifically, Steiner commends a fourfold movement:

·        We begin in an approach to the text drenched in love and trust.  This text, we say to ourselves, has something worthwhile to say at least to us. 

·        We then move to attack mode, analysing the text.  How does it communicate through meaning, syntax, and sound and thought?

·        Then we transform, rendering the text into a new form lying somewhere along the continuum from literal to literary. 

·        The fourth movement, Steiner names "compensation" or "restitution".  In some way, our translation has to revalue the original for a new audience.

This is not to suggest that Steiner’s is primarily a technical manual.  He raises questions rather than describes methods.  He takes the philosophy of language and the then infant science of evolutionary biology to its limits and finds only mystery.  His critiques of Chomsky's generative grammar, and Steven Pinker's proposition that there is only one human language underlying the hundreds of languages still stand in 2010.

He gives outstanding examples of good translations.  He presents in inter-linear form Pierre Leyris’ breathtaking translation of Gerard Manley Hopkins' Pied Beauty.  This so moved me that I copied it out.

But above all, After Babel swirls with rich ideas about language and how we share it with others.  What is Babel? Is the multitude of tongues, which our planet experiences as the norm, actually preferable to the hegemony of just one language? Is Babel the attempt to impose politically correct language to the private version of language each individual speaks? The Bible presents Pentecost as Babel's antidote, and the miracle of Pentecost is precisely the mutual understanding of many languages.

It may be that the translator, whether interpreting a text from a far off culture and language, or explaining a passage from Jane Austen, is doing her part to bring in Pentecost.

John Shelby Spong, Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven…, Harper One 2009, Hardcover 288 pages. ($24 approx. on the internet.)

Reviewed by Ted Witham

Bishop Jack Spong takes his readers on a long journey to "Eternal Life".  His vision of eternal life is broad: it includes a plan for the church's mission in the world, a plea for mysticism, and a vision of human beings transcending the limitations of the individual for a oneness with God and with others. Overall, I like his vision.

Eternal Life is a rollicking ride of the sort we have come to expect from Bishop Spong. 

Jack Spong believes that religion has prevented us from seeing the grand vision by keeping us in unhealthy dependence, waiting on a father who knows best, and who in fact often manipulates us into even more dependency. 

This paternalistic dynamic played out in the news as I was reading Eternal Life.  It was sad to see the wonderful and feisty Sisters of St Joseph waiting on a Papa in Rome to declare that Mary McKillop was sufficiently saintly.  The Sisters already consider McKillop a saint, and it appears demeaning for them to be forced to wait while a far-off authority decides whether post mortem miracles are valid or not.

Eternal Life is in part an engaging memoir. Spong traces his journey from an evangelical home in North Carolina through his teenage years in a more "catholic" Anglican parish.  At each step of the way from deacon to priest, to pastoral work in parishes and to diocesan Bishop, Spong's intellectual curiosity deepens.  He is no longer content with the church’s easy answers.  He liberates himself energetically from the literalist view of the Bible he inherited.  More importantly, he discards the triple-decker universe of the Bible, and along with it, the concept of the transcendent God.  For Spong, God is not beyond us; God is within us.

Bishop Spong describes the church's journey as it moves from childhood to maturity and invites others to join this journey.  I sense some impatience on his part with those who haven't travelled his particular road, or who are perhaps embarked on a different journey.  In interviews he often says that his intended audience are those who have left the church unable any longer to swallow the literalism and infantilism they have experienced in the church.

He criticises priests like me who understand his journey, but in order to avoid offence, sometimes cloak our language in ambiguity.  I do understand the Spong dilemma, but I am trained as a pastor and educator:  I try to communicate by taking people with me. 

Spong is an iconoclast. He tears down superstition and pre-modern thought and clears the way for a Christianity with intellectual integrity in the modern world.  Like all iconoclasts, the Bishop skirts the edge of orthodoxy. However, if a Panel of Triers in a diocese somewhere tried him for heresy, I have no doubt that he could show that all his theology accords with scripture and can “be proved thereby” and thus satisfy the canonical claims of the Anglican Articles of Religion. Iconoclast he may be, but not apostate.

I agree with Bishop Spong that the church stands on tiptoe at the edge of great changes.  We need iconoclasts like him to undo our tight grip on inadequate concepts of the past, but we also need gracious guides who will inspire us and lead us confidently into that future.  Spong is the first, but not, crucially, the latter.

Bishop Spong convinces me that all scripture is poetry, but fails to read scripture with the depth and sympathy that would make it sing anew. 

He is keen to remind us that God is not "up there", and demonstrates that we should instead look within to find God.  This, as he says, is Mysticism 101.  But he does not account for our need to reach outwards to find God. Even if the proper direction is not up, most of us feel impelled to look outwards to our fellow humans and the wondrous creation, and to listen there for God speaking to us. 

He is enthusiastic to show us that faith and science are compatible, but ignores science's scepticism for its own methodology and conclusions.  Even the brashest scientists admit that science doesn't have all the answers. Blind belief in science will not serve faith well.

Maybe all these expect too much of Bishop Spong. We should accept that his ministry is more to tear down our conceptual idols than to build up our spiritual future. We should read Spong and clear our minds, and we should also listen to our hearts and shape our own mature vision of God and God's future. Of that, the Bishop would approve.

I have started saying "Elohim" instead of "God", when I am reading the Old Testament. This simple substitution has exploded my picture of God.  I should explain that I read Morning Prayer out aloud, and I have been substituting "Adonai“ for "the Lord" for some time. So when I see the word “God” on the page, I am now speaking the word “Elohim”. I hear the Hebrew, and the English is muted.

It seems important to me to remind myself of the Hebrew behind the word "God".  In 99% of its occurrences, the Hebrew word “Elohim” is translated by the English “God”.  While “God” may be the most accurate translation, it is quite misleading.  “Elohim” is a vague word, plural in form, and often plural in meaning.  In this plural sense, it can mean gods, angels or heavenly beings.  This plural is a mysterious word, and reminds us of our ignorance of the spiritual realm and the beings that inhabit it.

In Genesis 1: 27, “Elohim” refers to the Creator, the one and only God of Israel, but emphatically a plural: "Then God said, let us make human beings...” Scholars debate whether this is a royal we, an anachronistic reference to the Trinity, or just more mystery.

In most of the Hebrew Bible, “Elohim” does settle down to be a comfortable name for the Most High, and “God” is the best rendering in English of this name.

But "Elohim" and "God” are not equivalents.  The word "God" is short, sharp, definite – in other words, at least in its sound and form, well defined,.  This English word gives the impression that we know some things about God, that we have God taped, that "God" is a precise name for a precise Person. In many ways, God is nothing like Elohim.

So going back to the original Hebrew when I read the Bible has unsettled my picture of God.  It has blurred the edges. It has spread a single dot untidily across the page, and in the process, it has smudged in more possibilities. It has exploded God – a Big Bang effect.

And it has made my prayer quite different. If I pray to Elohim, I am not praying to a simple entity. Prayer can not resemble a simple conversation with a single human being, but becomes something quite other, quite alien. I can't get my mind around it.  It is too big, too vague, too mysterious.

