My sense of where I am today in this religious or spiritual quest... (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Sunday, June 10, 2012, 22:17 (374 days ago) @ James

Thank you Sue, for the question, and Enda and James for your responses. I wrote last night that I found reading Chris Geraghty's book "therapeutic". I've long thought that the reason I do what I do is a personal endeavour to try and figure out why things screwed up so badly in my life at around the age of 45. Many people seem to be able to walk away from tragedies. I've seen others who become consumed in lengthy court battles trying to sort out something that went wrong. Chris Geraghty's three books could be read as another pathway that people take to "work through" why their life turned out the way it did.

[Incidentally, I was going to mention this in another thread, Chris Geraghty has a section in his book about how, long before he became a lawyer, he contemplated taking the Church and the Catholic Weekly to court for what they had done to him. He spent some time preparing his case – and describes that in his book – but eventually concluded that the legal system cannot solve these sort of problems and he turned away from pursuing that course. Somewhere else in the book (I can't find the precise quote) he offers the intelligent advice from a judge, long before he became a judge, that many of the problems of life cannot be solved by the law. That has been my experience also. And I think somewhere even Jesus offered similar advice.]

My early beliefs and formative influences...

As I reflect back on my "Catholicism" it has to start with my grandfather and my father. My grandfather was from a desperately poor family on the West of Ireland who migrated to Australia at the end of the 19th Century. In hindsight I suspect he was what today I would describe as a "main chancer". He had charm, was a good salesman, a gambler, an excellent eye for the "main chance" in any situation and in some respects he did very well for himself albeit that in later life, after his wife (my grandmother) was committed to a mental asylum for 25 years, there was also much tragedy that left a legacy into later generations. He was "Catholic" but I suspect in the same sense that he was "Irish". I don't have any recall of how his "Catholicism" might have been some guide to his life. I do have greater recall of that in my father's case. My dad was a "believer". What the pope, the bishops or the local parish priest said was "gospel" — as though it was something uttered by Almighty God himself. Dad was only educated to primary level but despite that he became successful in business and he didn't inherit the "main chancer" gene. I suspect his religious outlook was far more formed by his mother's outlook. She was a cultured Dubliner — her father had held a high position in the education system in Dublin (they say as "Director General" but I suspect I ought to verify that at some time). She was disinherited for going off to Australia with what was seen to be a "bounder" in her husband. She was considered to have married "below her station in life" to use a now dated expression. Their faith was very simple, even superstitious. They believed in saying rosaries and novenas and all the prayers would be answered – Catholicism in a sense that was "more Catholic than the pope's". God was seen to be "up there" listening to each one of our prayers and keeping a big log-book of our sins and indiscretions.

My own views changed to some extent late in secondary school and at university via two valuable influences in my life —one a Christian Brother who was our RE teacher in my Sub-leaving and Leaving Year, Vince (Doc) McKenna (one of the first Christian Brothers to get a doctorate [in Physics]). We still correspond and speak on Skype occasionally. The other was our university chaplain, the Jesuit, Johnny Harte. Years before as a youngster at the Jesuit school I attended at the time, he kicked me out of his choir because I couldn't sing in tune. The greater debt I owe to him is from his time as university chaplain in the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. This was an exciting time to be a "Catholic" and Johnny Harte was the perfect chaplain for those times although, even at that time, we heard rumours that he was being "reported" to the archbishop for the advice he was giving us. The Temple Police have been around for a long time. I was far from being a "liberal" or "progressive" in my own personal faith and religious outlook though.

My mid-life belief system...

I'd summarise my belief system flowing out of that early formation as sharing with my father and grandmother a sense that the Catholic Church was the embodiment of God on earth. It gave us access to Divine wisdom and truth. The Second Vatican Council I truly did see as a "movement of the Spirit" moving this huge monolith into the 20th Century. It was not perceived as "something radical", or even "political", but as a genuine Spirit-inspired endeavour bringing all the dogma and beliefs "up to date". I broadly believed the Creed, and said it, as a factual almost literal expression of my beliefs. I observed all the laws — even including Humanae Vitae even though we privately had doubts about it. These beliefs basically "framed my life" right through my early married life and the raising of my children until my wife threw a wobbly and chucked it all in, including me.

Where do I stand today?

Where do I stand today? I think that's something I am still working through. It will be twenty years this coming Christmas since the shit hit the fan in my life.

While I am appreciative of what Enda wrote, and in many ways sympathetic to some of his perspectives — especially the bit about "intuition" — I do see the religious quest ultimately as a "quest for truth". Not in the sense of a "quest for certitude" or some quest for "the ten commandments or church moral laws" but in the sense of seeking to understand our lives, and Life. I don't see Catholicism as some "social welfare club" or endeavour. I don't think I've ever seen it primarily as some "tribal" identification endeavour — this is the "religious club" I belong to, or barrack for, in much the same way that we might belong to, or barrack for, some football club. Catholicism, to me, is primarily an endeavour helping us to understand our world, and understand ourselves. I perceive it to be as an endeavour by which, and through which, we are encouraged to "grow" as individuals. To become more competent as "navigators" of this endeavour called "Life".

