I received an email yesterday from Mark Makowski in Minneapolis asking for a more detailed explanation of the suggestion I've been putting forward in recent times for us to view Jesus as a "model" or "blueprint" for our lives. Mark wrote: "A friend of mine sent me your article entitled Why Evangelize.  I read it. I appreciate all your efforts and your commitment to stay the course in the RC church.  I'd like to hear more about your blueprint ideas concerning JC.  I'd say that some don't know how to read a blueprint.  The bishops keep selling the wrong blueprint. And the pope has a history of deception and I don't think he's changed much since taking on the taller hat.  Nonetheless, I am intrigued by your blueprint idea." The following commentary is the response I sent to Mark which I also present as our lead commentary today.

Some background regarding my own personal journey that sets this is context...

I am now 60 years of age. With the benefit of hindsight the first 45 years of my life were very happy. I was brought up in the dominant Irish-Catholic spiritual and cultural frame of reference that characterised Catholicism in this country for most of its history until recent decades.

My late parents, Des and Nora Coyne

My father was Catholic and my mother Protestant but she was very supportive of my father and his faith outlook and my brother and I were brought up in a strong Catholic ethos. My father was a daily Mass-goer for most of his life. Like the majority of Catholics of his generation (he was born in 1913) he did not receive an extensive education and left school at the age of about 13 and worked in his father's general store. Dad became successful in business himself and my brother and I were sent to the best Catholic schools and I eventually went on to study at university. In 1966 when I attended university, tertiary education was only available to around 10% of the population in this country and, I should imagine, to a similar or slightly lower proportion of Catholics. I subsequently married a Catholic girl and we had four children, one of them, a twin, only living for seven days. I basically followed "the faith of my father" and had a conservative outlook politically and theologically.

Things went along fine until I reached the age of about 45. Events occurred in my wider family at that time which are complex to explain but basically they ended up caving in my entire world. My wife bailed out (basically as a secondary side-effect of what was going on and the pressure this imposed on her) and I was left with a whole series of questions about the fundamentals of belief upon which my life had been framed and lived. As well as losing my marriage, my own businesses were decimated by the events, my personal reputation was trashed, and on a number of occasions I seriously contemplated taking my own life. It is basically from that time in the early 1990s that I mark the start of my search for a more coherent understanding of both my own personal life and this wider context of the religio-spiritual context in which it had been lived.

Two significant experiences that served as an important trigger to changing my base thinking paradigm...

Amongst the many particular experiences there are two that stand out as having a major influence on my world view — the base paradigm from which I viewed the meaning of my life. They seem trivial as I write them out today but each of these incidents had the effect of pulling me up in my tracks and planting the caution: "something's not right here. This doesn't make sense!"

Two illusions shattered: The Rosary and Priests as last place of comfort and wisdom

Praying the Rosary: at the time the incident blew up in my family I was living on one side of this continent and my wife and children were living in Perth on the other side of the continent. We were still happily married and I was commuting home regularly. Every night I used to pray the rosary seeking the intercession of Mary to protect my wife and children. I was acting out of the belief that "the family that prays together stays together" and I sincerely believed in the efficacy of that kind of prayer. In the light of subsequent events it was pretty plain to me that there was something seriously amiss with this kind of belief in the power of prayer. It simply did not deliver the results it was touted to deliver.

A belief in Church/Priest as the "last port of call": while I had lived my life up until that point in fairly comfortable circumstances and largely devoid of stress — of course I believed many things had been stressful at the time, including things like the loss of one of our children and miscarriages, and financial pressures at various times in business — in hindsight they were all "Sunday school picnic" territory compared to what I was going to encounter in the 1990s and even up until about 2002. Despite the comfort of my life until that point, somewhere or other along the line a belief had been planted in me that if ever a person found their life in real crisis the one sure place where you would find comfort was in their church and via the local priest. It was some kind of indelible belief. The sort of stuff cemented in by the image of priests and nuns and others caring for prisoners on death row; the Florence Nightingale imagery of Catholics motivated by their faith and beliefs alone to care for the sick, the wounded in war, the homeless and so on. I lived in an "upwardly mobile middle class" stream in society and had no expectation that I would ever need to call on such assistance but nevertheless it did form a rock-solid part of the belief paradigm in which I lived and worked. When the shit hit the fan in my life and I had occasion to call on that belief I went a-knockin' on various doors seeking comfort and help. I have to honestly say I found the six priests I called on, or was directed to, all "totally out of their depth" with the particular set of problems I brought to them. This was tested again in a completely different way early in the new century in a different set of circumstances and at an even higher level in the clerical pecking order and that has also heavily influenced my search for a better way of trying to understand this entire "Jesus" and "Catholic" paradigm of belief. A number of important illusions had been shattered.