I am so glad Elohim has returned to my daily prayer and thoughts. Elohim will foster my spirit's growth much more powerfully than God will.

Stephen Hunt, Contemporary Christianity and LGBT sexualities, Burlington VT: Ashgate Publications 2009

Reviewed by Ted Witham

Soon after its release, my wife Rae and I went to see the movie Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee’s brilliant adaptation of Annie Proulx's short story.  We saw it as tragic story of bisexuality book-ended by an outraged protest against anti-gay violence. Many of our friends reacted negatively to it, and most preferred not even to see it.

For some, it is so difficult to deal with these issues, to name them clearly and to discuss them.  Their attitude, I fear, may be expressed in the cliché: "My mind’s made up: don't confuse me with facts!"

There are many challenging "facts" in Contemporary Christianity and LGBT sexualities, but this book is too good to be dismissed just because readers find its subject confronting.  In effect, the different essayists go through the letters LGBT and Q and explore the interactions between the "non-heterosexual" population and the churches.

Fact 1: Many gay Anglican clergy cope with their homosexuality by putting up a false – or incomplete – picture of themselves to the world.  They effectively censor their public face.  What they play on "front stage", is projected by energetic manipulations of the person’s "back stage".  Michael Keenan uses the image of a tapestry with its beautiful face and crazily-stitched back. 

Of course it is a fact that clergy hide their homosexuality. Over the years I have been privileged to see some of my colleagues and their beautiful stitching. This essay alerts us to ways we can be more supportive of gay clergy.  But it also reminds me that we all have a front and backstage; we all stitch the back so that the viewed side of our personality is what we would like it to be.

In her chapter, Kristin Aune asks what it is about non-heterosexuality that evangelical Christians don't like.  Fact 2: She concludes that their prime concern is not their genital activity.  On the contrary, what worries evangelical is that gay men are defective in their masculinity.  They are not "real men".

I found this to be a helpful insight.  I used to work for an inter-church agency, and remember meeting many "real men" among the younger Government school chaplains.  I was really seduced by their confidence as men, as heads of family and leaders of women and men.  I acquiesced to their world-view, and even presented myself as "one of them".  To my shame, I did not challenge this too neat understanding of masculinity.  As Kristin Aune describes it, being real men in these ways implied a lesser role for women, as men's hand-maids, not their help-mates (Genesis 2).  This gender polarity needs challenging not encouraging.

Marta Trzebiatowski sets out to explore the disapproval Polish women experienced when some announced that they are called either to monastic life or others came out as lesbians:  Fact 3. Trzebiatowski finds many similarities between the two groups: both groups of women have refused the social role of motherhood, and they have refused the “heteronormativity “of their culture.

Perhaps the Third Order can be advocates for Religious as well as others who choose not to follow social norms.  As a Religious Order which includes both singles and mothers, our members know both the inner logic of celibacy and the validating power of motherhood.

I found myself most challenged by Alex Toft's essay on "Bisexual Christians". 

Fact 4: There are, it seems, as many definitions of bisexuality as there are bisexual individuals.  Should you define bisexuality as sexual attraction to both the opposite sex and the same sex?  If the definition is not based on desire, then is bisexuality of variant of gender, not male, not female, not straight, not gay, but all or some of the above?

Does the fact that people who understand themselves as bisexual in fact void all definitions of gender and sexuality so that none is really meaningful? Or to follow another track, are we all in fact bisexuals? Was Jesus, "the ideal template for human existence", himself bisexual?

Writing for the Church of England in 2004, Thatcher and Stuart concluded that:

... bisexuals undermine the whole sexual system, the neat classification of people into homo and hetero, the pathologizing of homosexuality as a heterosexual disorder, and so on. (p. 77)

This "dangerous" fluidity usually evokes only negative reactions from the church: Toft found that the church considered bisexual individuals to be "in a state of confusion” (p.  85), rejecting a God-given identity. 

Unsurprisingly, bisexuals find it difficult to continue to relate to churches. Many bisexuals felt that the only way to continue as Christians was outside the official Christian community.

Those who do stay in the church, feel forced to separate their sexuality from their spirituality "and ‘act’ heterosexually within religious spheres", creating "great inner conflict" for individuals (p. 85). 

According to veteran researchers Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip and Michael Keenan, transgendered Christians throw up an even deeper challenge to the churches: Fact 4. To be transgendered is to experience oneself as in some way opposite in sexuality to what one "should be".  A transgendered person may feel trapped in the body of the wrong gender/sex, or may need to dress in clothes of the opposite sex, or may have physical markers of both sexes.

Again, the permutations defy clear definition.  The way transgendered people come to a clear self-understanding is by paying attention to their bodies. Transgendered Christians recall the church to an embodied theology.    Mainstream Christians too often devalue not only the body but matter in general.  This leads them to wander into a docetic heresy, devaluing the incarnation, the embodiment of God in Jesus of Nazareth. Transgender brings us back to a more classical theology, reminding us that we cannot grow spiritually if we deny the body.  "Transgenderism ... is about spiritual growth as an embodied experience."  (p. 99)

Stephen Hunt untangles the different threads of the influence of gay Christians on policy in the church and in the community.  Not surprisingly, he finds that they have been more effective in changing laws than challenging theology:  Fact 5.

Richard O'Leary takes us to the very religious world of Northern Ireland where the difficulties gays experience are magnified by the culture:  Fact 6.

Yvonne Aburrow asks "Is It Meaningful to Speak of ‘Queer Spirituality’?"  Feminist theology has a "hermeneutic of suspicion".  Readers scour their reading for bias to find out whether the writer has smuggled patriarchal values into this text.  Have assumptions of male superiority, distorted the meaning of the text?  If so, the reader can then make appropriate adjustments.  

 Fact 7: Queer theology takes this hermeneutic of suspicion a step further, looking for any normative bias to any gender or sexual identity. For example, when we read Genesis 1:27,

(“God created man in his own image,
   in the image of God he created him;
   male and female he created them.”)

do we read these words through the eyes of heteronormativity? In particular, does the little word ‘and’ deceive us?

The Hebrew word for ‘and’ ranges in meaning, sometimes joining two terms very closely,  and at other times describing a real difference between two things? Do we see the “and” in the phrase “male and female” in the latter sense, as disjunctive, emphasising the separateness of the genders? Could we not legitimately emphasise the conjunctive nature of the “and”? “Male and female” may highlight not a clear separation between the sexes, but that humanity is the totality of gender and sex, and that, astonishingly, this unpredictability reflects the truth about God, as humanity is created in God’s image. This is not a new reading of Genesis: Phyllis Trible reads Genesis 1:27 in this way. [1]

Queer theology intends to be provocative, and, because of its radical assumption that no expression of gender identity is normative, will at some point end up offending every reader.  This offence validates the approach.

In fact, queer theology might take us back to Saint Paul's radical idea that "in Christ Jesus, there is no longer ... male nor female."  (Galatians 3:28), Christ, Paul says, is gender-blind, just as he is colour-blind.  We need transgendered people to remind us of this foundational Christian value.

