St Mary's

Illuminating the St Mary’s conflict
Andrew Hamilton December 11, 2009 reprinted from Eurekastreet.com

Flanagan, Martin et al: Peter Kennedy: The Man Who Threatened Rome. One Day Hill, Melbourne, 2009. ISBN 978 0 9805643 6 5. Online

Peter Kennedy: The Man Who Threatened RomeThe conflict between Archbishop John Bathersby and Fr Peter Kennedy’s St Mary’s congregation was passionate and public. This valuable book illuminates the dispute, setting it into a human context that is both much smaller and larger than that offered by the media coverage.

The most instructive and moving contributions to the book are studies of people involved. Two interviews of Kennedy by Martin Flanagan serve as book ends. Flanagan catches the contemplative and detached character of Kennedy’s personality. These make his understated religious leadership so formidable and so attractive.

Michele Gierck’s profiles of a range of people involved in the life of the congregation are also deeply insightful. She allows them to speak for themselves, perhaps more eloquently than they knew they could speak. The stories of people help you see the depth of what is involved in the building and pulling down of communities, the precarious lives that find some mending, the desired connections made, the broken people who find nurturing.

These pieces, together with the autobiographical reflections by people who have known St Mary’s, suggest why and how the St Mary’s congregation will survive its separation from the Brisbane Catholic church.

The large themes of the story bear wider reflection. Most contributors emphasise the importance of the congregation, expressing disappointment and surprise that it was not consulted during the conflict. This suggests disconnection between the inclusive and self-effacing leadership offered to the community by its two priests, and the place in the Catholic Tradition of the priest as teacher and as responsible to the Bishop for his community.

There may also be a larger tension between the Australian preference for association between equals and the hierarchical structures of the Catholic church. This tension expresses itself occasionally in conflict of the kind experienced at St Mary’s but more often in the quiet withdrawal from the Catholic Church by people who identify it with authoritarian ways of relating.

Many contributors also express outrage that blow-ins who came to St Mary’s to tape sermons, photograph ceremonies, and denounce it to the Archbishop and to the Vatican were given credit by Church authorities. They see this as noxious as welcoming blowflies to Christmas dinner. Certainly, it is hard to imagine anything more alienating to its members than a school, a society or a church that encourages tell-tales and snitches.

But the contributors return to the break between the St Mary’s community and the Brisbane Catholic Church. Much of the comment deals with the underlying tension between the inclusiveness of the community worship and its symbols and the insistence by the Archbishop on the universal symbols of the Catholic Church. I found myself most exercised personally by this question.

I take it as axiomatic that Christian communities should offer hospitality to the hesitant, doubtful, searching and disconcerted. That is a Christian ideal, and also reflects life in any congregation and seasons in the life of most Christians. Congregations that claim to be models of untroubled faith and Christian living simply suffer from lack of self-knowledge.

The merit of St Mary’s is that the diversity of the congregation is evident, and that its welcome to those on the margins of the Catholic Church is explicit and is honoured in its practice as well as in its rhetoric. That is why the separation is such a loss for the Brisbane Catholic Church. If one of the traditional identifying qualities of the Catholic Church is holiness, and if energetic and visible reaching out to marginalised people is an essential expression of holiness, to lose people who offer such a conspicuous example of it is to lose much.

The question the book leaves me with is not about the inclusiveness of the community, but about what people are included into. In my understanding, at the heart of Catholic faith has been the conviction that God has acted decisively for all human beings in the life, death and rising of Jesus Christ. The implications of this faith have been spelled out in summary form in the claim that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that God is trinity.

This fundamental belief shapes relationships in the Church and its teaching. It is expressed through symbols of faith in the church. The language of liturgy and the ways of praying provide a matrix within which doubt, hesitation, wonderment and disconcertment can be held. The shared symbols allow a proper tension between what is received and what is individually believed, lived and struggled with.

The reflections in this book generally focus on the tension between these symbols and creeds, and the belief of individuals or the demands of modernity. That in itself is unproblematic. Peter Kennedy himself wants to preserve a proper silence about God and to insist on the limitations of words and language.

But in the reflections that insist on the need for new words, for respect for the mystery of God, it was not clear whether the decisive investment of God in the life of Jesus Christ was an event for which new words needed to be found, or was part of the old words that needed to be superseded. I did not find any clear assertion that in Jesus Christ God has spoken a decisive word into silence, and that this is the heart of Christian faith.

