The call to fall awake - Peter Dowling
The call to fall awake
A recent comment I read from Mark Patrick Hederman, current Abbot of Glenstal Abbey in County Limerick Ireland said: I never go anywhere unless I receive three signs that I should do so! He was commenting on how things have a habit of striking us and all of a sudden the same idea, thought, person, or event can come at us from a number of sources almost simultaneously. This might be regarded as chance, as Providence, as the energy of the universe coming together in a creative way, as some other interpretation, but it seems to come from ‘beyond’ in an unexpected way.
It was in this context that the name John Feehan surfaced late last year for me. With a Presentation Sister and a Presentation Brother, I was part of a group of three to organise a week together for our Leadership Teams in the following September – in fact, just last week now. One of us had been speaking to some of our fellow religious who had had some sabbatical time at An Tairseach, the Ecology Centre run by the Dominican Sisters in Wicklow Ireland. They had spoken very positively of John’s presentation to them. A second of our team of three had heard John’s name from another source in terms of a course he had run recently. We also heard that he was going to publish a further book in January of this year, now entitled The Singing Heart of the World. So, we decided, after consulting with our teams, that it was no coincidence that his name was surfacing!
John is a scientist, a geologist, and a biologist in particular. At the end of this coming academic year, he will retire from University College Dublin as Senior Lecturer in the School of Agriculture, Food Science and Veterinary Medicine. Having spent some earlier time as a student with the Salesian formation program, lived in Africa, raised his own family, published numerous articles on science and philosophy, and been a observer/participant in Irish and Church and world life, John had quite a unique background to bring towards expanding our consciousness as leaders. He graciously agreed to spend a day with us.
There was no doubting John’s passion for his subject – Creation as Revelation. A few days afterwards, what is staying with me is his challenge to us to be people of contemplation and wonder. Unless one is able to let the wonder of the mystery of all creation, and one’s oneness (in reality) with all, then it is still only a head-trip, and our world will not be changed from its all-pervading consumerist ideology pedaled by a developed world, desired by the less developed world, and totally unsustainable in terms of population and resources. People are needed whose hearts are touched to live and be in new ways. The only way to come to that level of consciousness is to be contemplative people, touched with the extraordinary grandeur of the mystery of creation, as revealing a God both deeply within and beyond that creation, and to allow that Mystery to change us. It is undoubtedly our deepest call to conversion today.
The kinds of changes that are needed in our human lifestyle will not be made by rational arguments. There are already sufficient of those, and they are able to be deflected by the powers of self-interest in business and politics, and also in the lethargy of each of us. It is only through a massive ground-swell of people who know that the present is killing the future that such change will begin to occur. It is happening, but the forces of resistance are strong. Perhaps a key role for religious is to be and encourage the kind of contemplative people who are able to be outspoken in areas concerning the future of our planet.
As I write this now, there is nothing new here, and yet everything is new! What is it that moves one from being somewhat complacent to taking more than cosmetic action. Is it a John Feehan? Is it someone else who has touched our psyche, and we know that truth has been spoken directly to our hearts? Is it in fact the person of Jesus whose message of the gospel takes new root in us for the specific needs of these times?
As I have been grappling with these questions in recent days, I also have had the chance to look at a powerpoint presentation kindly sent to me by Mark O’Loughlin in Melbourne Australia. Mark gave the presentation some weeks ago to a group of people and entitled it Attempting to Understand a Spirituality of Transcendent Sacredness of All Being. Having experienced Mark’s passion and rich insights on other occasions, I was struck forcibly by what he was saying and its connection with what John Feehan had said. Seeing all of reality as having being – not only humans, but all other forms of existence, such as creation, art forms, light, memory, … – has a powerful impact on how one looks at reality. If we are all beings, and are in one communion of beings with all else, then so much of how we live must be seen in new ways.