Derek Jay then sketches "Trends in the Spiritual Direction of LGBT People." Jay uses the three-stage schema of St John of the Cross and its purgative, illuminative and unitive stages of spiritual growth as a framework to explore the particular needs of LGBT people in direction.  For example, the spiritual director needs to note when the church's attempts to enforce celibacy on non-heterosexuals lead to promiscuity, and then help the person to find integrity in their life choices.  LGBT people need to accept and celebrate their differentness.  Fact 8: Directors can encourage LGBT people to model an alternative spirituality – a more embodied, more accepting, spirituality, with more integrity about sin – to the rest of the Church.

The book challenges me to action at several points.  Firstly it takes me to tapestry; not for the purpose of picking apart the tapestries of others trying to identify the stitching hidden at the back of the face their owners present to the world.  Rather it is to pay attention to one's own front stage and backstage; to examine with honesty how we stitch and how we hide our true selves. The purpose of the self examination is to allow our compassion for others to grow as we see how we manage our own lives.

Secondly, this book challenges me when I acquiesce to the too simple views around me, whether they are a cheerful masculinity that puts women down, and either ignores or destroys the lives of those who do not conform to the heterosexual norm. 

It also challenges me to speak up, when people disapprove the life choices of others.  I will not always agree with people's choice of marriage partner or their vows of celibacy or the partner they take up with, but it is not my role in life to judge.  Rather I am called as a Christian to affirm the way others see God leading them.

Lastly, I am challenged to tell my story with more honesty than I have previously. I acknowledge that I need to do this with utmost care: care for my wife and children, care for my siblings and in-laws, and care for my Third Order sisters and brothers. But tell the story I must.

Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence, London: Granta Books (2009),

Paperback, 320 pages.

$40.50 (AUD) approx from emporiumbooks.com.au

Reviewed by Ted Witham

Review published in Eureka Street.

Being a Christian is more about emptying oneself and opening the self to God than it is about fulfilling the self.  Silence, according to Sara Maitland's fascinating book, reveals this truth starkly.

Sara Maitland feels compelled to live in greater silence, and this book details her journey to learn what silence is through reading about it and experiencing it in different settings.  Her reading covers not only traditional Christian accounts of silence, but also the secular accounts of extreme isolation and silence, for example, Richard Byrd alone in a tent in the Arctic winter, or Alexander Selkirk frantically building fences on his desert island.

Maitland’s overview of the Christian desert tradition and the traditions of silence in Buddhism is comprehensive, and sometimes wry.  Why did the wily Bishop Athanasius put so many words into the mouth of the nearly always silent Anthony in writing his history of the hermit?  Answer: because Athanasius needed a mouthpiece for orthodoxy, and he pressed even those who didn't talk into service.

Maitland feels that our culture devalues silence.  Our individualism and consumerist need to fulfil ourselves has crowded silence out.  So resistance of friends to her plans has itself to be resisted with deeper understanding and the careful explanations in this book.

Maitland worries that we no longer respond to appalling tragedy with silence.  We chatter and make busy work when loved ones die. We even applaud in funerals. 

She spends six weeks on Skye, a bleak island off the Scottish coast, noting the principal experiences that silence brings: greater intensity of seeing, hearing, smelling; a breaking down of the boundaries of the self; a joy she names “jouissance "; and hearing sounds and voices.

Maitland then travels to Israel for a desert experience of silence, where she discovers the lassitude and undoing of a sense of time, both of which open her out to an experience of God.

Her third planned experience of silence was in the high country near her childhood home in southwest Scotland.  These walks give Sara Maitland a different experience of solitude, because high country below the snow-line is noisy and stimulates clear memories, which she polishes into anecdotes.  This experience of silence actually reinforces the sense of ego.

She reflects on these two contrasting experiences: the desert silence helps her to pray; the mountain solitude helps her to put experience into words.  The latter "silence" is the solitude the artist claims, especially since the Romantic poets gave us the image of the artist as a hero journeying into the self to bring out new creations for the reader or viewer.

Maitland knows she needs these two silences – the desert and the mountain – to fulfil her twin callings to pray and to write. She wonders whether they are compatible with each other.  Can she have both, or must she relinquish one or the other?

She buys and rebuilds an isolated shepherd's hut, again in southwest Scotland, to learn how to find both silence and solitude for both prayer and writing. 

The contrast Maitland draws between emptying self, the classic Christian goal, and fulfilling the self, the modern Enlightenment project, is provocative. 

If silence opens us more fully to the Other then it entails a necessary breaking down of the boundaries of the self. This is one of the problems that Maitland says our modern society has with silence: it fears the disintegration of the self. Maitland argues persuasively that holding on to tightly to the self is madness, because it prevents us from being accessible to God.

Like Maitland, this reviewer feels a vocation to write.  Since retirement, and through my deeper immersion in the Franciscan Third Order, I am also rediscovering my vocation to pray.  Sara Maitland's book, and the prism of silence she explores, prod me deeper into prayer and more thoughtfully, less frenetically, into writing.

1.       For this amazing day,
we give you thanks, Most High,
for leaping green of trees,
and gazing blue of sky.
Love without end,
gift of our Friend,
Creator’s Son,
our Jesus Christ.

2.       The love of dearest friends,
steadfast through every storm.
The stranger’s help in need,
all human care to warm.
Love every where,
gift that you share,
we give you thanks,
friend Jesus Christ.

3.       *My wife's sweet morning kiss,
her love my life inspires,
the way you join all this
to spiritual desires.
For her embrace,
sheer gift of grace,
I bless your love,
dear Jesus Christ.

4.       Your Scriptures send us out
to serve all folk in need.
They draw us close to you,
and challenge to proceed.
For words of joy,
love to deploy,
peace to unfold,
Word, Jesus Christ.

5.       Exalting power of faith,
its loving kindness shows.
It guides us all to walk
the way God loves and knows.
For faith's true role’s
to lift the soul
in praise for love
to Jesus Christ.

                Metre 6666.4444 “Darwall” TIS 108
©Ted Witham 2008
(thanks to e.e. cummings who inspired the first verse imagery)

Or “My husband's morning kiss." or omit this verse as appropriate.

This is my review for Studio: A Journal of Christians Writing

of

Via Dolorosa

By Nick Trakakis

187 pages, published by the author

 [www.trakakis.com]

John Bussell, one of the founders of this church, was the eldest of nine children.  John Wollaston, who built the little church at Picton, had five children.  We all know of big families from the 1800s and early 1900s.  My father was one of eight.

We know the reasons for the big families.  Before the days of immunisation, many children died before they reached two or three years.  Before penicillin, mortality rates for adults were also higher than today.  TB killed my Auntie Violet when she was 28.

There was no aged pension, so parents had lots of children in the hope that one or two would look after them in old age.  We have all heard of unmarried women caring for their parents, and sacrificing their own chances of a family.

Up until the 1800s, big families were simply an economic necessity.  In England at that time, things were beginning to change.  Historians claim that the 1800s were the time when childhood was invented.  It was then that parents started to have fewer children and to cherish each one more.

We can see the same thing happening in India now. The middle-class is growing and it has aspirations greater than simply surviving in poverty, so they are having fewer children and more ambitions for each.

Going back much further than Victorian England, back to the time of Jesus, we discover that children were the least valued of human beings.  Children had no rights: babies were exposed, and nobody was prosecuted.  Children had no property and no current economic value.  They were lower on the scale even than slaves, who at least could earn their living or be sold for cash.

