Tenison Woods and MacKillop Centre News: Faith and works

Take the case, my brothers, of someone who has never done a single good act but claims that he has faith. Will that faith save him? If one of the brothers or one of the sisters is in need of clothes and has not enough food to live on, and one of you says to them, ‘I wish you well; keep yourself warm and eat plenty,’ without giving them these bare necessities of life, then what good is that? Faith is like that: if good works do not go with it, it is quite dead.

This is the way to talk to people of that kind: ‘You say you have faith and I have good deeds; I will prove to you that I have faith by showing you my good deeds – now you prove to me that you have faith without any good deeds to show.’

James 2:14-18

The UNHCR has estimated that there are 13 million refugees seeking a place to call home and another 1.2 million asylum seekers. This is less than 0.2 per cent of the world’s population displaced for reasons of politics, religion, economics, ethnicity, famine or drought.

The tragedy that is playing out of Hungary’s now-fenced border, and its government’s capitulation in bussing 6,000 Syrian refugees into Austria is symptomatic of the failure of Hungarian humanitarian policy. In defending his response to the surge of refuges attempting to enter the country, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that his country had a right not to take in large numbers of Muslims.

It costs nothing to sit in the comfort our warm homes on a cool spring evening using social media to express our sorrow and disappointment. It will take something substantially more to make a difference to the lives of those who have nowhere else to lay their heads.

Being angry, deriding our own politicians for their inactivity and apparent lack of compassion will achieve no more than those who rage against the dying of the night (apologies to Dylan Thomas). I must act. It is not a matter of belief, but a matter of faith. If I have faith, it must, according to James, be proven by my action. I either do something or I do nothing.

Options are: Pray (for guidance, for those suffering, for those governing)

Give (money, time, support, encouragement for those at the forefront)

Create (Awareness, empathy, write, speak out, lobby)

One response which cannot be acceptable is, as James warns: ‘I wish you well; keep yourself warm and eat plenty.’

Peter Douglas

HEAD OF SCHOOL SERVICES, NORTH

Reverse Mission by Richard Rohr

Jesus, perhaps disappointingly, gives no abstract theory of social justice. Instead, Jesus makes his life a concrete parable about how to live in this world. He demands of his first followers that they be living witnesses to a simple life on the edge of the dominant consciousness. Once you are at the visible center of any group, or once you are at the top of anything, you have too much to prove and too much to protect. Growth or real change is unlikely. You will be a defender of the status quo--which appears to be working for you. Every great spiritual teacher has warned against this complacency. The only free positions in this world are at the bottom and at the edges of things. Everywhere else, there is too much to maintain--an image to promote and a fear of losing it all--which ends up controlling your whole life.

An overly protected life--a life focused on thinking more than experiencing--does not know deeply or broadly. Jesus did not call us to the poor and to the pain only to be helpful; he called us to be in solidarity with the real and for own transformation. It is often only after the fact we realize that they helped us in ways we never knew we needed. This is sometimes called "reverse mission." The ones we think we are "saving" end up saving us, and in the process, redefine the very meaning of salvation!

Only near the poor, close to "the tears of things" as the Roman poet Virgil puts it, in solidarity with suffering, can we understand ourselves, love one another well, imitate Jesus, and live his full Gospel. The view from the top of anything is distorted by misperception, illusions, fear of falling, and a radical disconnection from the heart. You cannot risk staying there long. As Thomas Merton said, "People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall."

I believe that, in the end, there are really only two "cauldrons of transformation": great love and great suffering. And they are indeed cauldrons, big stew pots of warming, boiling, mixing, and flavouring! Our lives of contemplation are a gradual, chosen, and eventual free fall into both of these cauldrons. There is no softer or more honest way to say it. Love and suffering are indeed the ordinary paths of transformation, and contemplative prayer is the best way to sustain the fruits of great love and great suffering over the long haul and into deep time. Otherwise you invariably narrow down again into business as usual.