A large question to be left with. And that is the significance of the dispute and the merit of this book.
Andrew HamiltonAndrew Hamilton is the consulting editor for Eureka Street. He also teaches at the United Faculty of Theology in Melbourne.

Over the last few years we have been providing opportunities for people of the community to engage with the theology of current writers.   This has been through Doc buying books and  on-selling (without markup) at the Drop Shop.

However there are people in the community who would prefer not to have to buy these books—as least not until they have had a chance to read them.

To this end we have established a small library.    The books can be borrowed by emailing Marg.   She will leave the book you require in a named ziploc bag  in the Drop Shop.   You should return it within a month of borrowing.  You are invited to make a small donation to our library costs when you return your book.

We have only one copy of some books so there may be a little wait.  Just be a little patient.

We would appreciate donations of any of the listed books.   We have to be somewhat restrictive as to titles until we have a permanent home for our library.

If you want to borrow or donate a book email margdoc2@bigpond.net.au

St Mary’s Community Library List

Anderson ‘Sailor’ Bob – WHAT’S WRONG WITH RIGHT NOW?
Arntz A et al – WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW?
Braha James – LIVING REALITY
Campion Edmund    - TED KENNEDY – PRIEST OF REDFERN
Charlesworth,   Max – DEMOCRATIC CHURCH
Fiand – AWE-FILLED WONDER
Fiand – FROM RELIGION BACK TO FAITH
Freke & Gandy – THE JESUS MYSTERIES
Harpur Tom – THE PAGAN CHRIST
Hodgens Eric – NEW EVANGELIZATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Hollaway Richard  – BETWEEN MONSTER AND SAINT
Holloway Richard -  DOUBTS AND LOVES
Holloway Richard  – GODLESS MORALITY
Holloway Richard -  LOOKING IN THE DISTANCE
Holloway Richard – ON FORGIVENESS
Kung Hans – THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
Leloup Jean-Yves – THE GOSPEL OF MARY MAGDALENE
Morwood   Michael – TOMORROW’S CATHOLIC
Morwood   Michael – FROM SAND TO SOLID GROUND
Morwood   Michael – IS JESUS GOD?
Ogden Steven – I MET GOD IN BERMUDA
Oliver Patrick – THE FREEING OF GOD
O’Murchu Diarmud – CATCHING UP WITH JESUS
Pope John XXlll – IN MY OWN WORDS
Ranke Heinemann – EUNUCHS FOR THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
Rohr Richard – WILD MAN TO WISE MAN
Spong John Shelby – A NEW CHRISTIANITY FOR A NEW WORLD
Spong John Shelby – ETERNAL LIFE: A NEW VISION
Spong John Shelby – THE SINS OF SCRIPTURE
Spong John Shelby – WHY CHRISTIANITY MUST CHANGE OR DIE.
Tolle Eckhart – PRACTICING THE POWER OF NOW
Tolle Eckhart – THE POWER OF NOW
Tolle – FINDHORN RETREAT  (BOOK AND DVD)
Walsch N.D – HOME WITH GOD
Wheeler John – AWAKENING TO THE NATURAL STATE

Today is the first day of Advent – Advent is the season of anticipation and of waiting. It is also a strongly feminine season – for obvious reasons – so at SMX we usually have women doing the four homilies of Advent. And speaking of which – I am reminded of a little chap who was in my class when we were preparing our Nativity play – “I know how Mary had her baby,” he announced. Mum told me she had a “miraculous contraption” – be quite a good idea really. Anyway, Advent it is – and I see an analogy between the season and where we are as a community.

We are a community that has been thru turmoil and is now in a sort of hiatus. We are in waiting – but what are we waiting for?

I think we are waiting to find out who we are. All the questions that people ask me, whether it is about our liturgy, our future, our governance, can be reduced to the question “Who are we?” Because once we are sure of who we are – what we will become and how, where and with whom we will become it, are simply resultant on who we are.

In the past we didn’t have to probe this question – we knew who we were – we were part of the Catholic Church – often we were a very unruly part and often we railed against numerous aspects of this church we belonged to. But we knew who we were.

We have been through a period of deconstruction. This has really happened over a number of years.

We began (with the help of the boys – Peter and Terry) to think about our beliefs and we discovered much of what we thought we believed was actually quite unbelievable. Together we realised it was OK to acknowledge the serious doubts we had about most things we believed about God and Jesus.  So we deconstructed dogma.