In fact, children had negative value.  Each child was just an extra mouth to feed. 

So imagine the surprise of the disciples when Jesus told them that to enter the kingdom of heaven they had to be like a child.

The disciples didn't get it.

To enter the kingdom of heaven, you’re supposed to take notice of someone who has no rights, no voice in the community, no property, no experience of life. You are to be like someone who is simply a victim of other people's decisions.

St Mark describes the disciples as dumb; he says they always miss the point.  Three times Jesus tells them that he is going to Jerusalem to be handed over to others and to be killed.  Three times the disciples don't get it.

And I’m with the disciples. How could this possibly be the Messiah they had expected? Instead of someone taking charge, this Messiah is letting others take charge of him.  This Messiah is giving up his rights, his voice and his standing in the community. This Messiah is handing himself over to others. This Messiah is behaving like the least of human beings; he is behaving as a child.

It's no wonder that the disciples don't get it.  And it is this aspect of Christianity that many people today don't get. Why would you surrender your power of action, your ability to initiate things?  Why would you give up your sense of identity?  Why would you? Yet this seems to be exactly what Jesus is predicting for himself, and not only for himself, he is inviting his disciples, including maybe you and me, to do the same.

Jesus comes at this advice to be as a child from two directions:

Firstly, he says, we are to receive this child, take notice of it, submit to it.  We are to take what a babe says as guidance for our lives.

Secondly, we are to be like this child, to put ourselves into the situation of the child, to give up all the advantages of being a complete person in society.  We are to open ourselves to being the victim of other people’s decisions for us. And this, we are told, is the way to the kingdom of heaven; this is the way to find God's fullness.

It seems like madness.

This week I was surprised to discover that I have some things in common with John Bussell.  He’s not really one of my heroes. I studied theology. So did Bussell, although he wasn't ordained.  Bussell struggled to make a living on his farm "Cattle Chosen". That was very different from me. I left our farm when I was 12. But when his farm didn't work out, Bussell went to teach classics at Bishop Hale's School. So did I. But when I taught there, it was called Hale School, and it was no longer in the Cloisters in St George's Terrace, but it had moved to its present site in Wembley Downs.

I was Acting Chaplain at Hale for a year and then senior Chaplain at Christ Church Grammar for eight years.  I loved both jobs. They are both good schools. They emphasised the value of excellence and taught the boys to strive to be the best they could.  They instilled ambition in the students, and I must say that part of that ambition was to do well, both financially and in standing in the community.  Money and power.

When I told students that Jesus said not to be ambitious for property and power, some of the teachers got angry.

Those schools are caught up in our materialistic world. Materialism is ambition for money and power. We are caught up in it too, even though we can see the damage it does; the damage to ourselves and our relationships, the damage to the environment. Materialism distorts everything. But even a year after the fall of Wall Street, it’s really hard to see a better way of doing things.

So we listen to this morning’s readings, and we remember that you and I do know a constructive way to challenge the damage materialism causes. It’s called the Way of the Cross.

Want nothing for yourself, give up your power over yourself, hand over your right to make decisions about yourself, these are the heart of the Way of the Cross. As I said, there are many times when, like the disciples, I don’t get it.

But the deep question Jesus wants his disciples to ask is, “Who is God for us really?” Most of us assume that we run our lives. We set our goals. We get what we work for. Jesus challenges all that and invites us to change our hearts and minds; Jesus wants us to convert to his way of thinking.

The challenge he gives us today is to learn how to let God be God in our lives. That will look different for each one of us, and I know, for me at least, it is taking a lifetime to respond to that challenge.

But for all of us, it means firstly working out what God wants us to be and do. To take time and space to ponder those questions, and to continue to make time and space to listen for God’s direction.

It means also finding ways to serve God in other people. Jesus knew that handing ourselves over in service will be one of the steps along the Way for every one his followers, because serving others is the only way we can learn to stop our self-serving.

It means also undoing our grasp on things and people. So often, fists like this are the way we are before God, grubbing for ourselves and holding on tight to what we grab. But if we uncurl our fingers and hold out our hands, then we find that we don’t need to grab and seize. We can hold our palms upward and receive.

I’d like to ask you to do an experiment this morning when we say the Lord’s Prayer together. You know it off by heart. Instead of holding on tight to your prayer book, I invite you to uncurl your hands and hold them out with your palms like this as you pray:

“Your kingdom come ....

“Give us today our daily bread....

“Forgive us our sins ...”

Focus on your hands and the words of the prayer, and see how the prayer comes alive for you in a new way.

Then bring that openness, that sense of receptivity, to the altar rail as you hold hands open for the bread, the living symbol of all that God gives back to us.

Jesus gave us the model of how to find the kingdom of God; he predicted it three times. He handed himself over, he gave up everything he had, everything he was, even his life. Then, after Jesus had completely dispossessed himself, God the Father was waiting in love to pour upon him more gifts than he could ever have imagined.

The more we undo our grasp on our own ambitions, the more we become like a no-value child, the more we will know the overwhelming generosity of God.

Via Stigmatae

I prayed to be like Jesus,
to be strong, and true, and knd.
I prayed to be like Jesus
with all my heart and mind.

I prayed to be like Jesus,
but saw the way to Christ
went by loss and total dying.
I balked: could I pay the price? 

I wanted to be joyful,
on hopes that I'd be healed.
I saw the road to Jesus was
with suffering sealed.

I gaze at him up on the Cross;
I see that all is lost.
I pray for strength of body,
so I may live the cost.

We believe
not
in planes that punch the guts of Western culture;
The looked-for symbol obscured
by reality - hundreds of bodies burned;
scores of minds crushed;
 springs of breath stopped.

We believe
not
in Allah who kills and burns and grinds;
His righteousness hidden
by hate and zealotry and spite,
and scores of minds bent;
and compassion’s breath ablaze.

We believe
not
in Christ who claims he’s King;
The dying Cross aloof;
 indifference foregrounded;
hearts quelled,
minds closed,

We believe
our Christ has
identified

11 September 2009

Kath Engebretson, In Your Shoes: Inter-faith education for Australian religious educators,
Ballan, Vic.: Connor Court Publishing, 2009. 169 pages, p’back.

A book review

Kath Engebretson's prime virtue as a guide for religion teachers is her practical realism.  In In Your Shoes Dr Engebretson shows off that virtue again.  She argues that teaching inter-faith is vital for global peace, and she shows how it can be done – in primary schools, secondary schools and universities. 

The question for inter-faith education is not only "What can you learn about other religions?", but also "What can you learn from other religions?" For Engebretson, inter-faith education is transformative: it changes lives.  In their positive encounters with other faiths, people construct their identities anew.  How does it change me, for example, as a Christian to learn about Islam or Hinduism?  Even more pertinently, what must I think about a person's religion when I have come into a positive relationship with the person?

What I like about Kath Engebretson is that she makes it easy.  What could seem radically new and difficult is presented as just a little outgrowth of teachers' current practice.  For example, Dr Engebretson shows that inter-faith education is based on the phenomenological approach well-known to many religion teachers.  Not just the approach proposed by Ninian Smart, but through its Australian versions popularised by Moore and Habel, and more recently, Terry Lovat.

