Creating strange gods:WEATHER-WISE it has not been a good summer but still it has been possible to go on long walks with hints of a blue sky overhead.
On one of those walks, recently, I was crossing a stream just before it goes into the sea at Brandon Bay, when a man I know and respect stopped his car.
We ended up standing at an old stone bridge and talking for the best part of half an hour.
Like most of us, he was born Catholic and grew up in that faith but is now adamant in his belief that the Catholic Church is all a sham and its priestly class have nothing to offer him.
He looked up the road at a large palatial-style house that was once a presbytery and recalled how someone he knew was once cutting the hedge and found a large number of empty whiskey bottles.
“The PP had not even the good grace or civic decency to put them in a bin,” he recalled.
I knew exactly what he was saying. This man is some few years younger than I but he had simply expressed a feeling of annoyance that I also feel when it comes to the institutional church.
I can’t speak for that man on the bridge, but growing up in an Ireland where the church spoke with such certainty and its ministers were treated with absurd obsequiousness, it was almost inevitable that it would all end up like this.
Once we mention God’s name we are in territory that is of its nature nebulous, uncertain, and is always in process, always in a state of nuance and development. So there has to be something amiss when people who use the word God “prance
around” in authority, importance and certainty. Jesus had strong words against such people.
Once we talk about “understanding” God we have created our own god – we have become idolaters. But on the other hand we believe that the historical Jesus has given us more than a glimpse of the mystery of God.
In tomorrow’s second reading St Paul writes: “How rich are the depths of God – how deep his wisdom and knowledge – and how impossible to penetrate his motives or understand his methods! Who could ever know the mind of the Lord? Who could ever be his counsellor? Who could ever give him anything or lend him anything? All that exists comes from him; all is by him and for him. To him be glory for ever! Amen”, (Romans 11: 33-36). When one reads those words of St Paul and compares them with much of the “certainty” enunciated by church figures, is it any wonder why people are confused and angry? It is easy and indeed lazy to explain in trite clichéd terms aspects of our faith. When it comes to speaking of God we have to stretch our minds as far as they can go even to begin to get any sort of handle on the mystery of God.
And faith is never a “cop-out” that affords us to be lazy or wander into the realm of superstition. If something is true in the realm of faith, so too is it true in the world of reason. Faith does not contradict reason.
The first Commandment tells us not to create strange gods. And that seems to be exactly what we so easily do.
We can never fathom the depths of God. Anyone who claims to be “there” or to have “inside knowledge” on the mystery of God is really a spoofer.
These days in Ireland people say they have lost their trust in the church.
Maybe we need to think again and see that we have at last lost our trust in “spoofers”. And that is a step forward, painful though it may be for some.
Those bottles in the ditch may have been dumped by a priest. We gave priests far too much power over us. Indeed, he may have simply been using alcohol to anaesthetise himself. Remember he too was just a mere mortal in search. Did anyone ever ask him in a real and respectful way where he was with his faith in God? Instead, people treated him as if he had a direct link with God. The poor man.
Today we are paying the price for our silly behaviour.
The church is the people of God – at all times in search and in process – discovering the word of God in all its mystery and wonder.
It’s good to say, “To him be glory for ever! Amen”.
– MC