Getting to the Point: community

Showing posts with label community. Show all posts

Thursday, June 18, 2015

Shall We Gather At The River (And Everywhere Else, For That Matter)?

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

And with your spirit.

I have begun to go through the Mass bit by bit on Thursdays, to show how every bit of the Mass is something to be lived and not simply a ritual to be undergone.

So we are still in early days here, with the ritual greeting of the priest and the response of the congregation. As I said last week, these ritual forms are important, theologically charged and meaningful. It is well meant, but a terrible mistake for a priest to substitute them with ‘Good morning!’ and similar glad handed informality.

The point of these entrance rites is to gather the community, coming from different directions and filled with different concerns and problems and attitudes, into a single body to offer God the worship in spirit and in truth. All the entrance rites are for that purpose.

And so we begin, as we did with the sign of the cross, by acknowledging that it is the Trinity that brings us together into unity. Jesus, the Father, the Spirit – in our quest to become a unity of faith, we have to know that God is the starting point, not nice human feelings or any other human efforts.

No, it is the gracious gift of Jesus Christ that places us in the love of the Father, a love that is sustained by the abiding presence of the Spirit in and among us, not anything of our own doing that is the source and strength of Christian unity.

I want to reflect, though, on our living out this one moment of the Mass. This is not exactly a part of the Mass we devote much time to, or think about afterwards. Even if the priest is extraordinarily slow of speech and super-duper reverent, this ritual greeting clocks in at under a minute.

It’s too bad, on one level. Because if we Catholics who are at Sunday Mass simply took this moment of the ritual greeting and applied it to our daily lives, factually the world would be transformed in a month’s time. In other words, if our guiding principle as we went through the day was to draw everyone we meet into a space of communion, if our basic principle of action was to extend grace and love to every human being who comes into our ambit, the results would be dramatic and world changing.

It is not a question of dramatically declaiming in the checkout line or the doctor’s office ‘PEACE BE WITH YOU ALL!’ But it is a question of having that sentiment within your heart towards the people in the checkout line and the harried cashier. Which will come out in one’s countenance, tone of voice, choice of words.

It’s about treating people as if they are, you know, people. Not automatons or avatars or annoyances. This is particularly acute in our on-line communications, where the actual human being at the other end of the media can recede into a dim abstraction. I don’t have to belabour what we all know, that digital communications are harsh and nasty and rude in a way that face to face communications never could be, as people would be punching one another in the face if they talked that way to one another within arm’s reach.

Well, we’re Christians, and we’re supposed to do better, folks. No exceptions, no excuses, no ‘but he did it first’ infantilism. Our mission is to spread the grace of Jesus Christ, the love of the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit to everyone we meet – period. Whether we like them or not or think they merit such treatment from us or not.

But it’s not primarily the on-line stuff I’m thinking about. I really am thinking about the supermarket cashier, to be honest. We have this awful tendency to reduce people to functionaries, to simply go through our days not really treating human beings as human beings. Obviously we are not to strike up a conversation with someone who is checking our groceries through while a line snakes behind us all the way to the dairy case. But… a smile? A sincere thank you? A basic warmth, a kind look, a simple acknowledgment that this person is not just a menial worker but a brother or sister? Is that really beyond us?

My experience is that being deliberate and purposeful in this way makes the routine tasks of daily life lighter and more pleasant, that people more often than not respond with smile for smile, warmth for warmth. And then the same thing with co-workers, with neighbours, with fellow commuters, with… well, you get the point. EVERYONE. And don’t forget the people you actually, you know, live with. We can lose sight of the basic call to build communion and family spirit with them, too, taking them for granted or consigning them to the category of ‘burden’ or ‘problem’.

Grace, love, and communion. To go through one’s day putting it out there, and receiving it back when it is reciprocated (‘and with your spirit’), and not fussing too much when it’s not. Gathering everyone in, bringing everyone into a space of communion, or at least trying to do so. If every Catholic who is at Mass on Sunday even tried to do that Monday-Saturday the whole world would be transformed into a much kinder, gentler, and warmer place in a fortnight. So let’s you and I try to do that today, OK?

Monday, May 11, 2015

In Praise of Dualism

Transgression speaks to the wicked, deep in his heart;

there is no fear of God before his eyes.

For he flatters himself in his own eyes

that his iniquity cannot be found out and hated.

The words of his mouth are trouble and deceit;
he has ceased to act wisely and do good.

He plots trouble while on his bed;
he sets himself in a way that is not good;

he does not reject evil.

Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens,
your faithfulness to the clouds.

Your righteousness is like the mountains of God;
your judgments are like the great deep;

man and beast you save, O Lord.
How precious is your steadfast love, O God!

The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings.

They feast on the abundance of your house,

and you give them drink from the river of your delights.

For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.

Oh, continue your steadfast love to those who know you,

and your righteousness to the upright of heart!

Let not the foot of arrogance come upon me,
nor the hand of the wicked drive me away.

