In cooperation with Bishop Geoffrey Robinson and his publisher, John Garratt Publishing, we have pleasure in presenting the end chapter meditations from his book which has created so much interest around the world. Today the reflection comes from Chapter Twelve.

"The Prison of the Past"

The Shemah, the prayer that a good Jewish person says every morning and evening, expresses a response of love to God's invitation. Jesus adapted it by combining the first part of the Shemah (Deuteronomy 6:4-5) with Leviticus 19:18 in this fashion:

Hear, 0 Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your mind,
and with all your strength.
And you shall love your neighbour as yourself.
There is no other commandment greater than these. (Mk.12:29-31)

In a world in which we must use weak human words in our attempt to express the divine, this prayer is as close as we will ever come to a statement in human words of eternal and unchangeable truth. The thought it expresses should be at the heart of any Christian creed.

The promise of Jesus Christ was not that the church will never make mistakes, but that it will survive its mistakes, for the truth of Jesus Christ will always be present in the church - tarnished and even obscured, but always there to be rediscovered. The promise is that, in spite of many errors in detail, the church will be maintained in the basic truth of the Great Tradition, and that the ugliness in the church will never completely destroy its underlying beauty. The church's faith will often be weak, its love lukewarm, its hope wavering, but that on which its faith is based, its love is rooted and its hope is built will always endure.

There is an absolute certainty of faith, but it is first and foremost a certainty in something that comes before words. It is faith in the person of Jesus Christ and in the love that fills his story.

Credit: These meditations are taken from the end of chapter reflections in Bishop Geoffrey Robinson's book, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church — Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus, published by John Garratt Publishing. We thank Bishop Robinson and John Garratt Publishing for permission to reproduce these meditations on Catholica Australia.

Bishop Geoffrey Robinson who has degrees in Philosophy, Theology and Church Law, was Auxiliary Bishop in the Archdiocese of Sydney from 1984 until his retirement in 2004. In 1994 he was elected by the Australian Bishops to the National Committee for Professional Standards, coordinating the response of the Catholic Church in Australia to revelations of sexual abuse, and from 1997 until 2003 he was co-chairman of this committee..

We welcome your thoughts in response to Bishop Robinson's reflection in our forum.

©2007 Geoffrey Robinson

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