This seems easy, and in a sense, it is, but Engebretson shows that a radical experiential phenomenological approach is required for inter-faith education.  Students must have such significant encounters with people from other faiths that they walk in their shoes.

And she shows, step by step, how you would go about this at primary, secondary and university levels.  I was intrigued that In Your Shoes for primary students takes us back to the 1980s and the excellent approach of Michael Grimmitt and depth themes.  These are placed alongside newer conceptual enquiry tools to help Primary students gained foundational knowledge of their "home" religion and other faiths.

In the secondary school, Engebretson advocates depth studies and a dialogical approach. She develops several depth studies for younger High School students, and while they do not quite constitute a teacher’s term programme, they would provide a good basis to work from.

Engebretson's pragmatism is most evident at the secondary level. She shows a keen appreciation of the Realpolitik, particularly of Catholic schools.  She acknowledges real limitations both from students’ cognitive development and also their unchurched backgrounds.  Students have a shallow grounding in the faith group sponsoring the school.  Inter-faith education has therefore to fit around "home faith" teaching.  Nevertheless, it should be tackled.

The skill Engebretson displays in this balancing act is impressive.  What reads as simple exposition in fact anticipates most objections and ends up encouraging the teacher: it can be done.

She likewise encourages universities to take students beyond purely descriptive Religious Studies to more transformative inter-faith courses.

This is an impressive and grounded book, thoroughly suited for its audience of busy Religion teachers in Catholic (and other Church) schools.

On occasion, I felt that Engebretson's pragmatism underestimated the possibilities: I would have liked to have been more inspired by, say, the depths of transformation and inter-faith understanding Year 11 and 12 students can and do reach.  But this is not a book about the heights inter-faith education may sometimes reach: it is about a reality teachers can bring about.

In the interests of accurate history and to avoid misunderstandings about the Saracens who harassed Assisi, Tertiary Michael Giffin gives some evidence to show that these Saracens were resident in southern Italy, and were attacking Assisi to do the Emperor's bidding, not for religious reasons.

WHO DID CLARE REPEL?

by MICHAEL GIFFIN tssf

Clare repelled freelance Saracen soldiers in the army of the Holy Roman Emperor,

Frederick II, not Saracens who represented an Islamic threat. All Franciscans need

to be aware of this distinction lest we contribute to inter-faith misunderstanding.

Here are some references:

http://www.answers.com/topic/clare-of-assisi

Clare lived during a tumultuous period in Italian history, and in 1234 San

Damiano's walls were transgressed by soldiers in the army of the Holy Roman

emperor, Frederick II. Clare was ill in bed but reportedly rose and went to the

window with a ciborium, a chalice-like vessel that was used at the time to house

the Eucharist. She was said to have raised the ciborium at the soldiers—some of

them Saracen, or Muslim—who had mounted a ladder, and they fell over backwards

and fled.

http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/english_pdf/Assisi.pdf

The History of Saint Clare, Virgin, tells of various miracles performed by Saint

Clare. There are episodes of multiplications of loaves and of bottles of oil that

appeared in the convent when there was none before. But Clare performed the

most famous of the miracles in 1240 on a Friday in September, in which she turned

away an attack by Saracen soldiers who had broken into the convent cloister by

showing them the Sacred Host.

[Note: the term used here is “Saracen soldiers” not “Islamic

soldiers”. The distinction is important. MG.]

http://www.deremilitari.org/resources/articles/saracen_archers.htm

During the first phase of their Southern Italian conquest, the Normans included

archers in their troops; but such usage seems to have been sporadic and simple …

According to Anna Commena, the archers that accompanied the Norman

expeditionary force in Epirus were just young striplings and decrepit old men,

recruited from every part of Southern Italy, and they did not have any knowledge

of handling a bow …

In early twelfth century Southern Italy, as in the rest of the Continent,

crossbowmen were being increasingly used in place of archers. But an important

exception to this was represented by the presence of Muslims, whose culture

contained a strong archery tradition, in the Norman-Swabian armies. The Normans,

soon after the conquest of Sicily was complete, began using Sicilian Saracen

mounted and foot archers as auxiliary troops …

Fredrick II reinforced the use of Saracens in Southern Italian armies. After having

put down the last of the rebellions in Sicily he deported to Lucera, in Puglia, the

most troublesome Saracens who had refused to convert. Here the Emperor founded

a flourishing Arab colony, which continued their traditions and customs for about a

century, as well as the right to practice their own religion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Islam_in_southern_Italy

The Islamic conquest and rule of Sicily, Malta, and parts of southern Italy was a

process whose origin can be traced back through the general expansion of Islam

from the 7th century onwards. Though the Muslim presence was ephemeral on the

peninsula and limited mostly to semi-permanent soldier camps—the Emirate of Bari

existed for only twenty years or so—their rule over the island was effective from

902, but their complete rule of Sicily lasted only from 965 until 1061, though they

were not completely evicted until 1091.

“We’ve just got time to say the Office before I go to work.”  Something about the way my wife said the word "Office" caught my attention this morning.  She was using the word to refer to the prayer that we say as members of the Third Order. The word also  can mean  Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, the regular prayers of Anglican clergy (and others).

It is a strange word, Office. It doesn't refer to a place, say the place where prayers are said.  Officium, the Latin origin of the word, means duty.  "Office" reminds us that we take on praying as a duty.

The idea that prayers are duty clashes with our normal assumptions.  Surely the motive for saying our prayers our prayers should be love, not duty. Officium clashes with the ideal that prayer is delighting in sitting in God's presence. "God looks at me , and I look at God," as Archbishop Anthony Bloom quotes the man sitting in silence in church.

To say our prayers as duty is counter-cultural. To say our prayers as duty expresses our deliberate decision to place our lives before God, day by day. To say our prayers as duty is an express desire to link ourselves in prayer to our fellow-believers around the world. To say our prayers as duty is an affirmation that we intend to respond to God in love however happy or sad, full of faith or doubt, we feel today.

If, in saying our prayers as duty, we feel delight or bliss, or we feel remorse or liberated by forgiveness, those feelings are a bonus, and are an additional blessing.

To say the Office is to confirm our identity as Christians, and having done our duty, we have placed ourselves in the presence of the Holy One. What a wonder-full place to be!

Mariani, Paul. Gerard Manley Hopkins: a Life.

New York City: Viking Adult, 2008

Reviewed by Ted Witham

The 13th century Franciscan philosopher Duns Scotus  was one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ heroes.  Duns Scotus invented  the idea of haecceitas.  This ugly Latin word is usually translated by the equally ugly   ”isness ", but would be better rendered as "uniqueness." Haecceitas refers to the quality that makes a thing itself and not anything else.  In other words, Scotus was encouraging his readers to gaze at things until they disclosed their unique quality.  Gazing, according to Sister Ilia Delio  among others, is a characteristic aspect of Franciscan praying. Duns Scotus' philosophy places him firmly in this Franciscan tradition.

Hopkins pays homage to Duns Scotus in his poem “Duns Scotus's Oxford." This sonnet deplores the way Oxford has developed and grown since the 1200s.