There the evildoers lie fallen; they are thrust down, unable to rise.

Psalm 36

Reflection – The Monday Psalter today brings us Psalm 36. This is a familiar one to those who pray the breviary, showing up on Wednesday Week One of Morning Prayer. It is a psalm reflecting proper biblical dualism—not the false dualism of Gnostic or Manichean mystery religions where good and evil are two equal and opposing powers in the world, but true dualism.

This true dualism is that there is black, and there is white. There is good, and there is evil. While any one human being may be quite a patchwork of tiny black and white bits, and the overall effect at a distance is one of grey indistinctness, the fact is that good is good, evil evil. And that the whole business of life is to become more and more radiant with the goodness reflecting the goodness of God, less and less stained by the sorrow and darkness of evil.

We know in the fullness of Christian revelation that this is the work of grace in us, and of the Holy Spirit bringing to us the grace of Christ, in which our own efforts are only a small (if necessary) part. But here and elsewhere in the biblical revelation the point is to highlight the radical and sharp delineation between what is good and what is evil.

It is worth noting in this psalm, however, that the two are sharply delineated, but are not really parallel. And the difference between them is instructive. The evil one, the ‘wicked’ in psalmodic parlance, is self-referential, circling back on himself. Transgression speaks to the wicked… he flatters himself… he sets himself on a way that is not good. Evil is a closed circle, in its most extreme form a solipsistic ego project in which no one counts or scarcely exists except the all-important self.

Good, on the other hand, is communitarian, relational, other-directed. The psalmist writing about goodness here first contemplates the goodness of God, not his own goodness. And he goes on to depict a genuine communion of persons in the next stanza – the children of mankind taking refuge in the shelter of God’s wings, feasting and drinking from the table of the Lord, from his fountain of life.

Sin always locks the person up in his own self; virtue, goodness, right conduct is marked by definition in its opening the person up to relationship, to communion, to a whole world that is bigger than himself and takes him out of himself. This is why the dualism of the mystery religions is wrong—good and evil are radically different and opposing things, but they are not co-equal.

Evil is petty, puny, and makes the evildoer smaller and smaller and smaller the more he gives into it. Good is expansive, and the more a person gives themselves over to the good, the more they are broken open to that bigger world—ultimately to a place of transcendence as we are ushered into the communion of the Trinity, the very interior life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit which Christ makes possible for us to share in by His mission as man.

This psalm only gives the slightest allusions to this, only sets the stage for that final revelation, but to pray it in the fullness of Christian revelation is a wonderful thing: Lord in your light, we see light itself. And that light is the light shining from Calvary, from the empty tomb, from the Upper Room, and from the altar of God and tabernacle of God in every church.

So let’s choose to do what is good today, as best we can (the whole point of the moral law being given to us in Scripture and Tradition is so we don't have to flounder around in this matter), and in that know we are being borne into a world and a life beyond what we can imagine.

Friday, March 13, 2015

People Before Profits?

All our activities in this world should have as goal the forming of community. The building of this world, the effort to make it a better place to live in, our individual works and enterprises, all must have this goal in view, otherwise they depart from God’s order.

Ruth Burrows, To Believe in Jesus

Reflection – ‘Write your blog posts while ye may…’ My time in Vancouver is going to be quite heavily scheduled, it seems, and there will be some long stretches of no blogging at all as I travel hither and yon without benefit of wifi. So, I thought I would do what I can in the days I have.

We are reading this fine book for our post-lunch spiritual reading at MH, and these particular sentences jumped out at me with considerable emphasis as I read it. It really does seem to me that in two relatively short sentences, 48 words, Burrows has encapsulated the entire social doctrine of the Catholic Church.

All our activities in this world have as their goal the forming of community. That is a very penetrating insight. And, while perhaps many reading this have never heard it put that way, it really is hard to argue against it, if one is starting from a point of Catholic theology.

Take, for example, an aspect of life people associate least with this formation of community, namely the running of a business. So a man or woman starts a business: they have a product or service of some kind, develop it to the point where people will pay money for it; they secure facilities, hire employees, advertise, market, execute; the business, if it is successful grows or at least turns a profit; the business owner and the employees are able to live off of the revenues/salaries they earn.

There – did I get it right, more or less? I have never operated a business, but that’s the gist of it, isn’t it? I probably forgot the part where they have crushing bank loans and spend the first few decades maxed out on debts and so forth. But that’s the basic thing, right?

So what does that have to do with the formation of community? That’s where this business is either in God’s order, or it is not. How does the owner treat the employees? Merely as cogs in a wheel, or as human beings? Yes, human beings who have to do the jobs they are hired for or be let go, but nonetheless, there is a difference between treating people like dirt and treating people like… well, people. And everyone who has had bad bosses and good bosses knows exactly what that difference is.

How do those running and working in the business treat their clientele? Like wallets that happen to be attached to human beings, or like human beings first, revenue sources second? Again, we all know the difference, and it does not need to be belaboured. Is the idea to gouge the customer out of every cent possible, or to provide a real good or service at a fair market price?

