Looking through Lent to Easter

Looking through Lent to Easter: NT Wright, former Bishop of Durham: “Christ is Risen from the Dead, the First Fruits of Those who have Died”, conference to Italian Catholic Bishops’ Conference (with link to article).
http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Italian_Bishops_Christ_Risen_First_Fruits.htm

Our Relationship with God

“THERE ARE two extremes that the Christian must avoid,” says Bishop Geoffrey Robinson.* “One extreme speaks only of personal self-fulfilment and denies the example and words of Jesus about taking up a cross. The other extreme speaks only the negative language of denial and renunciation and does not allow for the proper self-love without which true growth is not possible. There is a middle ground and it may be found only when we reject both extremes and try to combine into one the two ideas of renuncia¬tion and self-love.
Imagine that I go to a symphony concert where the orchestra and a soloist play Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto. If the pianist is very good, there can come a moment when everything around me fades away and I am taken up into direct contact with Tchaikovsky alone, who speaks to me through his music. At that moment the pianist could paraphrase the words of St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians, ‘I live now, not I, but Tchaikovsky lives in me’.
It is Tchaikovsky alone who can support and continue this mo¬ment, for it is his music alone that contains the inspiration, the genius, the divine spark that no one else in that hall possesses. Take this away and the music would come to an abrupt halt, for no one else can supply it.
At the same time, it is at this moment when we have forgotten the very existence of the pianist that the pianist is most fully alive, most fully all he or she is capable of being. There will have been a vast amount of hard work, and, therefore, of self-denial and renunciation, before this moment became possible, and it would never have been possible if the person had had a narrow and indulgent idea of self-fulfilment. On the other hand, there would also have to have been a basic self-love, self-esteem and self-confidence, or the “pianist would never have had the courage to begin the long journey to this moment, let alone complete it.
“I have chosen Tchaikovsky deliberately, for he was homosexual at a time when it was not possible to be open about this fact and he suffered greatly from this tension in his life. This suffering is so much part of the music he composed that I do not believe any pianist who knew nothing of suffering could really take me to that moment when I was in direct contact with Tchaikovsky himself The pianist would not need to have had exactly the same experiences as Tchaikovsky, but would need to have known anguish, helplessness, fear and anger.
In a similar way, people could be in a position to say the words of Paul, ‘I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me’ only when they had combined these different elements in their lives. Jesus alone would supply the spiritual inspiration and genius and they would have to be constantly connected to this source of spiritual energy.
They would need to have a basic love of self and belief in self, as Jesus certainly did, for without this growth would not be possible. They would have to make every effort to become all they were capable of being, with all the renunciation and self-denial this would involve. And, like Jesus, they would have to open themselves to the full pain and tragedy of the world around them and seek to enter the depths of its mystery. They would need to experience their own brokenness.
There is a long history behind the few thoughts I have expressed here. Much of that history was negative and went too far with the idea of denying oneself. In recent decades the reaction has gone too far in the opposite direction. For the next millennium it is essential that the church find and articulate that middle ground that gives the only true freedom to grow.” 16/3/12
* from CONFRONTING POWER AND SEX IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, Bishop Geoffrey Robinson.
Peter Knott SJ

WHAT’S GOD LIKE?

WHAT’S GOD LIKE?

IT IS generally accepted that God’s relationship with creation can be discussed only obliquely and through models. We need a number of models and images to represent divine action to ourselves, and each has its limitations as well as its possibilities. And we need to keep in mind that the world revealed to us by science has chance and unpredictability built into its processes.
The most common model has been the artist and the work of art he or she produces. The world can be seen as a painting or a piece of sculpture or a great building. There seems something too static in this model. It appears to suggest a God who produces his work of art and then goes on holiday.
The world as literary text has possibilities, notably the fact that a text takes on a life which is independent of its author, so that the interpretative process at the receiver’s end makes a real contribution to the whole communicative enterprise. There are however, defects in this model too.
As in the preceding case, it suggests an absent author who hands over his text to readers who have no need of the author in order to read the text. Writing, then, implies alienation on the part of the author. It destroys immediacy, vitality, and feeling. In addition, the model of written text lends itself to deterministic interpretation: it’s all in the book, we only turn the pages.
The performing arts are better possibilities. The theatre offers a classic metaphor for life: ‘all the world’s a stage … ‘ Actors work from a script, but they have considerable liberty of interpretation, so that it can reasonably be claimed that the script of a playwright suggests less determinism than the text of a novel. The playwright however, does not have to be present at rehearsals or performances.
So it seems better that God is thought of
more as an artist than as a technician or a manager. We might imagine the Creator
standing before the canvas or seated at the