Today I am also far more aware of all the failings of this institution — and the many who make it up, including my own failings and insecurities. I suspect those "human failings" are now bringing it to its knees – and not in prayer. It's on its way to becoming another of the many religions and civilisations that have characterised "the Ascent of Humankind". In another two or three hundred years the archaeologists of that time will be "digging through the ruins" like the archaeologists of our time dig through the ruins of Mayan, Inca, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, or Aboriginal ruins trying to work out what the people believed and how they lived.

The beliefs I have discarded and the ones I still hold true...

I no longer believe in the Virgin Birth as a literal description that explains how Jesus came into our world. I am even sceptical that he is literally "the Son of God". I am certainly sceptical of Jesus "ascending into heaven" like some modern space rocket. My growing sense is that he was a "pretty ordinary cove" just like most of us — in other words he was "fully human". At the same time he was blessed or graced with extraordinary wisdom to the extent that the people who knew him personally perceived him to be "the Son of God" and, from that, developed the entire mythology, and theology, of Christianity. The "wisdom" or "insight" of Jesus, I perceive today, to be partly intrinsic to the individual historical figure but as much a lot of the "wisdom" and "insight" has been cloaked onto his frame by later seers, prophets, theologians, popes, priests and all sorts of people. The trouble is that along with all the "wisdom and insight" that has also been cloaked onto him has been a whole lot of superstitious nonsense, bullshit and pious old wives' tales.

The challenge we face today is one of sorting the wheat from the chaff — the divine wisdom and insight from all the superstitious nonsense, bullshit and pious old wives' tales!

I no longer have faith that Pope Benedict, George Pell or Anthony Fisher (my local bishop) are leading us to "the promised land" or "eternal salvation". To me they are all "small men" — or as Chris Geraghty describes them "old frogs" — basically playing with people's emotions. They are not engaged in any serious "spiritual endeavour". They're no longer seriously engaged in the process of "building the kingdom" Jesus Christ was speaking about but their endeavour is one of trying to "bolster the kingdom" of an earthly institution in the face of an increasingly disbelieving world. Their principal quest today seems to be one of trying to "prove" that they are "infallible" and alone have insight into the "mind of God". I see them as very normal human beings — no "ontological difference" whatsoever — struggling like all the rest us and driven by ego and their insecurities.

Myself: I still do "believe". I do "believe" Creation had a Creator. Life didn't simply "evolve" from some Quantum perturbation* – or from "random chance". There was some "genius mind" who thought the whole thing up. I have some sense of wanting to pay homage to that "supernatural power" and simply to say "thanks". That's my sense of the "Alpha or Beginning God" we seek. I also have a sense of an "Omega God" — some "final destination" for our lives" or "the meaning of life". I can't describe it except in negative terms to say that it is unlikely to be the big "party in the sky with all our dead forebears". It is not only a sense of "end destination" though. I also sense each of us has embedded deep down in our being some sense of the "ideal person" we would like to be. "Ideal" both in these senses of our own perception and in the perception of others — more especially those closest to us. I do continue to believe that there is some final accountability we face for the ways in which we have conducted our lives. The life journey is not simply about learning a lot of "religious rules" from our parents, and then at school, and then the rest of our lives is some endeavour of "obeying the rules". The whole of our lives is a journey of learning how to live more intelligently — and morally. We don't simply learn all those rules when we are young but we are still learning when we are about to die.

*The Universe in fact may well have emerged out of a Quantum Perturbation — and I suspect it might have wearing my "science hat". That leaves unanswered though the question of who thought up the idea of Quantum Perturbation's in the first place — and all the "laws" and "Matter" and "Ideas" and "Life" that has flowed out of that singularity?

Is it "Catholic" or "catholic"?

Does all of this fit somehow in a "Catholic" system of belief — or "catholic"? I am contemptuous of people who present Catholicism as some "game" of dress-ups, etiquette, social conformism and speaking in certain tones of voice and languages to one another in affected ways and having little orgasms over liturgical dress and ecclesial "bling". I am also contemptuous of the "Temple Police" and those who present it as some game of "obeying rules in the expectation of some eternal reward" for obedience. There is some notion of obedience involved in the life journey but it is a long way distant from what these bishops and temple police posit in their homilies about docility and social conformism. Our prime obedience is to conscience — the voice of the Divine within or what Jesus himself described as "the will of my Father in heaven". That "father" does not sit somewhere up above the clouds but deep within each one of us.

I am unsure whether society will still need the sort of religious institutions that formed us. My suspicion is that it probably still does. I have a faint but growing belief that what we are presently going through in the world may eventually lead to a healing of the religious disunity that has characterized so much of human history. There are arguments that that may unfold in a de-institutionalised context. I don't believe God is dead, nor that the concept of God is dead. I don't believe the spiritual quest is at an end. We are searching for a new theological framework in which to answer these enduring questions that faced the proverbial Adam and Eve, or the first life-form that had the capacity to reflect on the big questions: "Where did we come from? Where are we going to? What does it all mean?" I do believe the Second Vatican Council was something "led by the Spirit" that was seeking to move the institution forward in the search for that new context. We badly, badly under-appreciated though the forces in the human psyches of an element in the flock. I sense the Spirit has now given up on the institutional church and its leaders and is now working on a far wider canvas in the whole of human society. Catholicism for a time had an opportunity to be a "leader of humankind" in this quest for a deeper, more universal theology and spirituality. I suspect it has now blown that chance irrevocably.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]