Mark invited his audience to be in touch with ‘transcendent’ experiences which take us out of the ordinary into another realm of consciousness, and which often become guiding lights for how we wish to live. Experiences of beauty, of nature, of wonder which lead us deeper into mystery become moments of grace to take us beyond the immediate. Touching into the transcendent is touching into the Sacred. Mark finished his presentation with some reflections on Mary, in particular seeing the Mary presence today as the Transcendent Feminine, a part of the transforming and creative divinity always giving birth to the sacred. My few comments are clearly an inadequate and superficial overview to the depth of Mark’s presentation, which reinforced for me a way of looking at being that is becoming the only sustainable way in terms of living into the future.
I am very grateful to both John and Mark for their insightful thoughts. I am beginning to find that the groundswell I notice in myself, almost the awakening from being a sleepwalker in seeing the truth of reality, is happening to others as well. There is some bigger plan at work, and we are all part of it. It is the progressive journey into new consciousness. Experiences of transcendence are often key moments on this journey.
John and Mark keep bringing me back to these words in the poem Oceans by Juan Ramon Jiminez:
I have a feeling that my boat has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing happens!
Nothing...Silence...Waves...
--Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?
Christian Brother Peter Dowling
September 2010
How Far Since Munnar? - Peter Dowling
It is two years since the Congregation Chapter in Munnar. Where have my thinking, my imagination, my dreams, my hopes, my fears gone since then? Have I taken a single step, travelled many miles, or even gone backwards? Loreena McKennitt’s song Never-Ending Road reminds us that we’re always making the path. Even when we’re not sure where it is going (most of the time!), there is an attitude to be lived that we are always engaged with the Mystery whom we call God.
My strongest image from the Chapter is that of ‘flying free’. I hear a call to living freely much more strongly than before. It is not a freedom from responsibility, but freedom to embrace a deeper humanity and a release of the fears that bind me. I used to think of lack of freedom in terms of personal weakness – the expectations that I put on myself that were unhealthy, the patterns of living coming more from addictive tendencies, the approach to morality I adopted that was more self-focused than attentive to global implications. My awareness is that these areas are still relevant, but less significant than I once regarded them, as a bigger picture opens up.
I realized after the Chapter that I needed to read much more and engage in conversation with people around the Universe Story, about which I had rather limited knowledge. What I have read, thought and talked about with others all reinforce the reality that the human being is the cosmos come to conscious awareness, and realising that we are related to all other elements in the community of the universe. This is a much wider understanding than I have had before, and it opens me up to questioning so much of what I took for granted. Taking seriously the learnings of science which result in new understandings of cosmology helps me to be in touch with what is being referred to as ‘emerging spirituality’. Of particular interest to me, as a professed/consecrated follower of Jesus, is how his story is part of the bigger picture of the Universe Story. I am finding this a great impetus to read some of the latest thinking on Jesus in scripture, and have found Marcus Borg’s book Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary an excellent one in this regard. It is helping me to see Jesus afresh. Cynthia Bourgeault’s The Wisdom Jesus is another book that has helped me.
I’m finding that to focus on the divinity of Jesus is a distraction that is less helpful in living as disciple today. That is not to deny his divinity, but to see it as less relevant for the present time. My emerging awareness is that a focus on Jesus’ divinity so easily takes him into another realm, and away from my learning how he himself as a human person experienced and grew in relationship with God. I’m called to learn to relate to God as he did, to be a son of God myself. Seeing what this means in a time of much expanded knowledge of the universe is both challenging and exciting, and goes beyond what I have taken in the past as my traditional understanding of the Catholic faith. ‘Catholic’, if it is to mean anything to me now, has to be expansive, embracing, universal, finding ‘truth’ in many places which once I might have considered suspect. How broad or narrow are the boundaries in which I choose to live? How free am I?
I’m finding a resistance in me to what I see as restricting, as wanting to consider a smaller vision. Jesus’ vision was expansive, and his God was able to embrace all people and situations, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ without exclusion. I worry that at the present time the hierarchical leadership of the Catholic Church seems to have its own survival at centre stage rather than reaching out beyond. It really has no grasp of the freedom which our Chapter calls us to, if one looks at so much of what is currently emanating from the Vatican. I believe even more strongly in the importance of the Church as ‘People of God’ which was a central platform of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Vatican II, and which has never really been implemented in practice. In fact, the effort to move back to clerical control, and particularly Roman control rather than collegial action of Bishops, seems to be dominant.
