Today’s Gospel is probably one of the most important pieces of scripture in the entire Bible. It states that after loving God, to love our neighbour as ourselves.

The importance of loving ourselves cannot be over emphasized but hopefully not like the man who is relating this story to a friend. He begins:

I woke up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night and noticed a man sneaking through my next door neighbour’s garden.

Suddenly my neighbour came from nowhere and smacked him over the head with a shovel, killing him instantly. He then began to dig a grave with the shovel.

Astonished I got back into bed.

Cathy, my wife, said,

‘Col, you’re shaking, what is it?”

“You’ll never believe what I’ve just seen” I said. “What is it?” she said. “That bastard next door still has my bloody shovel!”

We were expecting him to say he was shaken by the cold blooded killing of a stranger with a shovel by his neighbour but instead he is shaken and angry by the fact his neighbour still has his shovel.  He displays a total disregard for the stranger who has been killed and buried by his neighbour.

The humour is in Col’s unexpected lack of empathy, and his selfish pre-occupation with his own possessions. His selfish pre-occupation takes us by surprise. It is like a world revolves around him. He is the centre of the universe, but also detached from it. It seems it is only there to serve him. This is the story of the Egoic Mind, the small and separate self. It is the story inside each of us, which battles with the larger self for supremacy, the larger self being the connected self, one where there is no small self, and it is all one. If we listen to a lot of our thoughts we often return to the small self, where we are at the centre, the hero or heroine, at least the central character of our stories.

Maybe the concept of original sin in Christianity had its origins in this understanding.

The expulsion from the garden, from paradise, the place where all was one to the place where we thought we were Gods, we were at the centre of the universe. In the story as Eve is being tempted, the serpent says, “God knows in fact that on the day you eat the fruit your eyes will be opened and you will be like Gods” (Gen 3⁵). It goes on “the woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye, and that it was desirable for the knowledge that it could give.

It seems the ancients in their grappling with how it all began, and how things were the way they were, may have discovered some perennial wisdom.

The break from the natural world, when were one with all the animals and plant species to becoming the thinking ape, a homo sapiens, the wise man, came with a price, we broke from paradise the place, free from knowing good and evil, to a place where we could think and discriminate and judge. We entered the world of duality, knowing good and evil writes the Genesis author.

They no longer saw themselves as animals and judged their nakedness as something they needed to do something about. We were told, “Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together to make themselves loin cloths”. (Gen 3⁷). We don’t see the animals doing this. They move into the world of knowledge and the mind brought with it much pain and suffering we are told. In different forms for man and for woman. The result of the pain and suffering was because we could discern good and evil, we could think and judge.

No longer like the rest of creation, we were to be stewards and caretakers and in the other we are to lord it over, subdue and multiply. We haven’t been very good at the latter, but lording over and subduing we have mastered. The thinking mind has been a blessing and a curse. It would seem in Western civilization we have prided ourselves in our thinking minds. In particular, this found expression in our pride to theologize. The study of God, reams and reams of material has been written trying to capture the mystery, we call God. I wonder when re-examining much of the dogmas and creeds of the church, if we have gone down some pretty dodgy paths. All in the name of capturing the so-called Truth, but really so much of it caught up in a church trying to monopolize God creating a product, and build a religion, which they claim they had exclusive rights to. Part of that theology was what became to be referred to as FALL-REDEMPTION theology. It served the church well for many years but now it is falling apart. Basically, most of you know what it is, but for those who might not be familiar, the story goes that in the beginning all is perfect, paradise, but Adam and Eve sin. God is very angry. They are kicked out of paradise. Over the centuries, God will not be placated by anything that humanity can do. The only way is for the God-Man (Jesus) to pay the ultimate sacrifice and placate the angry God and all will be restored.

So the only way to God is through Christ Our Lord. Amen. The only way to Christ is with the Catholic Church which we were told Christ set up with Peter as the head. “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church!” (possibly a 4^th or 5^th century convenient insert to the Gospel which has Jesus set up a church).

So the path or funnel to God and heaven, is the church with its seven gateways or sacraments; its gatekeepers, the priests, are the only ones who can keep the gates, and, of course, the final only through Christ, Our Lord.

Finding ultimate expression in the Eucharist, and in this theology, remembering and reminding God of the sacrifice of his Son to pave the way to God, the only path. When you begin to challenge this theology, as we did, the dominoes begin to fall. The need for the whole edifice falls. In challenging the theology you challenge the whole structure which is why it remains firmly entrenched in the whole system.

Changing the words of the Eucharist away from this theology has massive repercussions for the whole structure of the church. It is why we were decisively dealt with by the Roman Catholic Corporation. And why anyone over the centuries who challenged it were severely dealt with, with things like the use of boiling oil, stretching on the rack and burning at the stake. We were lucky we were a few centuries late.

This theology comes with a legacy both for those who continue to embrace it and for many who leave it. This theology, this constructed thinking and understanding, presumes no direct access to God. It is only through Christ and the Church can we adequately approach the throne of God. If you doubt this go to any parish mass throughout the world and listen to the words, words rigorously imposed by the Church central with repercussions for those who refuse to use them.

You have probably heard of the term ‘Recovering Catholic’, a bit like the recovering alcoholic, or gambler. The recovering Catholic is a term referring to those who have become immersed in this theology and thinking for years and remains with a lingering sense of guilt and unworthiness. They are never good enough; nothing of what they do or say is ever good enough.

The starting point in Fall-Redemption theology is emphasizing the Fall, there has to be a fall for God to redeem us and in the Fall we are miserable worms. In the Book of Job we hear that before God and his all-powerful omnipotence, “What, then, of man, a maggot that he is, the son of man, a worm.” (Job 25⁵)

The central stained glass window behind the main altar in St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney, is Adam and Eve in the Garden being expelled by God. As I said the fall is central in this version of Christian thinking.

In Toni Bernhard’s book ‘How to Wake Up’ she relates ‘in 1990, Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzburg attended a conference with the Dalai Lama that was held for Westerners. When it was her turn to bring up an issue for discussion, she asked him, “What do you think about self-hatred?” She was hoping for advice in helping her many students whose inner critic was so strong. The Dalai Lama was utterly confused by her question because he wasn’t familiar with the idea of people disliking themselves. It simply wasn’t part of his culture. The story is comforting because it means that we are not inherently deficient or unworthy. These types of feelings are the result of conditioning. As most psychologists would maintain that if we have been conditioned there is a chance of undoing this conditioning by a reconditioning. And as Toni Bernhard states, there is no better way to begin ‘reconditioning” a self-critical mind than to question the validity of the stressful stories it spins; because the suffering is in the stories. To realize for the most part, they are stories we have created and in many instances have little or no truth within them. They often reflect our conditioning and are distortions of the past or present, or are worst-case scenarios about a future we can’t possibly know. When we can understand this we can suspend our belief in their validity and let them be seeing them for what they are – just stories. We can recognize our critical conditioning, for those brought up in a Catholic Church where it was important to think of ourselves as deficient and unworthy, we can see how invalid these thoughts are and simply smile.

We can begin to truly love ourselves free of the critical mind and therefore truly love our neighbour as we love ourselves. We can recognize also how often our thoughts have us on centre stage, the hero of the drama, Gods of our universe. When we see them as thoughts that come and go, like guests in a guest house, we can welcome them and farewell them simply as guests. The price of picking from the tree of knowledge and becoming the thinking ape has been to deal with our thoughts.

I love Rumi’s summation of this and I would like to finish with it.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-- Jelaluddin Rumi,
translation by Coleman Barks

Homily 30^th and 31^st August, 2014