Here is another of those beautifully eclectic reflections by Vince Exley where he pulls togehter a couple of lengthy quotes from other authors he has recently been reading. Vince writes: At the present time our local Vinnies is struggling with the problem of using plastic bags in our shop. I have dug up some random readings on how we need to care for both persons and the environment and how we need to be Church to do this:

Big Bang Theology - from a talk by Denis Edwards…

Karl Rahner (1904-1984), Hero of Vatican II, had a passion for the mystery of God that surrounds and upholds every dimension of life. He claimed that matter and spirit are unified not separate; they have more uniting them than dividing them. We see the unity of matter and spirit in the human person. Spirit is the human person in so far as the person can become conscious; self-conscious, conscious of one's self, others and the mystery that surrounds life. The human person is matter in so far as I can only do this in concrete encounters with the objects in the world through my body.

Karl Rahner

Rahner says that we must consider the great moments in evolution, the movement from matter to life and the movement from life into consciousness or spirit. These are part of one single history of evolution and form a pattern, a direction, and a current that is generated somehow.

Something fantastic happens in the movement from matter to life. How does it happen? How do we account for the movement of inert, apparently dead matter to living matter? Then how do we account for the movement towards human life, towards consciousness? Something new and essentially different happens.

Rahner sees the human person as the cosmos itself come to consciousness. We are God's creation evolving to the point where creation becomes conscious of itself and takes on a spiritual life. It is the nature of matter, of this Earth to develop towards consciousness. The cosmos finds itself; it discovers itself when it can reflect upon itself in a human being.

The story of the cosmos, the story of creation continues in the human person, in a way it reaches it's climax there. But it continues in human community, it continues in the capacity we have to love one another, to create a common life together. The evolution continues in human interaction with the environment. Our shaping of the Earth is part of what it is to be of the Earth. We are the earth come to consciousness. We have to deal with the Earth intelligently and lovingly.

How is it that these great leaps occur? How does life develop into humankind? How does what is inert develop into life? Rahner says he finds it more helpful to think about that not in terms of God intervening to make things jump but in terms of something already there, the core of matter. He believes that matter has within it the power towards life. There is something intrinsic in it. There is something right back in those gases, right back in the first explosion, that would become life and there is something right back there that would become human consciousness, human spirit.

Transcendence — something intrinsic to nature/creation?

He calls this capacity transcendence, that matter can transcend itself, go beyond itself and become living and these living molecules can become thinking and loving human beings. All is accounted for by the capacity of transcendence at the heart of matter that's due not to the creature but to God. He believes this transcendence is intrinsic not extrinsic. It is not God zapping things from without, it comes from within, but it comes from within by the power, by the pressure of the divine within things, the power of God moving these realities towards these moments of transition.

Why does God do this? Why does God set up this whole mysterious reality? Why set up this process of evolution? Rahner says it is very simple, what God wanted to do was to communicate God's very self to creatures. The whole process heads towards God's self communication to us and through us to the whole planet and through the planet somehow to the whole of creation. That reality Rahner calls grace. Grace is simply the presence of God reaching out to embrace every person. This whole process is geared towards the communication between God and us and this is the high point in the evolutionary process.

So this is transcendence of the cosmos, this movement from matter->to->life->to->consciousness reaches it's goal when God is able to communicate his very self in love to conscious and free human beings and through conscious and free human movement, which we ourselves experience, is too brief for us. But He is there, the heart of this earthly world, the secret seal of its eternal validity. He is risen.

In death in some way the human person becomes pan-cosmic. We embrace the whole world. Rahner doesn't see any beings like us, who are the-world-come-to-consciousness. God reaches out to all creation. Rahner believes the story is going somewhere and it reaches its highest point, and its definitive stature in Jesus of Nazareth, in his life, death and resurrection. Jesus comes as the complete and full expression of God's self-communication to us.

Any time we turn to the mystery that surrounds us we experience God, but not very explicitly. But God communicates to us explicitly in Jesus of Nazareth. Rahner says that God wanted to create and at the heart of creation God was always going to reveal his very self to his creatures in Jesus, this being the high point of the creation process. Our mystical experience, our experience of the spirit is ambiguous. Our experience of Jesus Christ is unambiguous. We need both.

Rahner writes: Christ is already at the heart and centre of the poor things of this earth, which we cannot do without because the earth is our mother. Christ is present in the blind hope of all creatures that without knowing it are striving to participate in the glorification of his body. He is present in the history of the earth whose blind course he steers with unearthly accuracy through all victories and all defeats onwards to the day predestined for it. To the day on which his glory will break out of its own death to transform all things. He is present in all tears and in every death as the hidden joy and life, which conquers by seeming to die. He is in the beggar to whom we give alms as the secret riches, which the almsgiver is allowed to share. He is in the wretchedness, the defeats, and the failures of his servants as the victory that belongs to God alone. He is in our feebleness as the power, which may allow itself to appear weak because it is invincible. Even in the midst of sin he is present as the compassion of the eternal love ready to be patient to the end. He is there as the innermost essence of all things, the most secret law. He is with us as the light of day and the air are with us, which we do not notice. As the law of a movement, which we don't comprehend because, that part of the interval between death and resurrection, but in spite of that he sees that our resurrection body, our eternal life means a new involvement with all creation and engages us with all creatures.

