BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN CHRIST

Praying and Working for the Ordination of Women in the Roman Catholic Church (BASIC - see CorpusCanada Links)
                        
Ours is an age of facade, of impressive PR and even more impressive web design. The "Celtic Tiger" purrs contentedly and assures us that "we've never had it so good".

Those who probe that facade and ask awkward questions are regarded as "yesterday's people", enemies of "progress", in need of "reconstruction". Today is what matters: today is opportunity, the only reality. The past is irrelevant - of interest only to "traditionalists" who do not have what it takes to live in a modern context.

We are encouraged to "let go", "lighten up", be "forward-looking", "go with the flow". It is the new recipe for personal freedom - based on ignorance, instant gratification and laissez faire. Gone is the sense of community and solidarity, of being my brother and sister's keeper, of personal responsibility for ensuring that I leave this world - or at least my small part of it - a better place than when I found it.

The churches are not immune to such "post-modern" trends. For a battered curia in Rome, the temptation must be to heave a huge sigh of relief at the emergence of a new, non-critical generation (after the upheavals of the Vatican 2 era) - even if the price is growing indifference to all forms of institutional religion. It means that religious establishments get a breathing space - to repair the facade, re-present themselves when "sanity" returns.

Part of that "re-presenting" is amnesia - dropping from memory what is inconvenient, uncomfortable and challenges the neat logic of self-serving "theologies".

Jesus told His followers to act "in memory of Him". Have we done so? If today Jesus were to wander into St. Peter's, would He "feel at home"? Would He be able to recognise elements of "continuity"? Or would His fate be that of Dostoyevsky's Jesus at the hands of the Grand Inquisitor?

There are those who will argue that this is a hopelessly idealistic - and therefore "unfair" - question: that Jesus (like President Kennedy and Martin Luther King) was fortunate to have been taken in His "prime" - when the vision was still fresh and the cynicism/"realism" that comes with old age/"maturity" had yet to set in ...

Given what has been done "in His name" over the last 2,000 years, to remember Jesus is necessarily to be "subversive" - but in a way that is positive, responsible and restorative: cleansing the Temple, not destroying it. Reclaiming the memory of Jesus means restoring the authentic meaning of "church" and, therefore, "Eucharist".

The first generations had no church buildings; they met in one another's homes and their Agape Eucharist was led by the head of the household, woman or man. The "Real Presence" was Jesus's promise to be wherever "Two or three are gathered in My name": it was a felt reality which strengthened their Christian witness and solidarity, so that others marveled at the quiet but incontrovertible way in which they lived out their faith and challenged the superficial values of the day.

The arrival of official church buildings in the 4th. century, with a liturgy now controlled by an ordained patriarchy, had profound implications for the meaning of church and Eucharist. For a start, it robbed the Eucharist of its original, domestic/meal-based setting; and it robbed family life of its already sanctified hearth. Henceforth, people had to leave their homes in order to enter a place that was recognised as holy and sanctified; secondly, they were obliged to look on at a liturgy now taken out of their hands and entrusted to "professionals".

It was these same professionals who drew up the official Scriptures and what became known as canon law; and who devised theologies of "church" and "Eucharist" that had more to do with preserving their own status and power than the Gospel and example of Jesus.

Much of that theological speculation was particularly unfortunate, imbued as it was by alien philosophical concepts (Platonic and Aristotelian), which fundamentally altered Christian spirituality from being "incarnational" and world-transforming into other-worldly escapism.

It also led to a two-tier People of God previously unknown in the inclusive, table-based community established by Jesus

* of active, decision-making leaders versus passive, dependent led
* of a teaching church versus a learning church    
* of "We know best"    
* of blind obedience as a virtue instead of the moral evil which it represents in the teaching of Jesus
* of an elite group to whom alone the full demands of Christian perfection applied versus the "multitudes", to whom paternalistic licence/ understanding/compassion must be extended, "for they know not what they do" (all of this directly contradicting Jesus's unequivocal teaching in the Sermon on the Mount);
* of bishops alone fully deserving the name of "Christian", they alone fully meriting the right to place the Sign of the Cross before their names
* they alone being "fully" priests
* presbyters being priests only by extension of the episcopal presence  
* and the rest of us "priests" only in some metaphorical/vague sense, which Vatican II tried but failed to raise above the level of tokenism.

The divine presence promised by Jesus for those who gathered together in His name was now narrowly focused on a piece of unleavened bread whose "substance" could be miraculously changed by these priests, and by these priests alone, into His Presence; a God whose coming and going was in their exclusive gift.

One of the great contributions which women are making to our experience of "church" and "Eucharist" today is the restoration of what might be called the "domestic"/familiar Jesus - as opposed to the Cosmic Christ of Pauline patriarchy (aloof, stern, unapproachable except through clerical mediation). This has nothing to do with "Protestantism", but women's innate attunement to what nourishes life, spiritual and physical. It marks the recovery of authentic and venerable practices from within the incredibly rich and living tradition of the Church - traditions of life-giving spirituality and theology which have been denied us by an increasingly out of touch and out of sight curia hiding behind their recently patched up facade of St. Peter's, before which the hungry sheep look up - and are left hanging about.