Travelling in Hughie time!

Dear Friends,

My apologies that I was not able to provide email updates while we were on our travels. The reality is that the effort involved to maintain the email reports was simply beyond my capabilities — I'm a boy remember and not greatly gifted at multi-tasking!!! We did try and provide regular reports of our progress via the forum though. Our trip around America and Canada (17 States of the US and 1 State of Canada) in 21 days was wonderful if not exhausting. In particular our last day involved a drive of twelve and a half hours down the Pacific coast from San Jose to Los Angeles on what must be one of the most picturesque drives in the world followed by a fourteen and a half hour flight home to Sydney has left us totally exhausted. We do have much to report but it will have to wait until Wednesday when I hope to resume some sort of normal publishing schedule.

I am still in the process of trying to make some kind of rational sense of all that we learned on our journey. The one thing I am pretty sure of comes from a new book we purchased just before we left the US by Jason Berry entitled Render unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church. I have been reading it on the plane home and since my return and am deeply absorbed. I've only read about 45% of the book so far but hope to provide a full review on Wednesday. What I think I can predict at the moment is that Berry has lit a fuse with this book that is likely to bring the entire crisis in Catholicism to some kind of head. If you think the sexual abuse crisis has been damaging enough wait until you start to see what is revealed now that an investigative journalist has started probing in the waters of financial probity. We live at a fascinating moment in human and ecclesial history — perhaps one of the largest single turning points in the two thousand year history of Catholicism. I do not envy any person at the moment in a position of responsibility within the institution for what has begun to unfold in the last half century.

We also live in a time of enormous uncertainty. A glance at any newspaper today ought to drive that lesson home. The uncertainty not only comes from climate change and the enormous economic uncertainty in the world at the moment but we're in a time of deep spiritual questioning and uncertainty. The old certitudes about God have seemingly collapsed despite the efforts of the conservative sectors in human society to return us to thinking paradigms that served our forebears well but patently no longer hold true in what we are discovering about the world and the Divine structure of Creation today.

Four stories that have inspired me...

What I think I can also report, particularly in the light of the lack of emails from us for the past three weeks, is that Catholica has generated a lot of interest around the world. (Our readership numbers collapsed for a few days due to the lack of emails but the interest in our forum picked up again and so I know many of you have been continuing to follow the conversations going on there. I again thank all of you who have contributed to that on-going discussion in our absence.) I'm still not at all sure where all this is leading. I cannot offer you any certitudes. Could I briefly share with you four stories that have been influential in my life journey. The first three of them come from women religious who have inspired my spiritual outlook. The first was a group of Dominican women in New Zealand who on 24th April 1899 set sail for the remote Western Australian diocese of Geraldton not knowing what their future held. Those women ended up having a massive impact on the spiritual formation of my father and wider family. A small part of their story is that they were effectively conned into coming to Geraldton at the time by the bishop and when they arrived were almost "dumped in the bush" and left to their own devices as to how they might survive and build their mission. (Ruth Marchant James wrote a beautiful book, cover illustrated at left, which the Dominican Sisters published for their centenary in 1999 which tells the whole story of these remarkable women.) They are women who chiefly inspire me for the attitude they exhibited in facing enormous uncertainty and the unknown.

Click on the image above to watch the video presentation on the charism of Emilie de Vialar

Another woman who inspired me was Emilie de Vialar, a French women of noble birth who founded the Sisters of St Joseph of the Apparition who later educated me in the Darling Ranges east of Perth. In 2005 I produced a multi-media production trying to encapsulate some of their charism at the time of their 150th Anniversary. In sending her sisters on their various missions to various parts of the world Emilie de Vialar is reputed to have said: "Go, and with what you have, and will receive, do all the good you can!" It reflects a similar sense of confidence in the Divine to that exhibited by Mary MacKillop in what she achieved in Australia in building a massive teaching enterprise that did much good. All of the endeavours of these women might be likened to a "loaves and fishes" trick in terms of what these women achieved with the limited resources at their disposal. Importantly, and unlike the story I am reading at the moment related by Jason Berry, I don't have a sense that any of it was achieved by the modern day corruption we see in the behaviour of a person like Marcial Maciel Degollado and some of the "main chancers" and ecclesial conmen who recently, or presently, have been polluting the Catholic endeavour to the shame and embarrassment of all of the baptised.

The fourth story comes from this trip we've just undertaken. It was a "leap of faith endeavour" and funded by supporters of Catholica including a very generous donation from Bud Malby who is pictured with his wife, Judy, in today's headline graphic. Bud has recently published a book that has been attracting a lot of attention — to the surprise of Bud himself and that is partly why he made the donation to our endeavours. His book is called Windknocker. It's a curious title but it is essentially a story about "living in the Spirit" or "living with the Spirit". It's an alternative story to the one we see so often related these days of using our religion as a means of displacing fear out of our lives by replacing it with human-made certitudes. We all face fear in our lives. It's scary. Using dogma and our religious beliefs as some kind of psychological or emotional crutch to displace the uncertainties in our lives is, I believe, a serious abrogation and misunderstanding of all that Jesus Christ came into the world to show us. Today I'm not even sure that Jesus actually came to show us that but rather I sense we human beings attribute to the Christ figure deep insights into our human condition. The Jesus we are searching for is not simply some "historical figure" who walked around the Middle East handing out advice some two thousand years ago. The Christ we seek is both that individual and the inspired insights his example and teachings have provided to so many in the millenia since. Also layered on top of the historical figure though is a heck of a lot of claptrap and what is simply superstitition and absolute bullshit. Our challenge today is to slough off all the claptrap, sentimentality and pious bullshit to find "the essential wisdom of Christ" that helps us navigate our way around America — or through life. That's essentially what Bud Malby's story Windknocker is about and I think, without being certain, that's essentially what the journey we're on with Catholica is about. It's about "living in the Spirit" or, as Milly and I call it, "living in Hughie time"!

And "living in Hughie time" is in fact a bit of a play on words of the expression "living in Kimberley time" — which was a European disparaging observation on Australian indigenous spirituality and attitude to life. Our indigenous brothers and sisters might have discovered in their spirituality a long time before 2,000 years ago how to truly "live in the Spirit!"

God willing, we'll be back on Wednesday to our usual publishing schedule — and I can promise we have a heck of a lot of wonderful material from many people to stimulate an ongoing, invigorating conversation about this exciting, if often daunting endeavour we describe as "life"!

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Wishing you a great day wherever you happen to be ... in life and in our world.

Brian Coyne
Editor and Publisher

Catholica
34 Martin Place, LINDEN NSW 2778, Australia
tel: +612 4753 1226
email: editor@catholica.com.au