“... graceless growth, thou hast confounded

Rural rural keeping - folk, flocks, and flowers.”

Hopkins has evidently informed this judgement by gazing at the buildings and trees he so loves until he sees what makes Oxford unique.

 “Towery city and branchy between towers;

Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded.”

Hopkins was expert at gazing.  Ilia Delio tells the story of Hopkins gazing at a tree in Ireland for three days until it disclosed its haecceitas.  Hopkins felt at home in the natural world of Ireland and Wales. It is this world, gazed at and wondered about, that is "charged with the glory of God.”

Paul Mariani's biography reveals that Hopkins’ expertise was profound but narrow.  His powerful intellect was trained at Oxford in the classics, and he remained absorbed in Latin and Greek even after the Jesuits had thoroughly trained him in theology. 

 The Jesuits seemed not to know what to do with this strange, intense young man, so they eventually sent him to Ireland on the pretext that he would help other Jesuits establish a Catholic University in Dublin.  Even though he was on the Catholic side, Ireland was not a congenial place for an English patriot, especially one who found it difficult to make friends. In practice, his lonely years in Ireland were an almost endless task marking the Latin and Greek exams of all the children matriculating in Ireland.

Depressed and physically ill, he battled on until his death in 1888 aged only 44.  

He cried out, presumably in the mid-1880s:

My own heart let me more have pity on; let

Me live to my sad self hereafter, kind,

Charitable; not live in this tormented mind.

With this tormented mind, tormenting yet.

Only hours before his death, Father Wheeler heard Hopkins whispering over and over again, "I am so happy.  I am so happy."    Mariani’s simple telling of this story leaves us with the impression that Hopkins is finally happy because he knows he will soon be passing from this unhappy life to his glorious reward.

Mariani’s Life is richly textured.  The biographer gathers a mass of detail and tells the story of Hopkins’ life chronologically.   His sources are so detailed that he often reports verbatim conversations that Hopkins had on a given day, and records what he was thinking and confiding to his journal.

Hopkins’ story is simple. From the English upper-middle class, Hopkins would have been expected to remain lifelong Anglican were it not for his awkward conversion to Rome. This choice, made at Oxford, determined his direction.

It was a time when young Oxford men agonised over ‘going over’: John Henry Newman, another of his heroes, had done it a generation earlier, and several of Hopkins’ circle either converted or seriously contemplated it. It was a decision to be made, as Hopkins did, with lengthy deliberation and careful disclosure to family and friends. Some never forgave or understood his decision.

His lifelong friendship with the poet Robert Bridges only just lasted this decision time.

Hopkins did well enough at his theological studies, and loved the setting of the Jesuit Novitiate at Roehampton, Wales. His daily walks inspired his poetry; he learned Welsh to better minister to Welsh-speakers; and he regaled his fellows with erudite jokes at end of term dinners. He was happy – or at least as happy as he would ever be.

His engagement with the craft of poetry started to flower at Roehampton. Paul Mariani shows how original Hopkins was both in developing the idea of ‘sprung rhythm’ and in paying attention to ‘inscape’. These are both complex ideas, and Mariani helped me understand them better.

Hopkins’ concept of ‘inscape’ is the poetical descendent of Duns Scotus’ haecceitas. Where landscape is exterior, ‘inscape’ is interior. It describes the qualities revealed when you gaze on something in nature or on the action of a person. Poetry is partly about capturing inscape, as a painter, in depicting trees and sky, communicates the qualities of the landscape.

Hopkins deeply understood the contribution Shakespeare had made to poetry and to the English language by adapting iambic pentameter to English poetry in both drama and poems. Hopkins believed that English is not a syllabic language, and questioned whether iambs and dactyls and other syllabic patterns were best for English. So he experimented with a line of five beats – still a pentameter – that was independent of the number of syllables: this was sprung rhythm.

Mariani explores at some depth the influence of Duns Scotus on Hopkins.  In a book of over 400 pages, I was a little disappointed not to find more about another influence: Ignatius of Loyola. I felt Paul Mariani played down the Jesuits’ influence of Hopkins. However, there is no way that a sensitive man like Hopkins could have completed the 40 day Exercises without being deeply permeated by Ignatian spirituality. Mariani may have thought that David Downes in his study on the Ignatian spirit and Hopkins  had sufficiently covered the notion of Hopkins the priest-poet.

While still in simple vows, the Jesuits put Hopkins into a classroom. He taught zealously, and students remembered him as gentle and trustworthy.

They would surely remember his illustration of how Achilles hooked Hector’s bloodied corpse behind his chariot and dragged it beneath the walls of Troy. “Hopkins lay on his back and had a student drag him around the floor.” (p. 333) His zany pedagogy sometimes connected with his students, but more often than not, his students simply found him over-scrupulous and strange. Teaching was not his vocation.

Meanwhile, Hopkins struggled on with his craft: sprung rhythm and internal rhymes pressed into service to express his insight into the true nature of the world around him. Not that Hopkins was always convinced that being a poet was the heart of his vocation. He stopped writing for some years, disappointed that he was not being published, and unsure of what his superiors really thought of his poetry.

And so to Ireland, and to the lonely room with the desk piled high with papers to mark, and the daily walk his only escape.

We might be tempted to conclude that he had lived the life of the archetypical Romantic poet: the genius whose suffering was transmuted into Art. This was the ideal that Byron, Keats, Coleridge and others proposed. 

Yet I doubt Hopkins would want to be placed with the Romantics. Every day, he might say, he had the privilege of seeing  the ‘dearest freshness deep down things’, and though to the observer, his life may seem to carry the shape of the Crucified Lord, Hopkins knew every day the presence of the Risen Lord: ‘Enough! the Resurrection,// A heart’s clarion! Away grief’s gasping, joyless days, dejection.’  This disciple was not waiting for the after-life to taste the joys of life in the Risen One. He was enchanted by it now.

For this lover of Hopkins’ poetry, this life was not only fascinating to read, but it was also good to hold such a beautiful book.  The narrative is sustained with clarity over 435 pages, and a handful of illustrations add much it.  I found myself often looking back to the photos of the young Bridges and Hopkins taken in 1863, and used as a pictorial epigraph for Part 1, and then flicking forward to the photos taken in 1888 months before Hopkins' death in Dublin.  These show that Bridges as a mature man with a vital eye looking forward to the future.  Hopkins, by contrast, looks exhausted and grim, with his hair receding and his head tilted slightly backwards as though he already looking up in anticipation.

Mariani has captured for me the haecceitas of Father Gerard Manley Hopkins, priest and poet.  Mariani's inscape is an insight into his intense, short life.

It was 1968. I was travelling from my home-town deep in W. A.’s Great Southern to the University in Perth.  I had slept overnight on the rail journey from Tambellup to Perth Central, walked to St George's Terrace to board the 72 bus to Crawley.  As I found my seat, I saw my friend Maria di Nardo, and greeted her.

“G’day, Maria. Howyergoin’?”

 Maria looked blank.  I repeated:

“G’day, Maria. Howyergoin’?”

I suddenly realised that there was a language problem.  I modulated my accent.

"Hello, Maria.  How are you today?"

"Oh hi, Ted," Maria replied, as if I hadn't spoken twice before.  "I'm well, thank you."

