Getting to the Point: ecumenism

Showing posts with label ecumenism. Show all posts

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Madonna House Movie VI: Light From the East

It is Thursday, and so we have the sixth instalment of the Madonna House video series, the twelve short films about our apostolate that we made just this past year. Here it is, with some thoughts following:

Now, I have to say for the first time in these videos that I don't think this one quite nailed it. This is not a criticism of the film makers, really: the subject of MH and its relationship to the Eastern church is a big one, perhaps not possible to cover in a seven minute You Tube style video. Film is a necessarily visual medium--this is its great power and beauty--but I think (I may be biased in this by my own authorial avocation) that something more needs to be written about this topic.

The film covers our celebration of the Byzantine liturgy--three of our priests have bi-ritual faculties, and we have the Divine Liturgy once a month. It also touches briefly upon the presence of icons in our community, interviewing one of our iconographers, and finally touches very briefly on the presence of poustinia in the life of the community. All of these are vast and profound topics in themselves and in the context of our Roman Catholic community, and so in a seven minute video the most that can be said is 'these things exist; they are really beautiful; we really like them!'

Like I say, there's a lot more that can be said on the topic, and it's on my 'long list' of books I would like to write some day. The fact is, Catherine Doherty was Russian, to the marrow of her spiritual bones, and her entire Christian formation was that of a Russian Orthodox lay woman. She had been exposed quite a bit to Catholicism in her childhood, being educated by Catholic nuns in various boarding schools, and her father in particular was very ecumenical in his own person, being a disciple of the Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev who took a remarkably pro-Roman stance in his writings.

Catherine, then, upon her becoming Catholic as a young woman lived out her Roman Catholicism with a complete interior orientation towards Russian spirituality and piety. Living outside of Russia, she often felt like a stranger in a strange land, and questioned God as to why He was asking her to found a community when she always struggled to communicate her understanding of the Gospel to a Western audience.

It is a long story as to how God answered that question. Part of it was his bringing to MH Fr. (later Archbishop) Joseph Raya whose dynamic charismatic celebration of his Melkite liturgy opened the community up to the beauty of the East. In addition, she discovered, and began to read, a succession of books by Russian theologians who themselves had left Russia in the Communist era and who thus had a Western audience for their Russian presentation. Schmemann, Arseniev, and above all Paul Evdokimov gave Catherine the words to explain what she had always lived, and the 'permission' to use those words to present her deepest spiritual insights to her MH family.

And so besides poustinia, she brought forth in the last decade of her life a slew of Russian words that I believe we are still just beginning to unpack in MH: sobornost (unity); strannik (pilgrim); urodivoi (fool for Christ); and molchanie (the silence of God). All of this (and more, yet) has made MH an odd thing indeed--a Roman Catholic community beating with a Russian heart, a group of Westerners, called to be faithful to our Western traditions and ways, yet illumined by light from the East, and still, largely, striving to understand what that means precisely and how we are to live it fully and faithfully.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Possessed by Truth

Two rules are generally regarded nowadays as fundamental for interreligious dialogue:

1. Dialogue does not aim at conversion, but at understanding. In this respect it differs from evangelization, from mission;

2. Accordingly, both parties to the dialogue remain consciously within their identity, which the dialogue does not place in question either for themselves or for the other.

These rules are correct, but in the way they are formulated here I still find them too superficial. True, dialogue does not aim at conversion, but at better mutual understanding – that is correct. But all the same, the search for knowledge and understanding always has to involve drawing closer to the truth. Both sides in this piece-by-piece approach to truth are therefore on the path that leads forward and towards greater commonality, brought about by the oneness of the truth.

As far as preserving identity is concerned, it would be too little for the Christian, so to speak, to assert his identity in a such a way that he effectively blocks the path to truth. Then his Christianity would appear as something arbitrary, merely propositional. He would seem not to reckon with the possibility that religion has to do with truth.

On the contrary, I would say that the Christian can afford to be supremely confident, yes, fundamentally certain that he can venture freely into the open sea of the truth, without having to fear for his Christian identity. To be sure, we do not possess the truth, the truth possesses us: Christ, who is the truth, has taken us by the hand, and we know that his hand is holding us securely on the path of our quest for knowledge. Being inwardly held by the hand of Christ makes us free and keeps us safe: free – because if we are held by him, we can enter openly and fearlessly into any dialogue; safe – because he does not let go of us, unless we cut ourselves off from him. At one with him, we stand in the light of truth.

Address to Roman Curia, December 21, 2012

Reflection – ‘We do not possess the truth; the truth possesses us.’ The Pope hear sails into some of the truly tricky elements of inter-religious dialogue. We are not relativists. We do not believe that Catholicism is merely one religious path among many, all of equal value. We do believe it is true.

