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Friday, 16 March 2012 Small is Beautiful!  Dear Friends, Just so you know why I persist with these emails when I could be having a holiday here in Perth: for some reason March and October are always our very best months of the year for growth in our readership figures. I've not yet worked out why that is. Our email plays a significant, but not dominant, part in generating traffic to Catholica. I can't afford not to have an email going out for too many days otherwise people quickly forget about us. I must say though that that is not likely to happen at the moment. The traffic over recent days to Catholica has been excellent and that owes much to the quality of the discussions in our forum. The discussion I'd like to highlight today is the string started by Bill Dowsley yesterday entitled "Lost Faith" [LINK]. It has generated much discussion. As mentioned in my last email, on Wednesday we had as guests for readers of Catholica join us for morning tea. "Meeka36", Born in Meekathara about 75 years ago, "Beehive" and Graham. They don't post on Catholica very often but they told us they are voracious readers of what is offered here. Towards the end of a long and fascinating conversation about many of the current topics of interest on Catholica "Beehive" launched into a fascinating recollection of his time as a missionary priest with the Zulu people in Southern Africa. I felt like grabbing my video camera, which was just inside the door, but hesitated to do that because placing a video camera in front of him I am sure would have destroyed the story which came from deep in his heart. (I've learned over the years that when you start "observing" something with a video camera it is very much like the now axiom in Physics that the intrusion of the observer changes that which is being observed.) I'm going to try and briefly summarize it here in one paragraph because what he said gels in so beautifully with the discussion triggered by Bill Dowsley and also the conversation about what Eugene Stockton is exploring about what we might learn from the spirituality of the indigenous peoples. "Beehive" spent 12 years with the Zulu people. With one group he spent seven years with he was the first missionary they had encountered. He was quite a young man when he first went there — fresh out of seminary. He essentially saw his mission as one of evangelizing these primitive people. That would have been the common perception of most "missionaries" at the time. In this exquisite and deeply moving story he told us he related how he had bored these people stupid with his first few homilies. In those early homilies he was essentially trying to teach them the "theology" of Christianity — what we believed and why we believed it. He could see he wasn't getting through so he tried a different tack. Instead of feeding them theology he began trying to simply tell them the story of this man "Jesus". Suddenly his "evangelizing" came alive. His audience was interested in the person named "Jesus". He related though how in the end he had been "evangelized" by the Zulu people rather than the other way about. "Beehive" explained to us that these people gave him insight into how the first Christian would have been the person "Jesus" — not through the eyes that have been "filtered" by all our modern theology and the devotional and worship practises of subsequent epochs in human history — but in a much simpler way. He suggested we need to read the scriptural stories – which it the only real quasi-historical information we have about Jesus – through the eyes and mindframe of a relatively "primitive" people who first wrote down those stories. We see, for example, the stories of the "Jesus miracles" through the lense of our modern understanding of the word "miracle". They had no understanding then of what we would describe as a "miracle" today. "Beehive" then went on into a lengthy exploration about how, in later years back here in Australia and long after he left the priesthood (and threw off much of the beliefs he'd been taught in seminary) he went back and endeavoured to explore how some of the insights of the Old Testament, particularly Isaiah, came to be pinned on the person of Jesus. It was a fascinating explanation — almost a monologue that went on for about 15 minutes and the rest of us were all spellbound. I'm going to try and twist "Beehive's" arm into writing a commentary for us where he can relate the story better than what I have done here. In the above I'm essentially only trying to draw out two aspects of the story "Beehive" told us. The first is the intersection with what Eugene Stockton seems to be on about: that we can learn something spiritually from the indigenous peoples of the world. They do have a wisdom that is valuable and not "primitive" at all. The indigenous peoples of the world have a spirituality that is grounded in the very essence of Creation. Secondly was his ("Beehive's") "loss of faith" which, in another sense was not a "loss" at all but a discovery, or re-discovery, of a new way in which to understand the Jesus or Christian story. For the significance of today's "Small is Beautiful" headline see the post I've placed on the forum HERE. We've been having a fascinating conversation here in Perth about the BBC television series "The Trap" – which we discussed at length back at the beginning of January here on Catholica – and last night I was introduced to some other ideas, broadly coming from the ideas of E.F. Schumacher which contrast with the ideas in "The Trap" and which may play a paradigmatic part in shaping world politics in the era opening up before us. There'll be no email tomorrow as I suspect we'll be busy all day with our journey back to Sydney. Back to normal on Sunday.
Wishing you a great day wherever you happen to be ... in life and in our world. Catholica |