That was a Eureka moment: the distance between home and Uni was not just geographical.  There actually was a linguistic and cultural distance between the two, a distance I had suspected when I talked to my former Primary school friends who had not lived away from our small town. They were unimpressed with my conversation about French poets and Latin verbs, and I was beginning to disdain circular conversations about crops and football.

Over the next few years, I discovered I had a choice: either to integrate my "Tambellup" self and by "Uni" self – or to not integrate them.  I worked out that maturity comes only by applying myself to this task of integration.  To become an adult I had to learn to talk respectfully to both my old schoolmates and my lecturers.

Like all teenagers, I had to integrate many aspects of my life: for me especially my sexuality, my academic and commonsense knowledge, my bilingualism in a monolingual culture.  This process of integration is like bringing blurry images so well into focus that they become one clear one.  So I knew that I would enjoy the wonderfully literate Arabesques retracing these steps, and reviving my memory of novels studied 40 years ago at Uni.

The author and the sub-title ‘Tales of Double Lives’ drew me in:  Robert Dessaix had already in Corfu helped me come terms with being bilingual in our stubbornly monolingual culture. The double lives in Arabesques, at least on the surface, are those of Dessaix and the French intellectual André Gide, as the author moseys around Europe and North Africa gently searching out the places that shaped Gide as one of the giants of the first half of last century.

But also intimated are the ‘double lives’ we lead as adolescents; the lives we hide from our parents and the lives we hide from our social circles. ‘Double lives’ suggests the French doubler, “to fold”.  Arabesques tells of lives “folded in” on each other: Gide’s on Dessaix’s, Dessaix’s adolescence on Dessaix’s mature self as a gay writer, Gide’s love for, and long marriage to, Madeleine,  folded against his dalliances during all those years with young men.

On his first trip south away from his confining mother, Gide wrote of himself, “j’éclos.” Dessaix lifts up this word for us, but admits the difficulty of translating it: “I bloom”,” I come into flower” don’t do it justice. It describes the moment when a bud opens. When Gide travelled, he felt like a bud just opening.  Robert Dessaix’s travel does the same for him. Travel starts the task of integrating the clashing elements of their lives. Remembering André Gide and discovering him anew helps Dessaix unravel the role travel plays in his personal growth.

I read travel memoir partly to evoke exotic places. Dessaix lovingly sketches the towns and deserts of Morocco and Tunisia, the narrow lanes of their souks and the aching beauty of their wilderness. In the Maghreb, and in the claustrophobic countryside of Normandy and Provence, Dessaix’s artist eye evokes line and colour. The text is complemented by pertinent photos, illustrations and graphics and printed on pages each designed like a mosaics tile. Arabesques is a beautiful book to hold and read.

Arabesques is richly textured both with places and with people. It is true that at times Dessaix seeks solitude as he moves around. Mostly he travels with companions including the young and mercurial Daniel, and the over-the-top Miriam and princess Zaïda. Their views and friendship are also folded (doublés) into the story.

The distinctive voice in which Robert Dessaix presented Radio National’s ‘Books and Writing Program’ (1985-1995) carries over into print, and while you can hear it as you read Corfu and Night Letters, it resonates strongest in Arabesques. His meditations on André Gide become reflections on religion, on sexuality, on friendship, on aging, home and travel, in a word, on life. The fact that these meditations arise from slow and meandering travel turns the writing into a sensual treat.

People were surprised by the impact of the talks given by Sr Ilia Delio when she was in Perth earlier this week.

‘This is the direction we [Christians, the Church] should be heading,’ one bishop declared.

These listeners were referring to Sister Ilia asking us to look at God’s world through modern lenses rather than our typical medieval thought forms. The evolutionary universe is a helpful framework for Christian spirituality, because God is love and love is dynamic, unfolding: evolutionary.  More than that, Sr Ilia claimed: evolutionary changes require chance, law and deep time. These three factors mean that in the short term, God’s universe can seem messy and unfinished, but creatures yearn to be more complete. Creation is on its way to its destination, which is none other the completion of the Incarnation of the Christ.

Sr Ilia’s main inspirations are the Franciscan theologians Bonaventure and Dun Scotus, and in the 20^th Century, the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin.

In her talk about living the Gospel in the 21^st Century, Ilia critiqued our usual approach to prayer as something we do in order to reach out to someone/something ‘out there’. But in reality, she reminded us, prayer is about going inward. If we abide in the presence of Christ, Christ is found in our hearts in our innermost selves. Prayer is not about ‘doing’, but about dwelling in ourselves and in all creation and therefore in Christ.

In an infinitely connected universe, we become more human by reaching out to others and to the future. Christ is incarnate in human being. The more we become ourselves, the more we express Christ.

In an aside about cyborgs, Ilia urged us to take note of the futurists’ warnings. Technology changes us: implants stop depression, Google changes the nature of information, and repaired organs give new but subtly different life. If the next steps in human evolution are to be hastened by technology (and Sr Ilia did not take sides in that particular controversy, but if we are,) then we need to take a close look at what that evolved humanity might be.

On the other hand, 96% of all species have lived – and then become extinct. Why should homo sapiens be any different? Could another species take up the cause of consciousness?

I heard Ilia Delio while reading Tom Frame’s excellent Evolution in the Antipodes which describes Darwin’s Australian legacy, beginning with Darwin’s visit to Port Jackson, Hobart and King George Sound in 1837, and continuing to whether creation science causes problems for Australian schools in the 2000s.

Tom’s careful analysis looks at Darwin from the point of view of the controversy his ideas sparked. We need to understand that history. But Sr Ilia admits nothing controversial about evolution: it is simply the way we moderns describe change in the universe. If we see things through the lens of evolution, we will know better who we are, and how to express whose we are.

The church as institution is in the process of collapsing.  While our national population continues to increase, the numbers at church continue to decline, and those I still meet at church are ever older and greyer.  The number of clergy remains more or less constant, but fewer of working age are working, or working full-time.

The church is collapsing, or if not, then it is being radically re-shaped.

It is easy to see the past as a Golden Age, with full churches charged only with evangelising those in its pews. In reality, the full churches of the 1950s though high on attendance, were low on involvement. If attenders then saw any real benefit it was more as insurance for the after-life than for opportunities for service. The massive man-power of the fifties was never mobilised for the Gospel.

We need to be clear about the connection between church and Gospel, between the institution and its mission. For they are not the same thing, and nor has the church ever really been shaped to serve only itself.

The church is God’s instrument to use as God wishes for God’s mission. My assertion is that God radically re-shapes the church for God’s purposes at least once each generation. In each generation, we seek out leaders to show the way forward: how we are now and in the near future to serve God’s Good News.

I have always expected bishops to be among those who will lead us. They are primarily ordained as ministers of the Gospel and only secondarily as bishops in the Church of God.

My high expectations of bishops are too often disappointed. I hear of bishops, for example, trying to force the amalgamation of dying parishes. Bishops’ instincts seem to lead them to preserve the institution and to fabricate a patch that will be doomed because of the impossible demands it will make on personnel, particularly on clergy. One priest will be asked to double the number of Sunday services and yet maintain or increase her efforts in pastoral care and parish management. The bishop, it seems, is desperate to preserve the past, and is unwilling to pay the price of scouting the future.

