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God and Time

What is time?

An introductory note of warning: some readers may find this blog a bit too theoretical and a waste of ‘time’.

We feel we know with some certainty what most things in our lives are. Things made of matter, of atoms and molecules, we can deal with comfortably, for they are solid and easy to experience with our senses. Even things like light and heat present no great confusion for us, once we understand the nature of electromagnetic radiation. We can even live with the duality in the nature of light, its being both a particle and a wave at the same time (a nice metaphor for the Divinity and Humanity of Christ perhaps?)

But when it comes to time, it is different. We do not really experience time with our senses in the normal sense. We experience the effects of time: things like movement and change. But what about time itself? What exactly is it?

Well if you’re now hoping I will go on to explain what time is, you will be disappointed. As far as I can ascertain, no one has ever been able to come even remotely close to explaining what time is. Oh sure, we fit time nicely into a whole lot of the laws and equations of physics, and we speak of time being the fourth dimension, together with the three dimensions of space forming the beautifully phrased “Time-Space Continuum”. We manipulate the idea of time to solve all sorts of practical problems and we use the time we read off our watches to organise our lives. But none of this even begins to tell us just what time actually is.

Normally, we understand things best by comparison with something already familiar to us. “A chihuahua is like a poodle,” I might explain to someone who has never seen one, “only a lot smaller, and usually with a lot more attitude.” But what can we compare time to? It seems to exist (does it exist?) in a category all its own.

The only thing we can compare it to sensibly is a dimension of space. Thus, we usually represent time using the classic representation of a spatial dimension: the number line. We think of time as being like a line that extends in one dimension, with forwards being the future, backwards being the past, and some point upon the line being the present, where we are now. Then we extend this analogy to have our point of the present slowly (???) moving along that line of time at a constant speed, never being able to stop, or go backwards, or speed up. This is a useful enough analogy for most of our practical needs, and it opens doors for the imagination of science fiction writers to explore by playing with our movement along this line. But is that really what time is?

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps most famous for being extremely hard to understand, proposed the solution that we are wrong to try to define time in words. Perhaps, he says, or at least as well as I can understand him, the problem is our language. Perhaps there are some things in our world that simply cannot be properly defined using the human lnaguage which is all we know. Perhaps if we could think in some other way, some totally alien way that we cannot now imagine, the nature of time would be obvious, as obvious as the nature of matter. Of course, St Paul preceded him by some 1900 years when he told us about the things in Heaven that “no words can express”. So maybe time is one of those creations of God. Maybe it belongs to the category of creations incomprehensible to the limited mind of man.

And where does God fit in all this? What is the relationship of God to time? I had thought this must have been obvious to most Christians, until I did a bit of research and dicsovered what a marvellous variety of theories Christians have held on this topic! Here are a couple (that I don’t like, by the way):

1. God exists within time Himself, just as we do.

2. God exists outside of our time, but within His own time, a sort of “meta-time”.

I don’t like these explanations, because being your typical Eastern Christian, any explanation that limits God in any way is unacceptable to me. The best explanation I have found so far is that God created time and exists outside of time in some mode that we can never imagine, being prisoners of time ourselves. All time is ‘present’ before Him, or is known to Him. But you see, even in trying to relay that last concept, I had to use a word that implies He is in time, “present”, whereas, He isn’t.

Perhaps that’s enough boggling of the mind for now (another ‘time’ word).

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Episcopi Vagantes

I like reading obscure books.

One I recently came across is titled Episcopi Vagantes by Henry R.T. Brandreth, and was written way back in 1947. It makes for interesting, if not disturbing reading.

An Episcopus Vagans is a man who is ordained as a bishop by another bishop who is not a valid bishop. So, for example, if a bishop is excommunicated from his church, and then proceeds to ordain a man as a bishop, that new bishop is an Episcopus Vagans. Some of the characteristics of these men are that they are not recognised nor in communion with any of the mainline Christian Churches, they tend to have tiny flocks, and they tend to be ordained for their own sakes, rather than for any genuine pastoral need.

And Episcopi Vagantes breed Episcopi Vagantes! There are a number of “lines” now, where one of them ordains another, who then ordains another, who then ordains another, and so on. There is a succession which they love to point out, but it is built upon a non-existent foundation. It is quite possible that in some of these ordinations money is exchanged, or each bishop lends support and ‘legitimacy’ to the other bishop by writing a flowery and official looking letter of recognition, and signing, “His Most Reverend Holiness Bishop Pseudoclericus, High Exarch of Pontogalatia and Phyricorpopoulus” or some such high sounding ecclesiastic title and name.

