Peter Kennedy book review
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.
22/12/2009 at 11:54 am Permalink
“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.”
In my opinion, it is this very ‘heart’ that needs to be looked at with fresh eyes & a spirit open to new understandings. To this end, Andrew, may I suggest the latest CWG newsletter bulletin #372 from Neale Donald Walsch – WHO IS THIS MAN CALLED JESUS? I think it reflects something of where many of us currently find ourselves – discovering a fresh, fuller interpretation of what it means to be a follower of Jesus….ENJOY!!
My dear friends…
This is our last Weekly Bulletin before Christmas Day. So I’d like to look at a question this week that people all over the world, people of all faiths and traditions, have been asking for a very long time. For over 2,000 years, in fact…
Who was this man called Jesus?
Yesterday I was listening to a Christmas Carol sung by Bing Crosby and I found myself turning to my wife and saying, “Imagine the kind of person you must have been to have people still singing about you a couple of millennia later.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “Pretty special.”
We all know, of course, that Jesus was the Son of God; that he was Divinity made into Humanity. Yet so, too, are we all. Every human being is Divine; we are all the Daughters and Sons of God. We are all God’s Offspring; God’s Issue. We have all proceeded from The Most High, we are all made up of the Same Stuff, and we are all Singularizations of The Singularity.
What, then, made Jesus so incredibly different that he stands out among human beings, all of whom are Individuations of the Divine? Could it be that he knew Who He Was?
Yes, I believe that’s it, and more. He not only knew Who He Was, he acted like it. He embraced it. He reflected it. He demonstrated it. He, quite literally, embodied it.
Jesus Christ brought into his body, mind, and soul the Divinity that is the natural inheritance of all of us. It wasn’t this way with him all the days of his life. We know, for instance, that he spent 40 days and 40 nights in the desert, searching, looking, delving deeply into his inner yearning, his inner knowing. Some say it was much longer than 40 days. We have heard of “the lost years of Christ.” We have heard that he spent much time with the Essenes, an esoteric sect seeking the experience of a Higher Way of Being.
Whatever is true about his journey, it is clear that Jesus challenged himself to step into another version of Who He Was and Who He Intended to Be. He dared to explore the outer limits of what it means to be Human and what it means to be Divine — at the same time. He dared to examine what was “real” and what was not about his day-to-day experience; he dared to drop his “story” — all the stuff he was “making up” in his head — about himself and about others, about why things happen and how things happen and whether things should have happened.
Jesus dared to drop his Story and to adopt his True Identity.
Why did Jesus do this? Well, I hypothesize that, like all of us, Jesus felt a natural impulse toward the Divine. Like all of us, Jesus experienced, at the heart of his being, an unexplained sense of Oneness, of Unity, with all things; an undefined but very real inner Awareness that he was more — much more — than he was allowing himself to be…and that there was more to life than he was experiencing — having nothing to do with what was going on outside, and everything to do with what was going on inside, of his Being.
The result of all this is that Jesus saw the events and occurrences of his life as serving him, rather than viewing himself as serving life. He saw every thought, word, and deed as an act of Self-Definition. He used life as an opportunity to experience himself in a particular way. He chose how he wanted to experience himself in every moment, ahead of time. Then he stepped into the moments of his life, seeing them all as perfectly coordinated outer opportunities to embrace the inner opportunity that awaited him.
Yet the true miracle of Jesus, in the end, had as much, if not more, to do with his outer world than with his inner world. For when Jesus came from his deep inner sense of Self Within, he placed into his outer world such a demonstration of that, that the world never forgot what it saw.
In short, Jesus modeled for us what it means to Be Who We Really Are.
Now, let’s look at how he did so. He began by loving without condition. First, himself. Then, everyone…and everything…else. He saw it all as Perfect. And therefore he saw that nothing needed forgiving, and everything merely yearned to be blessed. Blessing, Jesus came to understand, meant covering everyone and everything with the Energy of Pure Essence — and, by overlaying it, submerging it, in this Energy (which, by the way, he understood emanated from him), transforming everything he encountered, and all those whose lives he touched.
In this way, Jesus gave people back to themselves. Others, in his presence, had the experience of awakening from a deep sleep; even of being roused from the dead.
Which brings me to “us.” I experience that many, many human beings are among the Walking Dead. They are dead to Who They Are, dead to what Life is truly about, dead to the miracle that IS Life Itself.
They are “dead to the world,” having no idea who they are, where they are, why they are where they are, or what they intend to do about any of that. They are sleep-walking, imagining that life is happening TO them, not THROUGH them.
Many, many human beings do not experience life as a series of decisions, but as a series of dilemmas; not as a series of choices, but as a series of chances. You take your chances, you don’t make your choices.
Yet I experience that all of the dilemmas I face today are the result of all of the choices I made yesterday. The question is not whether I made those choices, but whether I made them consciously or unconsciously.
But how can I make my choices consciously if I have no idea who I am, where I am, why I am where I am, and what I am doing here? I can’t. Therefore, I need someone to remind me.
That’s where you come in. And that’s where Jesus came in.
Jesus said to everyone, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” He said, “I and the Father are one, and ye are brothers.” He said, “Why are you so amazed? These things, and more, shall you do also.” He remembered his own Divinity — and he spent his life seeking to help us remember ours.
And that is why we remember him to this day with songs of celebration and words of praise. We remember him because he remembered us. He loved us as if we were Divine — precisely because we are.
He forgave quickly and easily, because he knew that there was really nothing TO forgive, save our forgetfulness. And he was aware that once WE became aware of how wonderful we all truly are, we would see how wonderful everyone else is, and on that day we would resolve never to do anything unforgiveable again.
So let us celebrate today, in word and song, the life of this extraordinary being named Jesus. And — as he, himself, would have us do — let us celebrate, as well, the Christ that dwells within us. The part of us that is Buddha, understanding and thus ending suffering. The part of us that is Moses, leading those we love out of the wilderness. The part of us that is Muhammad, the prophet who shares great wisdom about life and how to live it fruitfully and with blessings.
Let us celebrate the part of us that is Krishna, the part of us that is Baha’u'llah, the part of us that is and remains Forever One with all the saints and sages of all religions and of every belief. Let us, this day, be Jewish and Janist, Buddhist and Brahmin, Muslim and Mormon, Confucian and Christian. Let us, today, be all of it. For that is what it means to be HUMAN.
And when we are fully human, we will become fully Divine…and THEN, at last, we will create peace on earth, and goodwill to all, everywhere.
Merry Christmas, everyone. And blessèd be.
Love and Hugs,
Neale.