keyboard, as it were.
The latter image respects both the autonomy of the text or work of art and recognises the indispensable and continuing role played by the author or artist.
Suppose we envisage an organist, not performing a finished piece, but extemporising on a theme. The theme is the given, the principle of continuity and identity which gives overall coherence together with considerable freedom in the attaining of it.
The continuing act of extemporisation is the principle of development, novelty, unpredictability. The organist keeps the theme before him but does not foresee where the extemporising spirit will lead hm. Each moment, each stage in the extemporising process, offers new possibilities which were originally unforeseen; a new delight is born with each realised possibility.
God seated at the organ of the universe is the supreme musical genius who is in final ‘control’ of the whole enterprise. But his skill and artistry are engaged, not at the beginning only, like the composer who gives the performer a completed score (with limited freedom of interpretation), but rather also at the challenge of each moment; when, for example, a new development suggests a modulation in key and perhaps a fresh counter-melody or registration, or any of the many devices open to a truly great musician.
A gifted extemporiser is not afraid of false turns or initiatives which in the event lead nowhere. She or he delights in them momentarily before returning to the original theme.
Like all analogies, of course, this has its limitations. It expresses the Creator’s rather than the creature’s freedom of action. Yet it does suggest a mode of action that has purpose whilst respecting freedom, allowing for deviation, and recognising the intimate, dynamic link between God and the world.
But the best of all models is Christ Jesus, second Person of the Trinity, who shows us in himself what God is really like and what we can be with his help. God is Love. 1 John 4.8
Peter Knott SJ

Experiencing God Everywhere

IN JESUS God became human experience: ‘What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life – this life was revealed so that you also may have fellowship with us, as we are in union with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.’1 John 1:1-3.
When asked about the essence of his message, Jesus replied: ‘Come and see.’ – come for the day and experience the presence of my company. He washed people’s feet. He used the metaphor of weddings to explain the nature of union with God. His humanity was seen in that experience of having his own feet washed by Mary’s tears, dried by her hair and anointed with her ointment.
Before he could believe in the Resurrection, Thomas needed to touch the wounds of the risen Christ. Deep healing and true faith are often found within the experience of woundedness.
Knowledge alone, ideas and concepts do not change us profoundly. Experience does. ‘Some things can only be seen by eyes filled with tears.’ After it we see things differently. Our experience is true when we hold no filtering lens, no preconceived notions: we have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable in our openness to reality. ‘Do not be afraid.’ Luke 12.32
Authentic conversion is experienced bodily and emotionally. It was to make all our pain redemptive that divine love
became wounded flesh.
We experience the Holy Spirit in charity, joy, peace, patience , kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. And that list of St Paul’s is not meant to be exclusive: he includes elsewhere humility and forgiveness, ‘whatever is excellent, honourable and worthy of praise.’ Gal 5.22, Col 3.12, Phil 4. 8
God became flesh, the place of experience, richer or poorer, better or worse, in sickness or health. Faith is that attitude which empowers us to experience, in healing depth, all the hard and joyful and routine experiences that each day may bring.
God desired to become our bodies, our senses, our emotions in time and space, so that divine being could be experienced everywhere, by everyone.
People are looking for the meaning of life, for the experience of being fully alive. They are looking for eternity. And eternity is not just to do with the hereafter. Eternity is a quality. If we don’t get it where we are here and now we won’t get it anywhere. The experience of eternity right now in some degree is the function of life. Heaven is the completion of that experience.
We experience something of God’s presence in everything that happens to us. There is a divine whisper in every sound; even the sound of temptation.
Our future resurrection will reveal that we have been experiencing it all our lives. ‘Heaven will be recognised as a country we have already entered, and in whose light and warmth we have already lived:’