What’s the point of all this ordaining? To my mind, it seems that all these men have something in common: they have a warped view of what it means to be a bishop, or indeed to be a servant of God at all. Their episcopacy is self-centred, and all they do is arranged for their personal convenience, rather than for the genuine welfare of others. This is first manifest in their desire, their lust we might say, for the episcopal dignity. They see only the respect such a vocation commands among others, and the power and authority it bestows. They see all the regalia and trappings that go with it: the crown, the staff of shepherdhood, the cross, the beard, the gown, and they enjoy the ‘play-acting’ at some subconscious level.

But being a bishop is not about yourself, nor is it about play-acting. I know that St Paul said that he who desires the position of a bishop desires a good work (1 Timothy 3:1). But to understand this as validating the lust for authority or self-aggrandisment in a person is a gross misinterpretation of the text. If we take this verse in context with the many criticisms St Paul makes elsewhere of those who abuse their leadership positions, we see that desiring the position is a highly dangerous thing. I suspect that only the very purest of hearts, the very simplest of souls could possibly desire being a bishop for the right reasons. And even they, if they thought about it, would flee from it, not seek it.

Our Church has been blessed through its history (although not always) with a philosophy of humility and an understanding of the graveness of pastoral responsibility that has produced a culture where no man in his right mind would desire ordination to the clergy. Thus, HH Pope Shenouda is famous for explaining the difficulty in finding men to ordain as priests thus: “Those who wish to be ordained are not suitable, and those who are suitable do not wish to be ordained”. Time and experience have borne out the truth of this maxim over and over. The difficulty is overcome, of course, by the grace of God who knows how to speak in the hearts of those who are nominated by others and make them submit.

But I find the Episcopi Vagantes disturbing because they bear all the outward marks of being a faithful bishop of God, yet their whole lives are based upon a selfish lie. Brandreth, with admirable though naive Christian charity, points out the genuine piety in some of these bishops he has met personally. I find myself wondering – could it be genuine? I suppose it is possible that a simple minded man might really believe that his mission is given by God, even though his ordination comes from a bishop that the vast majority of God’s people do not recognise as a valid bishop. But it is also possible that these men are very good at appearing pious, whether consciously or unconsciously. We have all met people who have mastered the art of the humbly downcast eyes and the soft and gentle voice, while all the time their thoughts are full of deceit and self-interest and hypocrisy. You discover the truth only over a prolonged period of time, when their behaviour sooner or later lets the truth of what’s inside them escape into the outer world. No one can maintain a false facade forever.

Surely then, these are the “wolves in sheep’s clothing” the Bible warns us about? And we have had our own Coptic version of an Episcopus Vagans recently in the person Max Michel, who was ordained by some invalid bishop as Patriarch of his own new Church. All the characteristics of an Episcopus Vagans fit him perfectly: the lust for clerical position, the self-interested motivation for ordination, the lack of recognition by any mainline Christian Church, the tiny flock. I saw him once in an interview on TV where the Muslim interviewer posed some pretty probing but valid questions. Sooner or later, the wolf emerges from beneath the sheepskin. His initial demure demeanour gave way to personal attacks, anger, childish pouting and whines of being persecuted. But he wasn’t being persecuted – the questions were pertinent and the interviewer was quite polite (and quite bemused by the end). He just had no answer for them.

The episcopate is a precious treasure given by God to shepherd His flock in this world. Those who abuse it and bring it into disrepute would be better off to “Have a stone tied around their neck and cast into the sea”, to paraphrase our Lord.

May God have mercy upon their souls … and ours.

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The Little Nasties and Me

Who am I, really?

Am I the calm and quiet person I like to think of myself as, or am I person who is easily moved to anger when someone pushes the right buttons? A recent incident precipitated this rush of self-examination. Do we ever really know ourselves?

We hold in our minds a sort of self-image, a profile of ourselves. Without it, we probably coundn’t live our lives. When we are faced with decisions, we refer back to this self-image, and to a large degree, it helps determine the decisions we make. You know the old adage: If you tell a child often enough that he is naughty, he will come to believe it, and behave accordingly”. And of course, the reverse is also true. I have seen both sides of this adage in action in real life. I have seen naughty children become angels because someone believed in their goodness, and good children become terrors because someone kept getting them into trouble.