They have been shattered further by the recent revelations of corruption in the mishandling of sexual abuse in the institution and the incapacity of the leadership to acknowledge errors. My view of priests and bishops today is that they are basically frail individuals like all the rest of us who struggle with their own egos and pain, peer group pressure and social conformism, and trying to make their world coherent, just as much as we do.

Searching for something different to "atonement theology/pray-pay-and-obey" sort of religiosity…

The foregoing are the broad influences that led me away from the "atonement theology/pray-pay-and-obey" sort of religiosity that I had been brought up on and which formed the framework of my religious beliefs and spiritual life up until what I now see as the "Gesthemane moment" in my life. It was not so much a particular "moment" but a succession of events over a period of about 12 years that led me to trying to find a better understanding of what Jesus Christ meant to me personally. I had largely rejected what I describe as the "hoop-jumping" view of morality wherein God (through Jesus) gave us this great heap of rules that we had to learn and obey and, if we were good enough in the obeying stakes, and didn't fall off the wagon too many times, God might smile on our efforts and allow us into Paradise. Frankly today I don't believe in petitionary prayer and a God of "magic" who even has the capacity to "reach down" and fix up the things going wrong in our lives, or the temporal order. My rosaries were heartfelt and sincere and following the rejection of the earnest and heartfelt request that I had made in those petitions for the protection of my family I came to the conclusion that either God didn't exist, or there were some serious flaws in the belief system I'd been formed in. (It's a long story which I won't go into here: I do believe God does communicate with us, and does offer advice, that helps us navigate the pathways of life and make intelligent decisions. That isn't "magic" though. As a basic theological principle I do not believe God, if he does have a capacity to intervene in the temporal via an omniscient or omnipotent potential, I believe it is a capacity that is not exercised. God self-limits his capacity to intervene directly in our temporal affairs because the alternative theological proposition sets up difficult constraints on the free will that is endowed to humankind. These are arguments for another day. The issue of miracles I believe today is a dangerous misreading of the relationship of God to humankind.)

Jesus as "model" or "blueprint" for our lives…

It was out of long reflection on these things that I came to this view of Jesus as a "blueprint" for our lives. He's not so much "saviour" as in some magic wand-waving, supernatural being, or emissary of God the Father, who is able to sprinkle us with some kind of "fairy dust", or whose "sacrifice on Calvary", somehow magically wipes away all our errors. I suspect the original trigger to this new way of looking at Jesus came from a little exercise I took on right back at the most intense time of my crisis. I had long worked in advertising and communications and had developed an appreciation that typing out the words of other people — in those days we didn't have scanners and so there was a lot of re-typing — gave me insights into how other people thought and reasoned. To pass the time I decided to literally type out the whole of the New Testament. We type slower than we think, or we can read, and somehow the typing process provides time to reflect on questions like "now, why did the person use precisely that formulation of words? Why didn't they say it this way instead?" I took on the exercise largely as an endeavour to "pass the time" in the seemingly interminal crisis my family was going through. It became, in hindsight, an awesome way to come to know Jesus Christ. That whole experience is probably what led me eventually to this view of Jesus as "model" and "blueprint" for our lives.