The Eucharist as Homecoming

IT WAS love that conceived creation, and it is love that carries it through. The love of God for his creation was expressed in the love of Jesus for his Father and for his fellow human beings.
Yet the reality of evil presents an enigma: how to believe in a loving God when there is so much suffering. The message of the Cross and Resurrection is that God is not mocked nor is he defeated by the worst that man can do. God’s creative purposes are triumphantly justified by his decision not only to raise Jesus from the dead but also his gift to creation of the risen Christ active in the community of men and women through the invisible work of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus did not try to explain the possible purpose and meaning of suffering. Instead he took it as a fact of life, relieved it when the occasion arose, and announced bluntly that those who wished to follow him must be prepared to shoulder it.
For Jesus the matter was eminently practical: to take up the Gospel is to take up the cross. The cross is not to be sought for itself; it comes to those who respond to the demands of love. The problem remains unsolved; the mystery, however, is infinitely deepened by the fact that in Christ God has taken upon himself the pain and distress of evolving creation.
This is not an answer in any academic or speculative sense. It is an answer in the demonstrative and practical sense. If God himself has chosen to share our griefs, it must follow that the existence of suffering does have transcendent meaning, not necessarily in itself but as a concomitance of freedom and the
power to love.
The Church is the community to which the message of Christ’s conquest of sin and suffering has been committed. It is the visible manifestation of human response to the greatest of God’s gifts. The work of redemption must go on. The mystery of the Church consists in the fact that God wills to bring the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus to bear on all humanity, first, through the sending of the Spirit and, second, through the sending of the Church, the gathering of those who, under the prompting of the Holy Spirit, proclaim Jesus as Lord of all creation.
The man who was God’s human expression of divinity went about doing good, caring for the poor and oppressed, renouncing the attractions of structured power, and being himself marginalised by his concern for the marginalised. He placed his hopes and his commission in his followers on whom the Father had bestowed the Kingdom.
The Church as founded by Christ Matt 16.18 is a community of those who love because they realise we are all loved by God, who forgive because they have been forgiven. Its principal ritual is the Eucharist, in which the symbol of a united family meal is fused mysteriously with the self-sacrifice of Jesus on Calvary to enable the participants to celebrate all that God has done for them and for the world by his offer of unconditional forgiveness and reconciliation.
Every Eucharist is a homecoming, a relaxing in our Father’s house, a celebration in symbol of all that we should be. Every Eucharist is an occasion when the participants express in symbolic gestures all that God wants them to be, and their commitment to extend that love to all the world.
17/2/12
Peter Knott SJ

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Prayer for Depth

WE SENSE the importance of prayer; yet, we often find it difficult to pray. We might be familiar with various forms of prayer, from devotional prayers to different kinds of meditation, but we may lack the confidence that our own particular way of praying, with all its distractions is prayer in the deep sense.
The gospels show us Jesus praying in virtually every kind of situation. He prays when he is joyful, he prays when he is in agony, he prays with others around him, and he prays when he is alone at night, withdrawn from all human contact. He prays high on a mountain, in a sacred place, and he prays on the level plane, where ordinary life happens. Jesus prays a lot.
And the lesson isn’t lost on his disciples. They sense that Jesus’ real depth and power are drawn from his prayer. They know that what makes him so special is that he is linked to a power outside of this world. And they want this for themselves. That’s why they ask: “Lord, teach us to pray!”
But we must understand what they were looking for when they asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. They sensed that what Jesus drew from the depth of his prayer was not, first of all, his power to do miracles or to silence his enemies with some kind of superior intelligence. What impressed them and what they wanted too for their own lives was his depth and graciousness.
The power they admired and wanted was Jesus’ attractiveness, his power to love and forgive his enemies. What they wanted was Jesus’ wisdom and inner freedom, his
power to renounce life in self-sacrifice, even while retaining the capacity to enjoy the everyday pleasures of life. They wanted Jesus’ power to be big-hearted, to love beyond his own circle and to love poor and rich alike; to live with charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, trustfulness and chastity (self-control) Gal 5.22, . What they wanted was Jesus’ depth and graciousness. cf 1 Cor 1.30
And they recognized that this power did not come from within himself, but from a source outside him. They saw that he connected to a deep source through prayer, through constantly lifting to God whatever was on his mind and in his heart. They saw it and they wanted that depth for themselves. So they asked Jesus to teach them how to pray like him.
We too want Jesus’ depth and graciousness in our own lives. Like Jesus’ disciples, we also know that we can only attain this through prayer, through accessing a power that lies in the depth of our souls and beyond our souls. We know too that the route to that depth lies in journeying inward, in silence, through both the muddle and the peace that come to us when we quieten ourselves to pray.
In both our reflective moments and in our more desperate moments, we feel our need for prayer and try to go to that deep place. But we struggle to get there. We may feel we don’t know how to sustain ourselves in prayer. Yet in this we are in good company with Jesus’ disciples. A good beginning is to recognize what we need and where it is to be found. We need to begin with that same plea: ‘Lord, teach us to pray!’
13/1/12
Peter Knott SJ