So I find myself now asking: how does change take place in our world and our Church? It can only come about by people living differently, and that implies a risk as it will not easily be accepted by those in power at present. I can’t see any other option than to keep engaging in new conversations with people from many different backgrounds in the awareness that the search for God is wide. I saw recently a book entitled Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian. The title is catchy, maybe offensive to some, yet it reminds me that I can only reclaim and own my Christian tradition more deeply if I realize and accept the truth in other faiths and journeys beyond the Christian and maybe even beyond any professed religion or faith. The reform of the Church that I want to commit to is not back to pre-Vatican II, but to a fuller implementation of the freedom that the Council called us to, and which embraces a global and universal vision. Unless conversations, decisions and actions around this bigger vision are part of the Catholic life, then Catholicism will be seen as irrelevant, which is how an increasing number are seeing it.
There has been massive criticism of the Church, even escalating in recent times to take in the Pope’s personal role, for its handling of sexual abuse. The media has a strong agenda and many wish to attack anything religious. Perhaps we are seeing two worlds collide. One world is the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire with its laws emanating from the Canons of the Church. The other world is the one of nation states that has a set of common or civil laws to govern themselves. One sees a “cover up’ when the other sees a care for both victims and abusers. Whatever the accuracy or not of this idea, more and more people are finding that there seems to be an unwillingness on the part of the Vatican to look at issues that may be related to the ‘Roman’ culture so entrenched in many parts of the Catholic world. Some of the key issues are not readily open for discussion and for new ways of thinking. Questions around use of power and decision-making in the Church, approaches to sexuality, role of women, institutional structures, lay people taking their authority, bishops acting collegially – these are the ones which need addressing.
A constant message that the CLT is hearing as we move in different parts of the developed world in particular is that many people are not finding a spirituality which speaks to them in their parishes. Yet, when there is an opportunity, they thrill to share their stories and their own experience of God – a God they recognise as beyond the boundaries in which they have grown up or often allowed their thinking to be bound. They experience a renewed sense of freedom and community. As a Brother, I want to encourage that new model of Church where there is freedom to share the God of our experience and to find new ways of celebrating this faith in liturgy and action for justice. The God whom I experience, and who speaks to me in the Munnar Chapter document, is clearly bringing new life to people as they touch with wonder into the new story of the cosmos and experience that God in their living.
The last two years have reinforced for me the obvious reality that Religious Life is changing, and is dying, and even dead, in some of its forms. Radical discipleship of Jesus is to be lived in new ways. If we are to be followers of Jesus as we engage with the new cosmology, discipleship seems to require of us a challenging of ‘domination systems’ (as Marcus Borg calls them), wherever they are found. Sandra Schneiders’ article published in NCR in January entitled Religious Life as Prophetic Life Form says eloquently what we are called to today. I’m wary of religious calling themselves ‘prophetic’. If they live a radical faithfulness to the gospel in these times, they will be prophetic, but it is up to others to give their actions that name. Love of the Church as People of God enables us all to call our priests and bishops our brothers too, engaged in the human search for God as part of all of life, and not separate and aloof, as many currently are. Actions based on deep contemplation of the gospel and the emerging spirituality coming from a new cosmology will, I believe, be prophetic as they touch into the divine invitation to creative growth in freedom.
For me, the constant challenge is to keep speaking the truth as I am seeing it now. It will not be the ‘full’ truth, but unless I am speaking what I see as ‘my truth’, I will not be making a contribution to changing those structures in our world and Church which desperately need changing. When enough people are doing things differently, then new things are possible. The Berlin Wall collapses, the Soviet Union breaks up, and the Church can be renewed too. All of a sudden, the ‘different’ becomes the reality!
I like the words of Juan Ramon Jiminez in his poem Oceans
I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing happens!
Nothing...Silence...Waves...
--Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?
Peter Dowling cfc
