Confessions XII (Communion and Atomisation)

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

Yesterday I have spoken of the need for a spirituality not blind to tragedy and a spirituality which recognises that, in our broken-ness, we cannot make it by ourselves.

We need Grace – and all my experience has pointed me to the power of the Grace, which flows through the early structures and traditions of the Church (still preserved in Orthodoxy and Catholicism).

It is moreover a Grace, I believe, which emphasises communion and co-operation.

Now in time, I hope to say more on this. For now, I will only say that I believe there is a particular communitarian sensibility to Catholicism – linked to a sense of God as mediated through the community (i.e. the Church) and which many writers have remarked on.

(This subject is often addressed vis-à-vis the more individual sensibility of Protestantism, with its stress on a unique, unmediated relation with a God, who has often been emphasised as more transcendent or radically ‘other’).

Thus, the Catholic sociologist Andrew Greeley speaks of a distinct Catholic Imagination. He argues that Catholics are socialised to see reality differently – with God’s sacramental presence running like a thread through family and community. He argues that Catholics bond more tightly as a result – though not always with healthy results.

Personally I feel Greeley’s analysis depends too much on ideas such as socialisation – and not nearly enough on the Mystery of the Sacraments. I was not socialised as a child to be Catholic – but I do think the Sacraments are changing me in the precise directions he indicates. For example. very human ties become ever more precious …

Whatever the origins of the Catholic communitarian ethos however, I believe there is much else to indicate that the traditional forms of the Church promote communion. The comparatively few schisms within the two millennia of Orthodoxy and Catholicism, also point to this, for example.

Now I believe that the Protestant emphasis on the individual also has tremendous value and necessity.

But as I consider Time magazine’s simple chilling headline ‘Earth at the TIPPING point’, I fear we have tipped too far into **atomisation**. And now more than ever, human co-operation and community is needed …

Here sitting at my computer in Ireland, my heart and mind are reeling at the world situation.

Here in Ireland … which still has far and away the most amazing communitarian ethos, I ever encountered among the various countries in which I lived.

Ireland which until only recently, never spawned a true right-wing party – having rejected such for decades. Ireland, where in even small cities, one can find churches with several daily masses and astonishing numbers participating in each.

Yes, Ireland for so long you rejected the secularist capitalism of the West. You were even described in tones that shivered many a spine, as ‘the greatest Theocracy West of Tehran’.

Was all of this simply Catholic socialisation – or was the Mystery of the Sacraments also a factor?

Personally, I believe it was. And when I consider the rupture from Tradition in the last centuries and the atomising trajectory, which followed in its wake, I feel my heart crying out ever more that something fundamental has been lost.

That there is something fundamentally flawed in this trajectory. A trajectory that is, that begins in the Renaissance, with the dismantling of Tradition.

Whether it is the Rationalism of Descartes, who needs to subject everything to **doubt**, in order to start building afresh.

Or whether it is the Reformation of those noble souls sincerely indignant at the very real abuses of the Church – yes, the terrible abuses, which nonetheless did not justify casting aspersions on vast masses of Christian inspiration – simply because they are not to be found in sola scriptura (i.e. the Bible alone).

Yes more and more troubled, I confess that my heart looks to that pre-Reformation tradition, and it wonders and wonders.

O Holy Mother Church, are you holding far more than we can ever see – far, far more that is directly relevant to addressing the ravaging of people and planet?

As I enter your Sacraments ever more deeply, I feel that I see, or I begin to see, something far more vital and needed within you than I ever imagined …

Now do not mistake me, dear friend. I do not wish for one moment to suggest that the Sacraments –as powerful as I experience them to be - are the only way that Christ’s Grace is available.

No, I certainly share John Paul II’s faith that this Grace comes through other religions and other paths (see my entry for 14-11-05). Personally, I become more keenly appreciative of all religious paths, which seek to honour and engage the roots of their tradition.

But the point I am stumbling towards, is that instead of a trajectory which moves ever more towards an atomised spirituality, where each of us simply does ‘our own thing’; instead of a spirituality divorced from the collective insight of a community across time (though often, it must be said, filled with fawning approbation towards the latest spiritual fad) – instead of all this, is it now more urgent than ever, that we look to what we have lost?

Is it time to realise that neither the Rationalism initiated (in a sense) by Descartes, and which underpins the secular capitalist world, nor atomised spirituality can cope with what is to come ?

O Holy Mother Church, is that what you whisper in my heart, as almost daily I join you in your Sacraments, and feel that I hear your loving, tender voice ever more vividly?

Yes I hear your voice, your Grace – and for this reason I have hope. We are not alone. Christ, Mary, the Angels and the Saints are ever with us …