The parables and NT stories about his life for much of our lives are just that, "stories" — some more gripping or memorable than others. I was finding that very often stories I had been hearing for decades suddenly "came alive" not because the stories had changed but because of some change in my life. Suddenly, to cite just one example, you'd get a whole "new take" or "new understanding" of the Parable of the Prodigal Son through an event in your relationship with your own son. Obviously you couldn't understand that "angle" fully until that event was triggered when you yourself had a son and the relevant event unfolding in your relationship with him. It was events in my life that, as it were, "brought the gospel stories alive". Obviously, if we are not familiar in the first place with all those parables and examples from Jesus' life, the unfolding events in our life cannot "evoke a memory". We have to be reasonably familiar — have re-membered the Jesus story — prior to this effect kicking in. (In passing, this is what has given me this new appreciation I wrote of the other day in the importance of Christ's Last Supper invitation to re-member him. We are nor "remembering" a piece of history, or an important figure in history. We are literally invited to re-member Jesus in our lives — re-build him in our lives.)

Jesus needs to be worshipped less as a "superstar" and integrated more into our lives as model and blueprint of a "Way" of thinking and acting our way through life.

To me today the real value of Jesus Christ in my life is essentially as a model or blueprint. He doesn't have to have known about motorcars, aeroplanes, cameras and computers. That is the value of a "blueprint". It doesn't necessarily have to be familiar with "the fine detail". I do have this sense that what the Church (in it's deepest and most authentic wisdom or insight — not these childish games trying to prove that we are Jesus' most favourite friend) describes as "the fullness of revelation found in Jesus" is another way of saying that Jesus is "the most complete blueprint of life". The record we have of his life (death and resurrection), even though a large section of the account is missing, is basically the blueprint that covers virtually every conceivable situation a person might confront in their journey through life. In effect whatever problem we encounter in our life Jesus might be The One who could truly claim "been there, done that — go look in Chapter 34, verse so and so and you will find a template for that kind of situation". The "Jesus Story" is ever fresh and vitalising if we are reading it not as "ancient history", or a series of fairy-tale like annecdotes of a famous guy's life, but if we are constantly synthesizing it through the unfolding parable of our own lives. We literally "find Jesus" at his fullest, at his most authentic, and at his most vibrant, through our own life story.

Our problem is that all of us are essentially "slow leaners". I found this with my father in the closing years of his life. He was "still learning" at the age of nearly 91 how to navigate this "religio-spiritual stuff". Religion, or spirituality, is not something that we "learn at school" and then we have "all the rules" which we spend the rest of our lives "obeying". It is a life-long learning process. Learning how to make "the best moral choices". Essentially I no longer even believe it is a process about "learning rules". Jesus Christ was not some "rule giver". So often in his parables and the example of his life he was showing us how to "break all the rules". This was not some anarchistic/nihilist endeavour of "breakin' the rules" just for sake of being different or being rebellious. The essential lesson being imparted is that very often, to make the most moral choice, the reality is that we do often have to break a whole host of taboos, shibboleths and social conformities in order to make the most correct moral decision for a lot of the situations that crop up in our lives. Jesus is a rule breaker but not a rule breaker in the name of anarchy and social chaos but in the name of true morality and finding "the most moral line" through life in the sense that a racing car driver has to discern the best "driving line" around a curved race circuit.

Applying all the foregoing to a wider canvas...

I think many people in the modern affluent, educated, socially sophisticated societies like those you and I inhabit, Mark, have grown beyond the very simple theology and Christology that was the base fare for Catholicism during much of the last 200 years — basically since the time of the French Revolution and around the length of the history of our "new world" nations in America and here in Australia. The "atonement theology" model doesn't make sense anymore but it is simply not part of our cultural history that the lay people are expected to try and nut this stuff out for themselves. The evengelical protestants have come up with a new theology, described as "Abundance Theology" which has some attraction to a sector of the population but even that only seems to have short term appeal. Our spiritual leaders seem so "locked in" to their "Trentan Theology" and the sense of power that it provides to them that there has been an enormous inertia to be overcome there in forcing them to re-think why their communication of the Christ message and the "Good News" has become such an unmitigated disaster. I think our world urgently needs a new Christology — a new way of interpreting Jesus and bringing alive the "Good News" of his essential message in this vastly changed, and rapidly changing, social and and more sophisticated intellectual and emotional landscape in which we live today. We need it if the Church is to re-evangelise its own flock let alone evangelise the "all nations" that Christ commanded his followers to do.

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>

©2008 Brian Coyne

[Brian's Take Archive]