I cannot believe it is over 20 months since we ran a lead commentary from Vince Exley. Vince has been one of the founding members of the Catholica community. My association with him goes back to the earliest days of the community that first began to congregate on the old CathNews discussion board around nine years ago now. And what a valuable commentary Vince delivers to us today. In so many ways I see it as a reflection of the journey so many of us in this community have been on. This is a "no holds barred" lay persons' reflection exploring the crisis the institutional Church is in and the search for any alternative set of answers that might pull the Church he loves out of that crisis by returning to grasp the insights of the original followers of Jesus. You may not agree with all that Vince writes. I can imagine some will switch off completely and get angry with some of his thoughts. Many will read this as the reflections of a mature man who has endeavoured to be faithful to the institutional line for a long, long time and he has, like so many others in this place, simply got fed up with where we have been led. ...Brian Coyne (Editor)

Will the Church ever be a force in the world again?

It seems to me that there is an expectation that the Catholic Church will reverse the trend it is in and come back to a position where it is once again a force in the world.

I believe that this will not happen. The Catholic Church is already just one of the 30,000 Christian sects found throughout the world.

It will inevitably become Benedict's small remnant, to do otherwise would require an enormous shift in it's Christology, understanding of scripture and in the way it governs itself. All of this I see as Mission Impossible.

The drift away from Christian churches and especially the Catholic Church started about 100 years ago when general access to education started. This is not a coincidence.

Today these churches, and especially the Catholic Church, only thrive among poorly educated peoples.

At one time I had thought that re-packaging the Christian message in more modern language would solve the problem and perhaps lure people back, but today I see that a complete makeover is required.

Fr. Richard Rohr OFM says:

"What word of hope does the Church have to offer the world? The world is tired of our ideas and theologies. It's tired of our lazy church services. It's no longer going to believe ideas, but it will believe love. It will believe life that is given and received. God is not calling us into our heads. Yet we've lived in our heads so long, the world no longer listens to us. I don't need your words, the world says to us. I don't need your sermons. I want life. And I want life more abundantly."

Rethinking what's gone wrong...

Christianity has developed a complete misunderstanding of Jesus. First of all Jesus did not come to found a new church, but to do something within Judaism and He did not found the Christian Church, Paul did. Paul is the first founder and first organiser of the Church. He hails her as the new, the true Israel. This becomes one of the most revolutionary and fateful proclamations in world history.

This misunderstanding of Jesus stems from a literal or fundamentalist interpretation of our Scriptures. When the bible and empirical or scientific truth are in conflict, I think we need to recognise that the Bible is probably the one that is wrong. This is not a problem unless you think that God wrote the Bible.

Siddhartha Gautama (The Budda) said;

"Believe nothing just because a wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true."

God did not work the miracles we read about in the OT, they are myths and legends. In many of its details the Bible is simply wrong! The idea that the Bible came into being in some sort of miraculous way and as either the literal dictation of God or even the "inspired message of God" is simply not supportable. The OT part of the Bible is a profoundly human, deeply flawed, but magnificent tribal history. For centuries the OT was mainly in oral form and the myths and legends would have been of value to people in remembering these oral stories.

I will never forget a BBC TV series called "Testament" by John Romer which opened with a group of Jewish priests in exile in Babylon, sitting together in absolute dejection. They were observing the slow disintegration of the Jewish exiles who were in danger of being absorbed into the local population. They devised a plan to mark them as a separate people. The priests wrote down a great deal of the OT and included such new things as laws for keeping the Sabbath, dietary laws and circumcision. This move proved to be very effective even up to today and the Christian Church was to emulate this move centuries later by creating its own unique restrictions.

With the exception of Paul's letters the earliest NT writings we have, (the ones actually written by him and not written in his name), the other books of the NT eventually followed the same genre as the OT, energetically creating myths and legends and reshaping events and persons to the writer's standards.

Jesus and miracles...

The evangelists could not comprehend Jesus and wanted to praise him, (the fantastic otherworldly person that He was), to the skies through their accounts of miracles, so as to make him great and imposing. But all they did was put a pile of tiny miracles in front of the true miracle that Jesus is all about — the miracle of the enormous love and compassion of God. The miracle stories have been used not to open up but to obstruct our view of Jesus. The gospels make it clear that before their story of Jesus was written a heavy dependency on the OT was already evident.

