Jesus said to him in reply, "What do
you want me to do for you?"
The blind man replied to him, "Master, I want to see."
American novelist and essayist Flannery
O’Connor (1925 – 1964) was a Catholic writer who wrote from the depth of the
American South and indeed from the depth of her faith. Her writing often
focused on questions of morality and ethics. What makes her writing
exceptional, however, is ‘how she challenged the self-assurance of her Catholic
and secular readers. Her stories expressed her sense of sacrament and of the
possibility of redemption in the midst of the strangeness of ordinary life’
(Richard O’Brien).
It is not that either sacrament or the
sacred are missing from our ‘ordinary lives’, it is usually because we fail to
see it there. For the community of Mark the evangelist, Jesus reveals himself,
sometimes ‘secretly’, until his mission is fully unveiled. Indeed it is more
through action than word that Jesus is truly revealed.
The story of Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46 – 52),
in fact, epitomizes the way in which Mark ‘feeds out’ information – the crowd
is trying to keep this blind beggar from calling our for Jesus. He is rebuked
but he persists in calling out for Jesus, and he reveals Jesus’ messiahship in
calling out, ‘Jesus, son of David!’ Bartimaeus is healed and he follows Jesus.
There are many levels to this story from
the literal to the allegorical, but I like the idea, that like Flannery
O’Connor, there is a narrative waiting to be told.
Undoubtedly we all want to have sight, but
to see and understand, to have
insight is something that we learn. In May of this year Francis canonized
four new saints, including Mariam Baouardy, a Melkite Greek Catholic Discalced Carmelite nun, and Marie-Alphonse Danil Ghattas, a Palestinian Dominican religious. And while
these lives have extraordinary merit and now recognition, it is in our own
ordinary lives that Jesus walks with us. His vitality reaches into our acts of
charity through to our concern for our neighbor and our care for the poor, into
our conversations with the lonely, into the advice and encouragement of our
children and those we mentor, into the generosity with which we give our
talents to the community and into the joyfulness in the way we accept what life
gives us.
It takes insight to see the hand of God at
work, as each action ‘feeds out’ a sense of his presence, and those who
recognize that hand do call out, ‘Jesus, son of David!’ and in doing so
acknowledge the redeeming power of God, of the possibility of salvation. It is
in the strangeness of our ordinary lives that God is truly revealed.
Peter Douglas
The blind man replied to him, "Master, I want to see."
Illuminated by starlight
1 October 2015 by Fr Daniel O’Leary
Our understanding of evolution, the vastness of the
universe and the strong possibility of life on other planets raises questions
about God and the doctrine of Original Sin. Yet Catholic theology offers some
eloquent answers
“We belong to a reality greater than our own”, writes
Diarmuid O’Murchu MSC, in his 2002 book Evolutionary Faith, “and it is now time
to embrace the cosmic and planetary context within which our life story and the
story of all life unfolds.”
For sure, our current understanding of religion,
particularly of Christianity, would be seriously challenged. Fr Thomas O’Meara
OP, in his wonderful little book Vast Universe, wrote that “the possibility of
extra-terrestrial life becoming part of our world, whether in theory or
reality, makes us think differently about who we are and about what it means to
be intelligent. It implies new horizons for the future. New theologies await.
Even a revelation believed to come from God would be expanded.”
Theologian Karl Rahner wrote: “Today the Christian is
aware of living on a tiny planet that is part of a system of a particular sun,
which itself belongs to a galaxy with 300 million stars, and is many thousands
of light years broad. In this cosmos of unimaginable size … [we believe that]
the eternal Logos of God who drives forward these billions of galaxies became a
human being on this small planet which is a speck of dust in the universe.”
We wonder what creation stories those other inhabited
“specks of dust” might have. Would they include a Fall? And if not would an
incarnation still be central to their stories? God, of course, can be present
on other planets in a million ways. Incarnation and redemption are not unique
to Earth. Nor does the possibility of a different kind of incarnation to ours
diminish the unique importance of our Christian story. We believe that the
risen Christ, the cosmic Christ, has the supreme role of saving and completing
the entire material universe. And we continue to wonder.
Paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ wrote:
“All that I can entertain is the possibility of a multi-aspect incarnation
which would be realised on all the stars …” In her poem “Christ in the
Universe”, Alice Meynell imagines this “multi-aspect incarnation”. She pictures
an extra-terrestrial gathering of the civilisations of countless
constellations, telling stories about their incarnations and eternities,
listening to “a million alien Gospels, in what guise He trod the Pleiades, the
Lyre, the Bear”.
O, be prepared my soul!
These reflections draw us into a deeper exploration of
our own faith story, and especially, the meaning of an Original Sin. Might we
be the only inhabited star to have disappointed our Creator? From the beginning
there have been theologians who, careful not to confuse myth with history, find
no place, since the first “Flaring Forth”, for an actual historical Fall, a
geographical Eden. Humanity, they say, is not defined by an original act of
disobedience, condemned from the very start to a punitive exile.
Paradise was never lost, they hold. Incarnation is not
about restoring it. Planned from the very beginning, it is about the healing, flourishing
and perfecting of our human nature as it evolves, despite its ignorance,
darkness, alienation and destructiveness, into its final destiny in the heart
of God. The Fall account is a story about our daily disruption of the harmony
between the Creator, humanity and creation due to what Pope Francis calls, in
his encyclical Laudato si’, “our presuming to take the place of God and our
refusal to acknowledge our creaturely limitations”.
Original Sin is not the name of a primordial
catastrophe: it expresses, as Fr Kevin Kelly puts it, “the dark underside of
our graced humanity and our graced world”. In Christianity in Evolution Jack
Mahoney SJ critiques the theology of atonement that links the Fall with
incarnation. He believes that “it would be more theologically appropriate now
to drop (the doctrine of Original Sin) as unnecessary and cumbersome baggage.”
Why? Because God’s first intention was never thrown off course.
Some leading theologians call for a radical revision
of this flawed teaching, this blight on the blossoming of Catholicism. Apart
from its implicit denial of the evolutionary process, the doctrine is generally
understood to define our disobedient disposition, the flawed nature and origin
of our human condition, the guilty way we stand before our Creator.
But we are born in God’s image, not definitively
shaped by sin from the beginning. Perhaps Baptism is not so much about
exorcising a past Original Sin from the baby’s soul as about preparing her
innocent heart for encountering the waiting “sin of the world” (St Paul).
We are not a fallen race. We never were. And this, of
course, is a lost traditional insight. St Augustine of Hippo wrote of the first
creation as a carmen Dei, a divinely inspired symphony of incarnate beauty. St
Bonaventure saw our planet and its people distilling light as a “stained-glass
window in the morning sun”. More recently Thomas Merton reminded us that we
were created to be “manifestations of divine beauty” in a world that is
“absolutely transparent, and the divine is shining through it all the time”.
Teilhard de Chardin was aware that the world stands at
the threshold of a swiftly developing theology of creation together with a new
cosmology. He believed that “our former planetary and anthropocentric focus
must give way to a fuller consciousness of cosmic community”.
And now, as astonishing discoveries and theories about
our origin, evolution and destiny fill the media, a significant renewal in
Catholic theology, spirituality and pastoral ministry must surely follow.
Writing about “the fecundity and creative artistry of the Creator”, Zachary
Hayes OFM, at the end of his A Window to the Divine, asks a fundamental
question: “How big a God do you believe in?”
Fr O’Leary’s website is www.djoleary.com
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