And so on and so forth. Every business exists in a matrix of other businesses and corporate entities, a life of a community. Do the business owners see themselves as a vibrant part of that community, someone who by virtue of being a profitable business can make a real contribution for the good to the life of the community, or is it just a sort of robber baron attitude where the idea is to bleed the community dry and get out of town before the crash happens?

The whole Catholic understanding of commercial life is indeed summed up by the (I admit) rather over-simplified and hackneyed phrase ‘people before profits’. Not, I would stress, ‘people instead of profits’, but ‘before’. Obviously, a business that does not turn a profit is a business that will not exist next year, with consequent harm and loss of employment to everyone involved in it. Business owners have to be able to earn a profit, but not at the expense of the human dignity and rights of others. That is what makes community, you know – always privileging the person over the thing, ‘who’ over ‘what’. And if the profits have to be a bit smaller in consequence of that privileging, so be it.

So that’s just one example of this—an entire book could be written (not by me, though – this is definitely not my bailiwick!) to show how these few words of Burrows really present the whole social vision of the Church. Politics, family life, the whole matrix of human activity in all its variety—all is subordinated to the building up of the human family, the human community, or it is alienated most seriously from God’s order.

Of course, this means that an awful lot of human activity in our world today is indeed so alienated, and we have a lot of work to do to re-humanize and evangelize the world in its social realities. Today, at least, let our activities be at the service of that task.

Sunday, September 28, 2014

How Can We Make the Mass Relevant to People?

Universality is an essential feature of Christian worship. It is the worship of an open heaven. It is never just an event in the life of a community that finds itself in a particular place.

No, to celebrate the Eucharist means to enter into the openness of a glorification of God that embraces both heaven and earth, an openness effected by the Cross and Resurrection. Christian liturgy is never just an event organized by a particular group or set of people or even by a particular local Church.

Mankind’s movement toward Christ meets Christ’s movement toward men. He wants to unite mankind and bring about the one Church the one divine assembly, of all men.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy

Reflection – One more day of ‘Ratzinger blogging’, and then we’ll be on to something different next week. It seemed appropriate on Sunday, the day of the Lord’s resurrection when the whole Body of Christ throughout the world is gathering together to worship the Risen Lord, to have this excerpt from Spirit of the Liturgy.

Liturgy in Roman Catholic culture in the past 50 years has suffered deeply from the loss of this universal perspective. Far too often we are locked into our own immediate community, our own immediate parish or culture or situation, and the liturgy becomes a mere expression of communal solidarity or identity.

The worst examples of this are seen, of course, in youth ministry, when efforts to make the Mass ‘relevant’ to teenagers or children lead perhaps well-meaning priests and youth workers to introduce such novelties as rock bands, rap, superhero vestments, and so forth. When the focus of the liturgy becomes the assembly and not God, the people and not the Person, fellowship and not Communion, then we are badly off course.

This is why fidelity to the rubrics matters so much. We are not just a little group doing our own thing at St. Soandso Parish, and so able to edit, add, delete, and modify the rite according to what works for us. What really works for us is to celebrate the liturgy exactly as it is given to us, to ‘say the black and do the red’ and in this to know ourselves to be part of a bigger body, a larger reality, a Church that extends to the ends of the earth and in fact transcends the earthly realm to extend to the worship of the Church Triumphant before the throne of God.

In fact, I would argue in a Chestertonian style that the liturgy is most relevant to us, most meeting us where we are, precisely when it is incomprehensible, obscure. It is most meaningful precisely where it is ‘meaningless’. Because we moderns need more than anything to be shaken out of our narrow provincialism, our conviction that the world begins and ends with us, that all reality is to conform itself to our little ideas and our little prejudices, rather than we conforming ourselves to the reality of God which is vastly greater than us.

When we are pushed beyond our immediate understanding and resonance with a liturgical moment, we are actually touching upon the fact, which goes way beyond liturgy and extends to every aspect of spiritual and moral life, that God is continually calling us well out of our comfort zones, well beyond what is easy or feels natural or corresponds to our notions about life.

The simple act of conforming ourselves to the liturgy that the Church gives us, rather than demanding continually that the liturgy conform itself to our likes and dislikes, is a deep act of spiritual humility that genuinely helps us to be conditioned for all the acts of discipleship, obedience, surrender, abandonment that the Lord will most certainly ask of all of us in our lives.

And that we do this act of conformation as a body, a community, signals then that this is the true identity of our community: we are the people the Lord calls together (the original meaning of ecclesia) to be his people, the ones he fashions and shapes according to his good purposes and not ours, his truth and meaning and not ours, his Death and Resurrection and glorification in heaven, and not our little and poor ideas about human happiness and flourishing.

Liturgical obedience is a powerful means, expression, and symbolic realization of the basic stance of faith and discipleship, and we in the Western Church need desperately to recover that sense of faith regarding the liturgy, both for our own selves, and for our task of evangelizing the world.