COMING UP ON CATHOLICA: Three great commentaries... (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Tuesday, March 20, 2012, 00:18 (427 days ago)

TonySee suggested in the members' forum that I get myself a bit more organized regarding our commentaries and "share the workload" a bit. It's great advice particularly given that most of the time I don't start tackling the layout of the commentaries until it's almost deadline time. The reality though also is that the commentaries often only come to me a short while before they are published. In manufacturing parlance I think they call that "Just In Time Delivery". I tend to think of it as some kind of endeavour of "living in the Spirit" — not worrying about tomorrow and just paying attention to what lands on my desk (or in my inbox) each day. Today though I have received a string of wonderful commentaries that I'll spread out over the next four days.

Last week we met Brian Pitts (Beehive) in Perth and towards the end of a long conversation he suddenly broke into this lengthy story of his personal life experience. Brian has now gone to the trouble of writing that story out and I'll run it tomorrow (Tuesday). I've just written the following to Brian in response:

I was deeply moved by your story and was strongly tempted to go and grab my video camera but, from experience, know that introducing a video camera in the middle of your story would have destroyed it. (I find a wonderful synergy between that and the observation in fundamental physics that the action of observing something actually changes that which is being observed.) That sort of testimony you shared with us is so powerful though because it is coming "from the heart". I just felt very privileged being there to hear it. I'm really looking forward to doing the layout for this written version.

I do despair of where institutional Catholicism is heading under the present management. I honestly think they are turning it into a religious cult little different to any of the other religious cults in the world. My sense is that Catholicism does have a claim to some kind of "primacy" in the world but it is not the sort of "primacy" that Benedict and friends seem to imagine. I think the claim to any kind of "primacy" does not derive from some belief that we (Catholics) have all the answers, or can read God's mind better than anyone else. A claim to "primacy" has to derive from a sense that we (Catholics) are the premier or leading community of people encouraging the search for truth — NOT a claim that we already know the Truth! The very personal story you shared with us to me illustrates the different approaches. Yours was a quest for truth; what do these words actually mean — what were their origin — what were the original writers of the Jesus' story trying to convey when they were quoting from Isaiah? Benedict and friends are into some game of "social conformism" — trying to create a society of "obedient, law-abiding little citizens". Ultimately it has nothing whatsoever to do with "finding Truth" or "finding God" in anyone's life. What they're about is building some totalitarian-like society where all the sheep follow the leader passively and with docility and never have to think for themselves. Ultimately I do not believe it leads to "heaven" or however we conceptualize the end objective of this entire spiritual or life quest.

On Wednesday: Tom McMahon has just sent through a further commentary opening up more on this dualism he's been exploring of two radically different understandings of the role of the priesthood. My own sense is that despite all the theology of the last 2000 years much of humanity is still locked into an almost Old Testament view of the priest as the one who journeys up to the mountain, or up to the altar, to offer the necessary sacrifice that will appease God and bring joy, fecundity, abundant crops, good weather and happy families into our lives. In many ways we are still people thinking in an Old Testament paradigm or mindset. Perhaps history will see as one of the great characteristics of this present epoch we are moving through as a final "throwing off" of that entire theological paradigm explaining our (human) relationship to the Godhead and the Divine? People have "lost faith" in that version or conception of priesthood. Perhaps the clerical sexual abuse crisis almost "had to happen" as the catalyst to "shatter our societal illusions" that priests are "ontologically different" or themselves to be treated as some kind of gods? We're searching not only for a new theology (understanding of the Godhead and the Divine and the relationship we are called into with that Alpha and Omega) but an entirely new concept of priesthood — a priesthood more in the concept of "fellow travellers"; not men set on pedestals (by us or them), but people (men and women) with graced skills and insight into reading the "spiritual roadmaps of life". This exploration Tom McMahon is exploring with us I think is vitally important in this process of our endeavours to discern the kind of "priests" society is seeking as their guides for the life journey.

On Thursday and Friday I'm going to run a lengthy commentary Graham English has just sent in entitled "Religion and Meaning". These opening paragraphs sum up what it is all about:

It is natural for humans to seek meaning. That is one of the reasons we have religion.

Religion is about producing meanings that are crucial to people's life orientations. We want to know where we came from and what we mean, if there is life after death, if we are worthy. We want to know what to do and how what we do affects who we are. We want to know why there is evil and whether we caused it or can affect it.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]