This came about because in the years after Jesus' death his disciples met in synagogues on the Sabbath, where readings from extracts of the OT scriptures were normally read and commented on. This became the setting in which the followers of Jesus told stories about him, recalled his sayings and parables and remembered and shared the developing Jesus' tradition. In this fashion, over the years the OT writings along with their myths and legends, were wrapped around Jesus and through them Jesus was interpreted.

Leonard Swindler in his book Yeshua – A model for Moderns when speaking of the early Christians says:

"Not to perceive that almost all the original language of the first Christians as expressed in the New Testament was in fact poetic, metaphorical, when speaking in its most ecstatic terms about the significance and meaning of Yeshua of Nazareth, was a profound misjudgement"

So Jesus or God did not work the miracles we are told about, there was no Virgin birth, no Ascension, no Pentecost, no Assumption.

Jesus himself rejects the notion that miracles proved his message. "Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe" (John 4:48). For him faith based on miracles is no faith. When they demand from him a sign from heaven, he rebuffs them: "Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly I say to you, no sign shall be given to this generation" (Mark 8:12). And, "An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign" (Matt. 12:39). Paul says absolutely nothing about any miracles by Jesus.

Eric Hodgens in his book "New Evangelisation in the 21st Century" says:

"It is not an accident that the pinnacle of Christian scriptures is the four gospels. Belief in God, in God's love, forgiveness and mercy — all high concepts — are presented in story form. Jesus is the ultimate statement of God's saving will for us. The story of Jesus, of his doings and sayings — including the stories he told — articulate the mysterious belief that Jesus was not acting of himself. He really was the voice of God; the visible face of the unseeable God. As the disciples' faith in Jesus developed they believed him to be ever closer to God himself. This is a difficult concept to articulate in philosophical discourse. Yet, quite simple stories can show how it happened. Jesus is shown as having power that belongs only to God.

Take the story of Jesus calming the storm as the disciples struggled against the wind on Lake Genesereth. The objective of the telling of the story is spelt out in the final sentence: "And they were filled with awe, and said to one another, Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?" The story is of their growing belief in who Jesus is. The ongoing challenge of faith is developed two chapters later with the story of Jesus walking on the water. He is master of the sea. He strides triumphantly over the evils of the deep. He is god‑like. The story can articulate the question of Jesus' identity more simply than conceptual discourse. The juxtaposition of the stories articulates the gradual development of full faith in Jesus' real identity more intuitively than conceptual discourse.

Stories call us to get involved; to identify with the characters and their situations, their challenges, their dilemmas. Wondering about this sort of story the question is not, 'Did it happen?' but, rather, 'What does it mean?' So, the stories in the gospels are told to convey good news. Some are factual; some are based on fact; some are made up. But telling the truth that Jesus is God's presence and voice for us is the ultimate objective. And this is a truth that can only be accepted by faith. The key question remains, 'What does the story mean?' There are two possibilities. It actually literally happened as told and so the disciples were moved to faith. Alternatively, their faith developed first and they expressed their new level of faith in him by telling this story. The first strains credibility. The second makes sense."

Albert Einstein said: "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

The present pope, Benedict XVI, writing in 1968 stated;

"According to the faith of the Church, the divine sonship of Jesus is not based on the circumstance that Jesus had no human father. The doctrine of Jesus' divinity would not be violated if Jesus had been the product of a normal human marriage. For the divine sonship that faith speaks of is not biological, but an ontological fact; it is not an event in time, but in God's eternity."

So that in my opinion has put paid to the MYTH of Virginal Birth.

Bishop John Selby Spong states that:

"Now let us look at the myth of 'Bodily Resurrection.' When one reads the NT in the order in which these books were written, a fascinating progression is revealed. Paul writing between the years 50 and 64 never describes the resurrection of Jesus as a physical body resuscitation after death. Paul did not envision the Resurrection as Jesus being restored to life in this world but as Jesus being raised unto God. It was not an event in time but a transcendent and transforming truth, one that we can experience today. Mark, around the year 64, ends his gospel with an empty tomb. Later others wrote two different additions to his abrupt endings. Matthew (80-85), Luke (88-92) and John (95-100) present the resurrection as physical resuscitation. In order to remove this physical body from the earth Luke develops the story of the ascension. The Easter story grew dramatically over the years."

