More than 55 years ago, I apprenticed as an upholsterer and served two years of my young life in Belfast at the trade- long enough to know that I did not want to do that for the rest of my life and long enough to learn some skills that have stayed with me and proved useful for the rest of my life. I learned what it means to take the craft of a bygone someone and the fashions of a bygone mind and to strip away what has worn out or outlived its usefulness, and by getting down to the frame, to rebuild it. I learned the value of reconstructing and conserving something useful and passing it on to some future person to make of it what others and I had done in the past. I also learned that in the home, no one wants just the frame of something. To be able to talk about the quality of the frame may be a good selling point, and to know the value of the frame helps in understanding the piece, but in the home, what is wanted is a good useable item.

  In the church today, we are trying to get down to the frame in order to rebuild something that we can enjoy, use, and hand on to the future. The base is God’s Way (the Kingdom) as we got it from Jesus, for example, the all-inclusive attitude that there are no outcasts, no marginalised, that everyone counts. All are welcome in Jesus’ group, to eat at Jesus’ table. No one is to be excommunicated. cut off, chastised, unless they stand against this attitude; Jesus was exasperated at the stupidity of those who would not see this (Mk 3: 29). The antipathy of the Jewish Hierarchy executed Jesus, maintaining that he had contempt for God (!) when, in fact, he had disdain only for their restrictive Codes. This was long before a christian hierarchy was ever dreamed of- it took a very long time before the christian community became aware that hierarchy was an (divinely) inspired idea. As a christian community, we would do well to look carefully at what Jesus did during his lifetime and what the community did in his name after his women disciples brought the men together again in Galilee.

  That is only a start. It is often said that if Jesus or one of his friends arrived at one of our churches, s/he would think that s/he had arrived at a foreign temple with Highpriests or Roman Senators dressed to impress with their rank and importance. I can live with that because I know that if by some magic I were to visit Jesus or one of his friends, I would end up in a synagogue in good Jewish fashion. I do not want to go back to old times or to bring old times forward. But they give me an understanding of our foundations.

  I know that apostolic succession is not a specialty    of any particular group within the koinonia but that it is a prerogative of the whole. Each local christian community is successor to the apostles and each one of us has apostolic succession in so far as we belong to a christian community. I know that under the guidance of Jesus’ spirit, each community chose men and women to be its servants- hosts, teachers, prophets, elders, bishops, and so on. Without election by the community, no one had  a recognized service. Today, a community, such as Corpus Canada, can make its own priests and bishops with apostolic succession. They would be in union with the catholic church and with the pope though the pope may not consider himself to be in union with them. I know that the appointment of bishops was not a prerogative of the pope until it was written into the 1917 Code.

   I know that a married priesthood is the norm in the catholic church. I know that women priests have not been the norm but that is a shameful Roman fashion for local communities to change.   I know that a local christian community can efficaciously celebrate the sacraments without asking anyone’s permission. I know that popes like the rest of us have not always been good christians and have made many mistakes and that they will make more, that some popes have caused destructive division within the church, and that it is up to rest of us to point that out as the Council of Constance did in 1415 and as the Code of Canon Law enjoins upon us. It would do us all well to study church history to learn from the past that we might fruitfully fashion the future.

  I know that in moments of profound emotion, the Roman Catholic Church, concerned as it is with Codes, may not be the place to experience God’s Way. People in joy are not always able to celebrate a marriage. People in grief do not always find comfort. An AIDS death, a child’s death, a painful divorce, a new marriage, each may go disdained or unheeded. In many other life events, God’s Way is often expressed in other church and natural communities. God is there and blesses them.

  I know that when I wished to marry, in 1966, which I did with church consent, the Roman Catholic Church in the person of its chief servant said that like Judas it were better if I had not been born. My mother, my sister, and my brothers forgave him, in time. Naomi and our three daughters eventually, when they knew about it, forgave him. I forgave him. We did not wait until the Jubilee Year 2000. We were graced long before that. I know that the home is the first church, the always church, the church that really matters. The Roman Catholic Church Hierarchy does not want to talk to me- in spite of my faith, my training, my priesthood. But, my family, my faith communities, myself, we have grown because  we were forced to go on seeking God’s Way without it. With the help of many others, we have had to reconstruct and conserve.

  The basic frame of the church is the koinonia willed to us by God in Jesus: as Jesus is one with God so we are one with God, with Jesus, and with one another. The koinonia comes first. Under the guidance of the Spirit, the koinonia has had servants among whom are found equally men and women, teachers, healers, prophets, bishops, priests, and hosts of others who have served the church well. It is often said that the church is not a democracy. Indeed it is not. Neither is the church an autocracy, monarchy, or any other kind of ‘cracy’. For the good order of the church, there needs to be governance so that the koinonia of God’s chosen people - people chosen for service to God’s way - can fulfill its mission. In the church, there are no archies. There are no divine rights over, only the divine right to freedom to serve. The christian community, in union with God and Jesus and one another, has the ability to give life (the authority) to invest leaders with the service of acting on behalf of the community. That is part of the fundamental framework within which we all must live and work and which no one has the power to change. 

  The Second Vatican Council went in the right direction when it stressed that the church is The People of God. The 1983 Code was to put that idea into church law. It managed only some of it, and what the Code did produce has to be approached in the spirit of Vatican ll. Similarly, subsequent edicts, decisions, and letters from the pope/curia have value only in so far as they are in accord with the spirit of God’s Way and The Council. In terms of the good news of Jesus, papal and curial decisions may have no authority at all. 
 
 As local christian communities, we need to be aware of our legitimacy, our autonomy, and our opportunity to live God’s Way. That does not mean that anything goes. We need to be part of the catholic church, to maintain contact with our history, our spiritual origins (that go back much further than organized religion), and our lived experience. In this way, we can rediscover that the ordinary is holy, that the  holy is holy in and of itself, and that the sacred is sacred because we declare it to be sacred. Through our regular and joyful gathering, we can learn the meaning of the scriptures and develop a spirituality that embraces the whole person. Local christian communities have the opportunity to exercise relationships in an intimate group and to show diocesan and parish church communities how the christian life can be lived more fully. We can live ecumenism, knowing that we do not have to leave one church community to be part of another. God’s Way is not divisive except, of course, for those who will not see.