Rahner says the coming kingdom will be the work of God but it will also be the self-transcendence of our history. It will be our world, our struggle, and our history again with the power of God operating in it, taking it to a new place. We can't predict how it is going to be but it will be truly ours, it will be our own history. So human history will endure but it will be radically transformed. Our actions, our living have eternal significance, so nothing is lost. My attempt to do something, which seems to fail, does not fail in the cosmic scale of things. It has eternal value; it is part of this new reality, the new heaven and the new earth.

Our task of caring for the earth in this context has eternal significance because it really matters that we are shaping the earth of the future. The material world is not something to be discarded. In a way beyond our imagination it becomes the new heaven and the new earth - the biblical promise.

This view connects up our theology of the earth with the very core of our belief about Jesus Christ. It also connects our view of trinity and grace and all the mainstream theologies, which are important to us. It keeps all creatures and human beings in appropriate relationships. It is not an exploitive, dominating, self-centeredness on the human nor is it levelling out of human and all other creatures in some kind of false democracy of creation. It's trying to hold the two in a relationship, which values each creature, each species before God, and which points to the stewardship of human beings and their responsibilities. Care for persons and care for the cosmos have to go together. Care for the earth and the struggle for justice become part of the one issue. It is an invitation to practice care of the earth because of the insistence that the material world has spiritual and eternal value. Rahner says that we should be the most radical materialists. Matter matters to us radically because of these things.

William J. Bausch in his book `The Parish of the Next Millennium'…

After discussing the enormous growth of literature on spirituality and discussing the premise that religion and spirituality are two different paths, William J. Bausch has the following to say about future church:

Baron Von Hugel says that the religious journey and the religious dimension — the search for genuine spirituality, if you will — have three elements.

First, there is the institutional dimension of spirituality wherein our quest for the sacred is formalised, structured, made concrete, rendered visible. Von Hugel calls this "religion," that is, the organised part of the quest. That is when you think of it, the arena of sacred texts, founding narratives, tradition, ongoing stories, rituals, rites, and the patterns of authority that preserve them and mediate and facilitate our communion with the sacred. The second expression is the intellectual dimension of spirituality, the formulation of cogent systems of thought, development, and reflection. This includes how to communicate the sacred to others and — this is important — how to critique ourselves when we are untrue to it. The third element is the mystical dimension of spirituality, the actual experience of the sacred.

So, Von Hugel, that great master of the spiritual life, says that true spirituality results in the balance of three essential elements: religion (organised to preserve the tradition), the intellectual (to proclaim, communicate, and critique), and the mystical (the actual experience of the sacred). He insists that all three are necessary and all three must be kept in balance: where one is dominant over the other two — such as organised religion and its cancer, authoritarianism — the answer is not to kill it but to cure it.

Tension and balance…

John Henry Cardinal Newman

I find it fascinating to recall that another great figure of von Hugel's time — the great John Henry Cardinal Newman — said almost exactly the same thing but, as you might expect, in more theological terms. Basing his analysis on the old biblical triad he said that there are three essential offices in the church, the Priestly, Prophetic, and the Kingly, and — he too was most insistent — they must be kept in balanced tension.

It is clear that Newman's priestly office is von Hugel's mystical experience: by it he means the discerning of that grace, that Presence, that lurks everywhere in the sacraments and in the sacramental world (something Karl Rahner would pick up). Newman's prophetic office or the proclamation, the heralding of the Good News, and teaching the gospel, is von Hugel's intellectual function. Newman's kingly office is von Hugel's "organised religion"; that is, the shepherding or political function of the church, the hierarchy. Newman emphatically noted that there will always be tension among the three offices. Indeed, lack of tension is an indication of sickness. Why? Well, that would mean that one had suppressed the others. Which is exactly what has happened and is happening.

Today we publicly or privately disdain or dismiss such a Neanderthal, corrupt "institutional" church, not only because of its past or present sins, but because, after all, it is an institution, and no one trusts any institution. And, what really counts, after all, is "spirituality". As we have seen, however, this attitude leaves us nowhere to go except to private experience; hence the enormous popularity of the New Age and individualism. But we've gone a step further; not trusting authority, we have also subverted the prophetic or critical intellectual function, the resultant bottom line being that what is true is what is true for me. But, as we have noted, both von Hugel and Newman were absolutely insistent that all three must be kept in harmony, must interact for a balanced spirituality.

The institution must be attentive to the intellectual and mystical elements. When it isn't, it can become authoritarian, self-serving, out-of-touch, insensitive to the mystical and intellectual elements — in a word bureaucratic. And thus we have the dissent we have today. By the same token, the intellectual and the mystical must be attentive to the institutional because that's where the texts, traditions, stories and communities are. When that doesn't happen you get individualism, eccentricity, the validity of personal experience only. Spirituality has just as much to do with participation in relationships with others in community and in wider social spheres. The search for the sacred is not something done alone. Our sense of the sacred is mediated through the texts, traditions, communal arrangements that embody our sense of meaning, purpose, value. Institutions and tradition enshrine the highest values we perceive and make it possible to pursue them with others.

All three therefore must be kept in balance, and the restoration of that balance is the task of the church of the next millennium.

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[Index of Commentaries by Vince Exley]