But as adults, are we masters of our own self-image? How much responsibility for it do we bear, and how much is borne by those we meet throughout our lives, especially those who are in a position to affect us strongly?

We take this impact of others for granted in many of the things we say. We speak of a saint such as St Mark who began the conversion of Egypt to Christianity 2,000 years ago. His impact on those first Egyptian Christians was nothing less than life-changing, indeed, nation-changing! Today, we accept immediately and without question that a powerful preacher or author can change the minds and lives of millions.

And yet, can anyone really change your self-image without your consent? In children, I can certainly accept that this happens, for the child is not yet mature enough to choose for him/herself what inputs to accept and to reject. The child to a great extent trusts the judgement of the adults in her life, takes their words and comments at face value, cannot analyse them very deeply, nor assess their validity. Tell a child they are cute, and they’ll beam with happiness, event hey are the most unattractive child ever to be born. Tell a child that they have been naughty, and watch the face drop, even if they have not done anything wrong.

But the grown up should be different. The grown up is required to bear their own responsibility for who they are. They are to be mature enough to filter the truth from the untruth, and thus form a self-image that is valid. And yet, we so often get it wrong…

I find myself unwilling to incorporate feedback that I don’t like from people into my self-image. Yet I jump at the chance when they say nice things about me. And then, an incident like the breaking through of anger suddenly crashes me back to earth once more. My self-image turns out to have been false, even though I had trusted it, and built my behaviour around it. There are little nasties lurking around in the dark corners of my soul that I seem to have conveniently forgotten about. My self-image needs revision, if it is to be accurate … and my self itself needs repentance, if it is to be acceptable. Which should I tackle first?

Perhaps the self-image has to be corrected first, brought back into line with reality. If I don’t know the little nasties inside me, how can I do anything about them? What if I don’t like the self-image I find, when I brush away the deception? Well, that’s when the real work begins…

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The Enigma of what comes After Death

I’ve recently been reading an old classic that had hitherto eluded my reading list. It’s called Reflections on Life after Life by Dr Raymond Moody. It’s actually the sequel to his original book simply called Life After Life, but I couldn’t find that one in the library. They were both written around the 1970s and they spawned a whole new genre that many others have since taken up with enthusiasm (though not always with good sense).

The basic premise is this: Dr Moody is a medical doctor who has been involved in a large number of resuscitations – people who are clinically dead, and are then brought back to life. Usually this happens within that brief window of opportunity before permanent brain damage sets in, somewhere around 5 minutes. There have been rare cases that broke that record and still came out perfectly normal. Medicine is like that; the moment you take something for granted a patient comes along to demolish it!

But the thing his books focus on is the weird experience that some of these patients (probably a minority) are able to recall after they have been brought back to life. In the first book (apparently) he outlines a number of general characteristics of these experiences that seem to be common among these patients. These include things that have now become a standard part of our culture and even our language. The tunnel, the light at the end, the beautiful place, the meeting with dead relatives, the shining person who emanates peace and joy, the command to return to life on earth, the reluctant return. In the second book he outlines some additional features that are by no means as common as those in the first book, but which are pretty interesting, such as the confused and lost looking souls and the sense of having ‘all knowledge’ suddenly become available to you (wouldn’t that be great?!) He also addresses some very interesting and important methodological issues in his research (which should set to rest many of the criticisms sceptics have raised, for he is quite thorough in his methodology) and most interestingly, speculates as to where this kind of research might lead in the future.

It makes for absolutely intriguing reading, but I wonder what these experiences mean. It would be all too easy to simply say “Of course these are just confirmation of what the Bible has been saying all along”, but the indomitable sceptic within me cannot help but ask questions:

Most of Dr Moody’s patients were Caucasian Christians. Would these experiences be any different in India? Or Tibet?

What research has been done to examine the possibility of these visions being hallucinations resulting from the trauma of illness or side effects of medications used, quite often in high doses in operations and resuscitations?

