As we close this last working week before Christmas 2007, I've been pondering what special meaning Christmas might have for me this year. Writing an email newsletter with Amanda last night to send to our family and immediate friends we both came to a realisation what a productive year it has been for both of us. Our long courtship which began back in December 2002 when we met through the CathNews discussion board finally culminated in our Wedding on 30th March this year. I summed our professional year up in these words...

Amanda, being a fan of Douglas Adams' trilogy of books has dubbed the places where she has lived "Milliways" — the Restaurant at the End of the Universe which featured in the second book in the trilogy — and today our house now proudly bears the sign proclaiming that as the title of our home. Funnily enough neither of us are great culinary experts or gastronomes — the stuff you are more likely to find being "cooked up" in this Restaurant are words and music.

And, on that score, it's been a fabulous year for both of us — perhaps, for both of us, the single most productive of our lives. On the work front: both through her contracts with various Church agencies, as well as a number of independent commissions, Amanda has been responsible for a raft of new compositions and these look set to "go places" in the year ahead through new publishing and recording deals, as well as a couple of major performances, which will see them get wide distribution around Australia and beyond.

In my own domain through Catholica Australia we have built up a consistent readership of around 7,500 people per month reading our site and in the last month of the year we might go close to breaking through the 8,000 milestone for the first time. We have a strong and loyal readership in Australia, the United States and Canada and a smaller but growing readership also in Europe. Our twin focus is to be providing a meeting place for discussion of interest to people seeking an adult discussion of spirituality, theology, faith and the meaning of life within a Catholic context. Allied with that we are seeking to reach out to those more educated sectors of the population who have become disenchanted in recent decades with the spiritual fare offered by institutional Catholicism itself. We're both incredibly grateful to the enormous amount of support we have received from so many people to make all of these initiatives possible. We have few resources ourselves other than time and the skills we've developed over our lifetimes and none of what we've been able to achieve would have been possible without the financial resources provided by so many people now and, more especially, by the now significant body of respected writers who have been contributing their time and skill writing the lead commentaries for Catholica which are the ultimate attraction that helps us increase our readership and, through that, it will eventually provide us with a revenue base through advertising that can make the venture self-supporting. One of the significant encouraging signs for us at the end of the year was Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the BeliefNet internet site for its commercial value. Our long-held belief has been that our venture likewise could become self-supporting through advertising if we can also establish a consistent readership at the international level. The twin challenges we face are in maintaining the quality of what we have to offer and in ourselves finding the avenues on a limited budget to bring our work to the attention of the potential audience we seek to serve.

Dr Rowan Williams

Reading a couple of interesting articles in the latest issue of The Tablet overnight and also two Christmas reflections from Fr John O'Keefe which we'll be publishing tomorrow and next Saturday I've been drawn to ask myself "really, what's this all about?". Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has a beautiful piece in The Tablet wondering where we're all going in our drive for Christian unity? I wonder if God wonders too? What a screwed up world we human beings have managed to create by our insistence that "my rules are better than your rules", or "my version of communion is the authentic one given to us by God and your version is a fake one. It's not the real McCoy!" Do you think God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit sit up there cacking themself silly over our carry on?

And talking of the Trinity, Timothy Radcliffe reviews a book by the 90 year-old theologian Sebastian Moore which is entitled "The Contagion of Jesus: doing theology as if it mattered". This paragraph from the review excited me:

His [Sebastian Moore's] exploration of the Trinity stresses that it is only from within, sharing the life of the Holy Spirit, that we can even glimpse the meaning of what we confess. "I can only understand the eternal having a Son in so far as the Spirit makes me a son." So the doctrine of the Trinity is not a game with celestial numbers, but "our own obscure interconnectedness brought infinitely into the light". My only slight quibble is with Moore's claim that the whole Western tradition has failed to understand this, and thus has seen the Church as an organisation rather than the fruit of the Spirit. Thomas Aquinas had a profound sense that our understanding of the Trinity was through a sharing of the life of the Triune God — knowledge as participation — and hardly ever treats the Church as an organisation.

As I enter this Christmas season 2007, I think I'll endeavour to concentrate my thoughts and prayers on this picture of Jesus as a symbol of unity rather than division in our world, eucharist as a symbol of unity rather than division, and of a picture of church as "communion of people and the body of Christ" rather than as institution or organisation. There is a huge challenge ahead that our world faces breaking down all those attitudes of ego, pride and the need for certitude that militate against unity — and I have to confess that even within our own Church the divide literally seems unbridgeable to me. We don't even have a starting point of shared agreement about the meaning in the language we use. Against all that though I think we can discern a growing body of intelligent voices in our world who do hunger for the unity and full communion and harmony that must rest as God's ultimate desire for his family.

LINKS:
Rowan Williams' article, "No Common Language Yet": www.thetablet.co.uk/articles/10795/
Timothy Radcliff's reviews of "The Contagion of Jesus: doing theology as if it mattered" by Sebastian Moore: www.thetablet.co.uk/reviews/373

Brian Coyne is the editor and publisher of Catholica Australia.

We welcome your thoughts in response to this commentary in our forum.

Brian Coyne can be contacted at: Brian Coyne <editor@catholica.com.au>

©2007 Brian Coyne

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