However, from reading these gospels it is clear that:

1. Something of absolutely enormous and fabulous power gripped the disciples following the crucifixion that totally transformed their lives.
2. But it was 50 years before that transforming experience was interpreted as the resuscitation of a three-day dead Jesus.

The point of the incarnation was for God to be with us; and being with us, to show us better how to be human, how better to embrace our lives by accepting the divine totally around us and inside us.

All of creation, all of the universe, with its billions of galaxies each containing billions of stars, [There are more stars in the universe than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth] is created by and sustained within this enormous entity we call God, this is a God immensely beyond the comprehension of the OT writers. Just one of these galaxies, our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is over 100,000 light years across and 16,000 light-years thick at its central bulge. (A light year is a distance measurement, defined as how far a beam of light travels in one year — at a speed of some 700 million miles per hour or 11 million miles per minute). The mystery is that human beings seek God, just as a seed planted in the dark earth thrusts its shoots upwards to expose itself to the sun. It is this instinctive seeking of the life force, this turning towards the source of being, which is the nature of our human experience.

The desire for communion with this God has been set within the human heart since the dawn of time. The mystery of that communion touches what is most intimate in us, reaching down to the very depths of our being. Yet how insignificant we seem to be, compared to the vastness of Creation. And yet that vastness, that infinite depth, is within us, inseparable from whom we are.

However, it is impossible for us mere humans to understand God. I cannot tell you who God is or what God is. We are all people who are bound by both time and space and yet when we speak of God we are trying to describe that which is not bound by time and space.

Yet the Church keeps making statements and creating creeds about God, about something they can know absolutely nothing about!

God is so immense that it is laughable and stupid to think that I can offend him. My actions cannot harm God, but they can really harm either my neighbour or myself.

What about St. Augustine, who was influenced by his strange Manichean concepts of man, coming up with the concepts of original sin leading to the development Limbo to accommodate children who died before they were baptized? What about the torture this caused to women over the centuries? I am not denying that we are all born with genetic traits and drives we would be better off without, but Augustine believed Baptism would get rid of them. Here at least the Catholic Church has come at last to its senses and recently dropped such a ridiculous man-made understanding of the after-life.

What about that abomination of 'penal substitution' put forward by St. Anselm that Adam and Eve having offended God, and with no human being capable of making retribution for the offence, Jesus had to come down to earth and be sacrificed for our sins. Utterly ridiculous!

The scholars of the Jesus Seminar claim that only16% of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels are actually authentic — accurate portrayals of what Jesus really said. The other 84% are words read into the Jesus of history by an interpreting community during the 30 year oral period after His death.

However in that 16% we have Jesus teaching that God is a God of enormous love. He refers to him as 'ABBA' or 'daddy'. In story after story Jesus expresses unexpected, costly, and overwhelming love and compassion for all people even enemies.

The meteoric spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire was due to this same love and compassion expressed by the Christian communities in the horribly cruel world of the Roman Empire at that time. People were amazed at this and said "Look how they love one another". Where do we find this same love and compassion in the Church today?

The fact that the gospel stories are not historical however, should not prevent us from trying to enter into the same thinking and emotions that the original writers experienced.

Take Christmas just as one example, even though we know that Jesus was not born in a stable in Bethlehem, we can suspend our rational thinking and enter a world of magic that the evangelists in their enthusiasm created, where stars do wander and angels do sing and wise men do travel and virgins do conceive.

But it must always be stressed that the stories are not to be taken literally.

Reviving the ancient "spirituality" of Christianity...

Vatican II was an attempt to bring common sense into the Catholic Church. I believe one of the reasons for its failure was that it did not start by reviving the ancient "spirituality" of Christianity.

Ever since the reformation the Catholic Church had been in defensive mode issuing dogma and doctrine and completely letting go of its ancient traditions of spirituality. If Vatican II had started with an emphasis on spirituality and meditation I believe that change would have been impossible to reverse.

But, spirituality cuts out the need for clerics and clericalism, and perhaps that tells us something!