The list could go on. I recently came across a much more recent study that seemed to promise a definite answer as to the nature of these experiences. In some cases, patients have described going through a feeling that they somehow left their bodies. They rose up in the air and could look down on themselves, surrounded by medical staff frantically trying to save their lives. Some of these patients describe the scene with exquisite detail, including things that by all the laws of logic they could not know. For example, one case in another book on the subject, Beyond Death’s Door by Dr Maurice Rawlings, has the patient describing the colour of the tie worn by a doctor who came into the room after he had become unconscious, and left the room before he regained consciousness. How could he do that???

Well, Professor Bruce Greyson in the USA thought up a brilliant experiment to try to settle the question. He set up a laptop computer on the top of a tall cabinet in a room where patients who are having pacemakers inserted have their hearts stopped temporarily as part of the procedure. On this laptop, a programme was installed that displays a random picture on the screen. There is absolutely no way for anyone to know which picture is going to be displayed beforehand, and afterwards, the laptop is removed without any of the medical staff or the patients seeing the picture. The idea was that if a patient had a near death experience and felt themselves rising up and looking down on the scene, they would see the top of the cabinet, and identify the picture on the laptop screen. If they correctly identified that picture, that would indicate that the experience was undoubtedly genuine and not just a hallucination or drug side effect.

But even the best laid plans of mice and men …

Unfortunately, I discovered that the research did not answer the question. Why? Because in the whole series of patients in the study’s time frame, not one single one of them happened to have a near death experience! Drats! Those doctors are obviously too good to be any good for such an experiment! Oh well; at least it illustrates the kind of experiment that might one day truly tell us whether these experiences are genuine or not. I for one will be waiting with bated breath, but I won’t be holding my breath long enough to pass out and have a near death experience.

You can check out Dr Moody’s work at http://www.lifeafterlife.com/

Fr Ant

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What Does It Mean To Be Human?

When does life begin?

Sure, it’s not one of your more pressing questions in life, but sooner or later, you’re likely to need an answer. The answer to this question will decide many other questions that for some people are crucial. Like…

Is it OK to have an abortion?
If we’re infertile, is it OK to use IVF (test tube babies)?
Should we allow stem cell research?

And there are many more. These may sound like matters far removed from our daily lives, but in fact, like climate change, they threaten to creep up on us slowly and change the whole nature of our existence. A bit far fetched, you say? Consider the following scenario (by the way, I have nothing at all against Bill Gates – he just springs to mind so easily as the prototypical rich person).

______________________

The year is 2030. At an isolated ranch in the desert of California, a man in a white coat unlocks a heavily armoured door. Balancing a tray stacked with basic foods, he pushes his way into the sparse room and nudges the door closed again behind him. Not that it really matters, for the six inhabitants of this room have never left it in their whole lives. They came here as soon as they were able to walk, and here they have stayed for the last 15 years. Their skin is very pale, in spite of the special lamps designed to mimic the radiation of natural sunlight. Apart from that, you wouldn’t think twice if you passed them on the street. They look perfectly normal as they sit / lie on the ground / stand around the room. But the moment they spot the man in the white coat with the tray, they spring into action. There is no aggression in their behaviour, just hunger. Like so many pigs shoving each other to the trough, they descend upon the man until the tray is empty, then they retire with satisfied grunts to their corners to enjoy thier meal. They do not talk. They do not acknowledge the man. They do not thank him, or cry out to him to save them from their prison. To them, this room is the world – all the world they have ever known. And now finally, it suddenly dawns upon you what’s really wrong with this scene. All six of these boys look exactly the same. Not just similar … exactly the same. Exactly the same, in fact, as a young Bill Gates…

______________________

It is now possible to clone human beings. In the near future, a wealthy person may be able to clone himself, produce half dozen replicas, and just keep them alive. No education, no affection, no life – just keep them alive. Why? So that when he grows old and sick, he has a sure supply of compatible donor organs and blood at his service. The sort of health insurance you can’t buy – until now.

It’s a horrific scenario, but the scary thing is that it is possible, today. Scientists have already cloned a variety of creatures, starting with the celebrity Dolly the sheep. So far the only publicly announced clones, such as those claimed by South Korean Hwang Woo-Suk, have truned out to be frauds. But the day is near when the real thing will stare us in the face.

And our lives will change. For example, would it be wrong to clone a person in order to save their life by thus producing an essential organ? What if we clone a person and let the zygote grow to only three weeks old when it is just a bundle of cells, and then we skim off some cells for research every week so that the zygote never grows beyond the three week stage? Would that be alright?