And yet this call to inter-religious dialogue, so vital in the world today wracked by war, violence, suspicion and hate, must be done with great respect for the beliefs of others, and the strong elements of beauty, truth, goodness present in every religion and every human heart.

It is this whole business of being possessed by the truth that is our surety in this work. In other words, ‘the truth’ is not in its essence some list of propositions or an ideology or debating points or a syllogism. It is a Person, and this is Jesus Christ who loves us and holds us in his care.

Because the truth that possesses us is that strong, that vital, that real—not some fragile certainty that we barely manage to hold onto, but a living communion of love—we don’t have to be afraid of other world views. We can listen with love to the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Muslim, the Jew. The love of Christ extends towards them, too, and if we are living in that love the very work of dialogue becomes deeply missionary, deeply evangelical, as Christ’s love enters the dialogue through our own interior dialogue with Him in the midst of it.

This is all so very important. Too often Christians draw back from the encounter with the ‘other’, perhaps for fear of losing their own faith or of capitulating to relativism or simply because it is hard work. We need this vision the Pope gives us here of how a loving respectful mutual searching out of truth always inclines our hearts towards deeper possession by the Truth, and in that Truth to show forth the face of love to all men and women.

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Less Yelling! More Listening!

In man’s present situation, the dialogue of religions is a necessary condition for peace in the world and it is therefore a duty for Christians as well as other religious communities. This dialogue of religions has various dimensions.

In the first place it is simply a dialogue of life, a dialogue of being together. This will not involve discussing the great themes of faith – whether God is Trinitarian or how the inspiration of the sacred Scriptures is to be understood, and so on. It is about the concrete problems of coexistence and shared responsibility for society, for the state, for humanity.

In the process, it is necessary to learn to accept the other in his otherness and the otherness of his thinking. To this end, the shared responsibility for justice and peace must become the guiding principle of the conversation. A dialogue about peace and justice is bound to move beyond the purely pragmatic to become an ethical struggle for the truth and for the human being: a dialogue concerning the values that come before everything.

In this way what began as a purely practical dialogue becomes a quest for the right way to live as a human being. Even if the fundamental choices themselves are not under discussion, the search for an answer to a specific question becomes a process in which, through listening to the other, both sides can obtain purification and enrichment. Thus this search can also mean taking common steps towards the one truth, even if the fundamental choices remain unaltered. If both sides set out from a hermeneutic of justice and peace, the fundamental difference will not disappear, but a deeper closeness will emerge nevertheless.

Address to Roman Curia, December 21, 2012

Reflection – So often, when we either try to enter into dialogue, or when we think about what dialogue means and how it is to be done, we can think it means papering over the differences between people and religions. To ‘dialogue’ means to put aside our different opinions and do… well, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do, and what kind of conversation is supposed to happen if we shelve or paper over our differences.

Of course some people want to avoid conflict and find it deeply unpleasant to be in disagreement with their neighbour; others seek it out and revel in the combat.

Neither of these attitudes is quite right, I think. Going along to get along can too easily become a compromise of integrity; deliberately picking fights or living in a state of constant dudgeon is not the way of peace and love in the world.

The Pope has a good model of dialogue in this passage, I think. Everyone wants justice in the world; everyone wants peace. Even the terrorist with the plastic explosives wants peace, and believes earnestly that his act of violence will help usher in the Dar es Salaam, the Islamic parallel to our Christian ‘kingdom of God.’

Dialogue—any dialogue, anywhere, between any people—must start from a point of common agreement. There is no other basis to enter into conversation with another person. And so, every serious human being beholds the world in its fragmented broken reality, and every serious human being of good will desires to advance justice and peace in the world.

This is where all real dialogues can begin. But the Pope observes insightfully that we cannot talk for very long about justice and peace, about what is wrong in the world and how to remedy it, without touching upon the deep questions of life and humanity. Not only do these deep questions inform what ‘justice and peace’ mean, but the very task of serving justice and peace requires that we come to understand the other in his or her difference.

I need to know why that terrorist believes his act of violence is needed for justice and peace. I need to know why the Planned Parenthood worker truly believes she is serving the cause of justice for women. I need to hear and know the perspective of the trans-gendered individual, the communist, the anarchist, the atheist.

Dialogue is an urgent need in the world today—there is far too much talking past one another, far too much yelling of slogans, far too much retreating into polarized camps. But if that dialogue is to be real, to be honest, we must get over the fear of putting on the table our different world views; we must able to disagree openly and honestly without vitriol or violence. It is this kind of dialogue—fearless, honest, searching—that is a purifying, enlightening, enriching activity that can truly move us all forward into the kingdom of God, into a more just, more peaceful world.