The others pressured in these situations may also seek preservation at the least cost. Maybe, they suggest, close one parish and require its remnant to attend another perhaps more viable parish. Maybe, they say, seek out ways to share scarce resources more efficiently.

But these proposals, too, are an attempt to stitch together a fraying institution, and will end up holding the tearing fabric for only a few moments longer.

God’s mission demands we ask radical questions.  The church’s current practice is to offer the Eucharist so that it is readily available. Now, I am one who loves the Eucharist. I am fed deeply by my participation in the sacrament, and I am bonded more passionately in the Body of Christ at each celebration.

 But let us ask what would happen if the Eucharist were less easily accessed.

It might mean that those who really loved the Eucharist would make a greater effort to attend when it was offered, thus making each service both better attended and more greatly appreciated.

On the other hand, it may force small groups of believers into finding other ways to meet their hunger for Eucharist, lay-led agape meals, for example, or vodcasted services delivered on DVD by pastoral assistants also bearing consecrated bread and wine.

Our bishops are our teachers, “perfecters” as Thomas Aquinas called them. Well, let them “perfect”, not the organisation of an institution, but our understanding of the Eucharist and our spiritual needs which are supplied by it.

Let our bishops “perfect” our desire to serve in the community, perhaps by bringing their lights out from under buckets.

For example, I would like to hear more, and more regularly of the involvement of the Archbishop of Perth in L’Arche. Maybe writing a blog about their personal ministry, as does Archbishop of Melbourne Philip Freier, should be required of all diocesan bishops.

Bishops’ oratory should be so persuasive that it is broadcast by the mass media and reinforced by technology narrow-casting to the faithful. Then we would be inspired by a sharp and bright vision of the Gospel.

But how I wish our bishops would lead us out of the mire of a collapsing institution into the narrow paths of following our Lord on his mission in the world.

Wills, Garry, What the Gospels Meant,
 New York: Viking 2008 (209 pages)

Reviewed by Ted Witham

My friend, acclaimed teacher of storytelling Bob Wilhelm, recommended What the Gospels Meant.  This latest work by Garry Wills will indeed appeal to storytellers (among others), because it shows how the Gospels are not simply stories about Jesus, not unsophisticated biographies, but rather they are narratives with intent. 

Wills shows how the Gospels are made up to show the truth about Jesus by weaving together aspects of the Scriptures, folklore and wider imagery.  These compositions are not fabrications; rather they are what we would call creative fiction. The gospel writers start from the truth that "Jesus died for our sins, and was raised again, according to Sacred Scripture."  This Pauline kernel is expanded in each gospel in different ways. 

Mark is concerned particularly to show how Jesus confronted and overcame the daemonic powers.  Matthew draws a picture of Jesus the teacher, while Luke paints Jesus the reconciler.  John begins and ends with the destruction of the Jewish Temple: Jesus has come to show a new and inner route to the Father.

As Wills himself writes, "the Johannine school meditated on the fullest and deepest meanings of what Jesus said, and impressed these meanings more fully and at length than if they were just reporting ipsissima verba.[ the very words themselves] ” (p. 170)

Some popular writers explaining what the Gospels meant pretend that there has not been 200 years of biblical criticism: they treat the New Testament as literally true. If the Gospels say that is what Jesus said, then they are the actual words he spoke.

Others follow the Jesus Seminar to its logical end and believe that Jesus said and did only those things that can be proved by modern historical methods. One scholar satirised the Jesus Seminar’s results by asserting that their Jesus was reduced to a wandering Stoic who came to a bad end.

Of course, neither of these does justice to the intelligence of the Gospels. Writers like Garry Wills take biblical criticism seriously into account; they read the text carefully (Wills’ translations are surprisingly fresh) and they remain orthodox.

I did enjoy Wills’ reminder that the original Greek of the Gospels was rough, marketplace language.  His translation of John 20 captures the movement between polished and unpolished speech and the abrupt changes of tense.

“Then Simon Peter arrives, following [the other disciple] and he entered the tomb. And he inspects the winding cloths lying there, and the veil for covering the face, not with the winding cloths but apart, folded up in its own location.” (p. 201)

Our familiar translations usually smooth away this vivid immediacy.

And more: this closer version of the Greek yields the insight that the other disciple was “faster not only at running but also at comprehending.” (p. 201)

Garry Wills relies heavily on the work of Fr Raymond Brown. Where Brown is technical, however, Wills writes more simply. In fact, he seems to aim to write as he describes the writing in John’s Gospel: “The language is very simple, almost childlike in its short plain statements, but rich in its simplicity.” (p. 171)

I commend What the Gospel Mean. You could confidently recommend to any intelligent lay-person looking for a basic understanding of Christian faith – and how we know this Revelation from the four Gospels.

If I have a criticism of this compendious history of the Franciscan movement, it is that its driving theme gets overwhelmed by the quantity of detail.  Maurice Carmody OFM has such a big story to tell, that it is sometimes difficult to know why he is telling it.

This is not his fault.  This history is, at least to my knowledge, the first attempt to tell the whole story from the initial companions of Francis of Assisi right through to the Franciscan family of the 21st century.   Of all books in the 16-page bibliography, Fr Maurice mentions only two or three which attempt the same historical range as The Franciscan Story.

And what a story it is!  The Franciscan Story begins with the stories of Francis and Clare, then explores the Brotherhood's increasing acceptance by the Church, the growth of the Brothers and Sisters of Penance, before arriving at the central theme of the story, which is the tension at the heart of the Franciscan community: is it possible to really live the life of poverty with the same austerity as St Francis?

This tension leads to division, firstly into the Conventuals and the Observants, and then on into greater and different reforms and divisions, always over the question of poverty.  This division made the Franciscan family in these early centuries vulnerable to being taken over as a tool of papal policy, especially as, from Bonaventure on, the friars produced great diplomats who placed themselves at the service of Popes.

The age of division came to an end at the end of the 19th century with the so-called Leonine Union, the attempt to bring together all the First Order friars under Pope Leo XIII.  This is Carmody's area of academic speciality, and his description of the intertwining of papal and Italian politics is fascinating.

The story ends with extended comments about the Second and Third Orders in modern times.  As a Tertiary I was struck with Leo XIII’s definition of Third Order spirituality:

The Order of St Francis is based entirely on the observance of the precepts of Jesus Christ.  The holy founder had no other object in view than that the Order should be a kind of training ground for the intensive practice of the Christian rule of life.  (p. 458)

The weakness with this definition is that successive Popes in the 20th century narrowed the role of the Seculars to personal piety, discouraging the social activism that has often animated Franciscan Christians.

Much of  Carmody's story is told through the lens of great individuals' lives.  Some of these as a Franciscan I would rather not know much about.  An example: the Order in the early 16th century was dominated by John Capistran. A very able judge, John became a friar with an energetic ministry as an Inquisitor and diplomat. He played a leading military role in the siege of Belgrade in 1546. A Humble and peace-making Franciscan? Maybe not.

I enjoyed learning so much more about the Franciscan heritage, and can commend Maurice Carmody’s clarity and grasp of a huge body of material.