Then we had to celebrate our liturgy in a way that sat well with our new thinking – so we deconstructed our old form of liturgy.     We did this so well we deconstructed ourselves right out of the church. But we had a liturgy which we could all be a part of, and in which we could be authentic. And one we came to love and were willing to defend.

So now we are rediscovering ourselves. And we are asking questions and talking about this. Perhaps these questions and discussions are the chorus to the verse – the important part – who we are becoming?

I’d like to reveal who I think we are now – I have heard us described as an ‘Intentional Eucharistic community’. For me this is a very good description.

Firstly, we are Eucharistic – as we celebrate the liturgy of the word and of the table.
The word – The homilies (especially those of Peter and Terry) – are especially important, because they help me find out who I am becoming and inform me about things in which I’m interested.
The readings – these support the homily. They may be from Scripture, but need not be. I don’t believe the Scripture is the word of God (as Holloway says –problems arose when people began to believe that God writes books) and I do believe there are inspired people writing today and what they are saying is more relevant to my life and thinking.

Then we have the liturgy of the table – this ritualised meal is equally as important to me. It is in this ritual that I discover the reality of the numinous. It is in the Eucharistic liturgy that I touch the sacred. As we stand around the table, say, and sing those words, I feel so blessed to be a part of it. This is what it is to be Eucharistic.

But we are more than even that. We are intentional. And our most important intention – even more important than the fact that we choose to be here – and the thing that gives us our authenticity and integrity – is our intention of being part of the reign of God here on planet earth – right now.

We are a community who is engaged in this world with the intention of doing what we can to make it more just. This is to do with our mindset. As Peter and Noel said last weekend, it’s about our orthopraxis. What we believe is important, but not as important as what we do. We believe in justice and we do what we can – in big or small ways – to help it thrive. We must be the ones who stand up in our workplaces and give lie to the popular press image of the ‘refugee problem’. We have to be the ones who stand with the people society shuns – stand up for the boat people. We have our own Micah oganisation, and we must support it, we need to get behind the ‘Common Ground’ concept.

The third part of that descriptor is the word ‘community’. I would like to suggest that it is through the small groups that we can develop as a community and so discover who we are. Every person who is interested in the question of who we are and where we are going can and should have the chance to talk about it. . As Spong said in that first reading –“It is not enough to know the truth of this mystical path; it is essential that we actually begin to walk it.”   But we need to walk this mystical path with others. People we know well and trust. People we talk to at more than a casual ‘once a week at mass’ kind of way.

So- those of us who want to be part of this unfolding story – let us all find ourselves a group to belong to. I think in this instance it isn’t just for the usual ‘joiners’ to be a part of – it is for everybody. We do have a number of these clusters (the St Mary’s name for small groups) already getting together. In fact, I can see people here today who are part of one. Please, could the people who are part of a cluster stand up?

We do need to get together and discuss the things that matter to us. We say we would like to be a democratic community. Having a voice is what democracy is all about. But we must be an informed voice. That means we do need to keep reading, listening to the homilies, thinking and talking about what we read and hear – thus educating ourselves.

Also, we must be strong as a community – we need to forge ties that strengthen us – and we can only do this when we know each other better. As Bob (a member of the Camp Hill Cluster) said to me, ‘We can only really do pastoral care in a community as geographically diverse as ours through the small groups”.

In the Gospel reading Jesus is spoken of as saying “Knock and it will be opened, ask and you will receive, seek and you will find”. These are all calls to action – let’s do our knocking, and asking and seeking together as we create little clusters of St Mary’s people all over Brisbane. Clusters who are supporting each other and lighting little fires of justice everywhere. And, incidentally, having lots of fun doing it.

Finally, I would like to unpack the final verses of today’s epistle:
There are three things that last: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love.

The first is faith – or maybe trust -
Tony summed it up for me, saying
“ Well, it’s like this. I go to the TLC every Sunday – I know that there will be a really good liturgy, that there will be an interesting homily, and that I will feel welcome there. I trust the people who make all this happen.”
As Tony said – we must have faith in those people who make it happen

Hope – we keep being optimistic about our future as a community – we are on a good thing here – lets not get niggly about little things that irritate us – keep the big picture in mind.

Love – we get to know each other better, we tolerate each other’s odd ideas, we help out where we can, and we laugh and have fun together.

There are three things that last: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love.