One of the greatest discoveries of the last century — maybe the word 'recoveries' is a better word — is the recovery of the contemplative tradition. And the contemplative tradition is the transformation of consciousness. This way of thinking had not been taught in the West for hundreds of years.

Albert Einstein says: "The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can have is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead ... That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible Universe forms my idea of God."

People are thirsting for spirituality. Look at the recent phenomenon of Eckart Tolle. Over two million people from 139 countries around the world participated in Oprah Winfrey and Eckart Tolle's web-based seminar studying Tolle's recent book "A New Earth".

Fr. Richard Rohr says that the genius of Eckart Tolle is that he is able to express all the ancient Christian teachings on spirituality and contemplation in a completely modern language, making it accessible to everyone.

Eckart Tolle in his book "The Power of Now" tells us that most of the thought processes that constantly go on in our minds are a waste of time. We are either thinking about the past, regrets, reminisces etc. or about the future, fantasies, fears etc., whereas if we can remain in the present we will be in the presence of the eternal NOW, in the presence of God.

Look at the success of the World Community for Christian Meditation under the guidance of Fr. Laurence Freeman. As a global spiritual community it took form in 1991. But it continues the 30-year-long work begun by the Benedictine monk John Main. His legacy is found in his teaching Christian meditation as part of the great work of our time of restoring the contemplation dimension of Christian faith in the life of the church. There are now hundreds of thousands of Catholics and other Christians, throughout the world, practicing the twice-daily routine of half-hourly meditation. Brisbane boasts having the largest number of WCCM meditation prayer groups of any city in the world. Here we have a monastery without walls in reality.

Our experience of life improves enormously when we engage in contemplative or meditative prayer.

Alfred Whitehead says: "Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science."

I accuse the leaders of the Christian Churches, especially the Catholic hierarchy of a great crime against humanity in denying the world an acceptable vision of Jesus and his teaching. The world today is confronted by massive environmental, economic and political problems and stands in great need of Christian love and compassion for friend and foe alike.

From Michael Dowd's book "Thank God for Evolution":

"In a diverse, developmental Cosmos there is ultimately no privileged position theologically — no place and time which we can be sure to have God's absolute truth. The insights revealed to Buddha, Confucius, Moses, Paul, Mohammed, the Hebrew prophets and other biblical writers, early church leaders, reformers, counter-reformers, and others through the ages and in other cultures throughout the world were only those that could have been received then and there. The same is true for us. Future generations will surely have larger, more comprehensive understandings of the meaning and magnitude of each of our faith traditions than any of us can imagine today."

Do I mean that we should disregard the Bible. No, I don't! The Bible contains an inexhaustible source of wisdom relevant for today if read in the right way.

Do I mean that there are no such thing as healings, psychic phenomena and other inexplicable events that I cannot yet explain by science. No I don't, but perhaps the first question that should be asked here is why don't they happen more often?

Teilhard de Chardin said: "The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason to hope."

Can we expect the Christian Churches and especially the Catholic Church to amend their interpretations of scripture, their dogmas and doctrines, their liturgies and creeds to accommodate the above views?

If they don't then more and more people will drift out the doors and Christianity will become completely irrelevant to the world, a world as I have said that needs Christian principles more than ever today.

For the near future I believe it is a hope and mission that is impossible.

Fr. Richard Rohr says:

It seems to me that the emerging church is emerging because people are finding the ability to have a grateful foot in both camps — Tradition (the mother church) along with a new consensus, a new support group that parallels, deepens, broadens, grounds and personalizes the traditional message. But you don't throw out the traditional message. The emerging church becomes an accountability system for the Tradition.

There's got to be a new kind of reformation in which we don't react, we don't rebel, we don't hate anything. You can't start a spiritual reformation by hating things. You have to be for something.

And so the emerging church questions are: What are you in love with? What do you believe in? What is the heaven that you have discovered?

New structures that can make the emerging church possible cannot be in opposition to any existing church structures. The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. Just go ahead and do it better.

Don't waste the next 20 years of your life being against anybody, anything, any group, any institution. Just go ahead and do it better. It's so commonsense when you hear it.

Vince Exley

[Index of Commentaries and Reflections by Vince Exley]