 |
| Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (played by Ralph Fiennes) giving his homily on certainty in the film Conclave. Screenshot from source. |
Conclave's fictional Cardinal Lawrence, addressing his fellow cardinals as they prepare to elect a new pope, warns them of a dangerous attitude: certainty.
There is one sin which I have come to fear above all others: certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. … Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery and, therefore, no need for faith. Let us pray that God grants us a pope who doubts. [Source.]
I don't totally agree. A personal sense of certainty can be a source of strength and courage. A few years ago, in a blog post inspired by Chris Hedges' When Atheism Becomes Religion, I made a distinction between personal certainty, on the one hand, and assertions of certainty in the social arena—particularly as categorical and coercive action.
I also admitted that ...
Certainty is a slippery quality. In my experience, it comes and goes—and returns. More importantly, it is relational rather than operational: I can be certain that God wants the best for you and me, and that God will be with you and me as we work for that best, but I'm hardly ever certain about what concrete steps to take next. For that decision, I need a mix of intuition, prayer, plain secular fact-checking, the wisdom of others, and a willingness to risk being wrong.
In the film Conclave, part of the context of Lawrence's homily on certainty is his understanding that the late pope, toward his end, had doubts—not about God, but about the church. It is institutionalized certainty that is the greater danger, and the cardinals would be wise to choose a pope who understands this.
This balancing act between personal certainty and socio-political uncertainty seems to me to be the way God set things up in the first place. I'm recalling the words of Anthony Bloom on God's powerlessness that I've quoted several times before. The context: In response to an interviewer's question, Bloom is commenting on the history of church/state relationships in Russia.
No party at all should be able to claim the Church as its own, but at the same time the Church is not non-party, or above parties. She must be the voice of a conscience illuminated by the Light of God. In the ideal state, the Church must be in a condition to speak to any party, any movement: "This is worthy of humanity and of God, and that is not." Of course, this can be done from either of two positions: either from a position of strength, or from a position of complete helplessness. It seems to me—and I'm deeply convinced of this—that the Church must never speak from a position of strength. The Church must not be one of the powers operating in this or that government; she must be, if you like, just as powerless as God, Who does not coerce, Who only calls us and reveals the beauty and truth of things, but doesn't enforce them on us; Who, similarly to the way our consciences work, points out the truth, but leaves us free to listen to truth and beauty—or to refuse them. It seems to me that this is how the Church should be. If the Church takes its place among those organizations that have power, that are able to force and direct events, then there will always be the risk that she would find power desirable; and as soon as the Church begins to dominate, she loses the most profound thing, the love of God, and an understanding of those who need salvation rather than the works of destruction and rebuilding.
(A lengthier extract is here, toward the end.)
For me, it follows that the work of evangelism is to encourage and draw out people's capacity to respond to God's call, God's offer of relationship, which would be reflected in our own offer of relationship, and our truthful testimony of how we have experienced that relationship in our faith community. This work does not depend on a convincing string of logical propositions, because no such string exists objectively apart from relationship. Just as with the turtles, it's relationships all the way down.
 |
| Photo: Judy Maurer, April 5. |
Twice in Judges (17:6 and 21:25) there is the telling refrain: “At that time there was no king in Israel. People did whatever they felt like doing.” But we readers know that there was a king in Israel: God was king. And so, while the lack of an earthly king accounts for the moral and political anarchy, the presence of the sovereign God, however obscurely realized, means that the reality of the kingdom is never in doubt.
However strong our faith, no human being ever has the whole picture—and we just make things worse when we pretend otherwise. God has, for reasons that may always remain obscure, chosen to fulfill the promises of God through us and our fractious, fragile communities. In the short run, even if our faith is strong, failure is an option, but then we dust each other off and once again wait for God's pull on our hearts. The next steps might not be clear all at once, and we may disagree any number of ways. But the certainty of God's love shared among us motivates us to keep praying for unity, discernment, perspective, and courage. There are no shortcuts; weaponized certainty and coercion are just dead ends.
Tim Gee with more on the police raid on Westminster Friends' meetinghouse.
Tom Gates considers the Rwandan genocide of 1994, "...one of recent history’s most extraordinary cases of mass scapegoating."
David Roberts speaks to Spokane Friends on the dark side of community.
Have you seen the second season of the television drama Severance? Beth Felker Jones gives us a theological commentary. (Spoilers. I have just started watching the second season, so I didn't read her commentary to the end....)
Jeff Sharlet and the eroticization of cruelty: what did we see when Kristi Noem went to El Salvador?
My favorite Canadian blues guitarist, "The Ice Queen," Sue Foley.
No comments:
Post a Comment