The Dark Enigma

THE PROBLEM of evil prevents many from believing in God How can belief in a loving God be
reconciled with suffering in the world he created? It may be helpful to consider three phases in trying to make some sense of this.
The first is to resist the (often irrational) urge to seek for a moral cause of the distress. God does not send affliction as punishment. Afflictions come to us unbidden from the world which God has made. We do not know why this should be, but the fact that it is so offers us the opportunity of entering into the dark mystery and of seeking to transcend it: and, if possible, to grow through it towards God and our fellow men and women.
The second phase consists in allowing oneself a ‘complaint against God.’ Jewish prayer practices a real freedom before God which a sound Christian theology and spirituality ought to be able to share. We have a long tradition of trust in a heavenly Father who cares for all his creation. If we really believe in a caring God, how can we avoid the sort of complaint we find, for example, in Psalm 6, Our accusation against God here is the impatience of hope in the cry of the psalmist, ‘ My soul is troubled, But though O Lord – how long ..?’ On a lighter note, St Teresa of Avila commented; ‘No wonder you have so few friends Lord when you treat them so badly !’
The third phase integrates complaint and indignation into the suffering itself. Then we see that the reasons for believing in God have nothing in common with the need to explain the origin of suffering. That this phase of integration is a function of prayer more than theology. It is an act of profound trust which is prepared to hope

against hope. It inspires us to trust not only the God who made us but also the very structures of the world he has given us as our environment. He comes to us not only in the serenity of the world which so often delights us, but also from out of the whirlwind of threat, pain, and discontent. God teaches us to discern him through the mist of tears as much as in the tranquility of order. It is a hard lesson, and we instinctively kick against it.
In this phase, we simply accept that our finite minds cannot explain why nature is red in tooth and claw, why one species lives of another, or why it can happen that innocent children suffer. We join our thinking to prayer.
To the unbeliever this attitude will look suspiciously like a case of wish doing duty for rational thought. Believers can only respond that, having opted for the existence of a provident God for other reasons, they are prepared to commit. themselves in faith, hope, and love to that God . Because he is God, he can be credited with reasons that lie beyond the grasp of our finite minds.
It is notable that many believers have said that through enduring suffering they have unaccountably grown in love of their fellow men and women, and of God also. This experience is not an answer to the intellectual problem of innocent suffering, but it does witness to the conviction that the reason for the existence of the cosmos is love and that real love always costs.
We need to keep in mind the price that God himself in Christ was prepared to pay in order that the world might believe and so be saved. ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.’ 2 Cor 5.19 It is inspiring, and a profoundly moving insight that our God is a crucified God.
Peter Knott SJ

God Loves the World

WHATEVER our beliefs, we can all agree that the world is not as it should be. But too often we and our Churches tend to see the world only as a mess, caught up in mindless trivialization, self-indulgent, short-sighted. We see it as having no values that demand self-sacrifice, of worshipping fame, of being addicted to material goods, and of being anti-Church. Indeed, it is not uncommon in our Churches to see the world as our enemy.
But Jesus loved the world! The Gospels describe Jesus’ reaction towards the world that rejected him. As Jesus Wept over Jerusalem, saying: “If you had only recognized the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.” Jesus sees what happens when people try to live without God, the mess, the pain, the heartbreak, and his heartache. If only you could see what you’re doing! Luke 19.41f
Looking at a world that can often break down because of its self-centredness, Jesus responds with understanding, not judgment; with heartache, not rubbing salt in the wounds; and with tears of compassion. Loving parents and friends understand exactly what Jesus was feeling at the moment when he wept over Jerusalem.
What frustrated parent hasn’t looked at a son or daughter caught up in wrong choices and self-destructive behaviour and wept inside as the words spontaneously formed: If only you could
see what you’re doing! If only I could do
something to spare you the damage you’re doing to your life by this blindness! If only you could recognize the things that make for peace! But you can’t, and it breaks my heart!
Our Christian faith asks us to have a genuine love for the world. ‘For God so loved the world he gave his only Son.’ John 3.16 ‘Love one another as I have loved you.’ John 15.12 The world isn’t our enemy. It’s our wayward child and our loved friend who is breaking our heart. That can be hard to see and accept when in fact the world is often belligerent and arrogant in its attitude towards us, when it’s angry with us, when it wrongly judges us, and when it scapegoats us.
But that’s exactly what suffering children often do to their parents and friends when they make bad choices and suffer the consequences. They impute and scapegoat. This can feel most unfair to us, but Jesus’ attitude towards those who rejected and crucified him invites us to empathise.
Moreover a genuine empathy for the world isn’t just predicated on mature sympathy. Mature sympathy is itself predicated on better seeing the world for what it is. The 17 year-old adolescent standing belligerent and angry before her parents isn’t a bad person, she’s just not yet fully grown up.
That’s true too for our world: It’s not a bad place; it’s just far from being a finished and mature one. Jesus came ‘that we might have life to the full.’ John 10.10 We find something of this fullness when we allow ourselves to be guided by the light of Christ rather than our passing moods 6/1/12
Peter Knott SJ

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