These technical advances need a response, for they are changing the way we think about what it means to be a human being. In our rationalistic society, already many see a human being as nothing more than an advanced animal, merely a complicated biological machine. The soul, they say, is an illusion, it does not exist. Our ‘personhood’ is nothing more than the result of brain cells firing in a certain pattern. With this attitude, there’s nothing wrong with the scenarios I described above. What we do to animals we have the right ot do to human animals.

It is already among us. People who are pro-abortion by and large do not consider a human foetus as being a human being. That’s why they claim the right of the mother to kill it. What can we say about a society that pulls so many of its children apart, ripping them from their mothers’ wombs in little pieces?

This is disturbing stuff, but sooner or later, we are going to have make up our minds. And we as Christians will need to be ready to speak up.

Fr Ant

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In the Light of Dawn

One of my favourite hymns of all time must be the Morning Doxology. The tune is lovely: lively, enthusiastic, full of joy and hope … a great way to start off the day. On special ocassions, like the Raising of Incense for the Great Feasts, Easter, Christmas and Epiphany, this hymn has a special long tune called The Seven Ways. it combines all your favourites from tasbeha and the liturgy, and is a truly heavenly experience, when it is done right.

But it is the words I especially like. Please allow me to share some of them with you, together with some thoughts.

The Light of Truth: who illuminates: every one : who comes into the world.
You came into the world: through Your love for mankind: and all the creation: rejoiced at Your coming.

The imagery of light darkness is of course is a very well known device used in the Gospels and the Bible in general. This hymn applies it, though, in a very intimate way to or daily experiences. It sets out clearly near the beginning just Who exactly is the source of all light in our lives. True, we no longer think that God literally holds the sun in his hands and moves it across the sky for us, but we know that it is He who created this whole universe, gave it its laws of nature, and designed this amazing planet for us to dwell on.It is true, then that every morning that dawns upon us is a gift from the hand of God. The light that shines upon us from the rays of the sun is symbolic of the light of Truth and Love He shines in our hearts.

With the morning, the past day is wiped away, consigned to memory, while a new and exciting day full of potential is revealed by the sun’s light. So also does the light of God push behind us our past failures and weaknesses, and reveal to us new hope, a hope founded not on ourselves, but upon the power of the Giver of that Light. Thus did St Anthony the Great pray every morning, “Lord, I have not yet begun to know You! Forget all the wasted days of my past and let me begin a new life with You this day”.

and later on:

Let there shine in us: the senses of light: and let us not be covered: by the darkness of pain.

It is only when our souls are blinded by the darkness that we can fall in sin. We err when we consciously or unconsciously hide ourselves from the Light of God’s Truth and love, and there in the darkness, our baser instincts can gain control over us. It stands to reason that when one throws open the curtains and lets the Light back in, the works of darkness flee and dissolve away. This is what happens when we repent and then confess. This is what happens every time we invite our Lord into our hearts with warmth and longing.

When going from a dark room out into bright sunshine, one is blinded for a while until the eyes adjust. So also, when returning to the room, the eyes see nothing for a while until they readjust. At the beginning of the day, we cry to God to give us eyes for light, not for darkness, to grant us to roam free in the wide world of light, not to be imprisoned in the man-made prison of our selfishness and self-centredness.

and:

In this morning: ease our inner ways: and our outer ways: with the joy of Your protection.

That which we do on the outside is a reflection of that which we are on the inside. Most sins begin in the mind and heart, and from there progress to fruition in action or word. Thus we ask God to walk with us this day along our inner paths. These are the paths the feet of our mind will tread, the directions our thoughts will follow. Without Jesus to guide us, it is all to easy to lose one’s way and find oneself treading upon thorns and thistles, or fighting through dense undergrowth and branches that will not yield. Much effort, little progress … all because I chose the wrong path.

But with Jesus beside me, listening to His directions, feeling His gentle nudges on my hand in His, looking to Him constantly for a lead, for reassurance, for courage and strength, any path is negotiable. Even when the right path becomes dangerous and difficult, His presence at my side makes the path not only bearable, but passable.

and:

Out of Your goodness: You prepared for us the night: grant us this day: to be without sin.

The night and the day are both from God. He allows us to enjoy the sweet rest of sleep as well as the thrill of the challenges of the day. With Him, good can be found in both darkness and light. Under His protection, we can even “Walk through the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil”. Sleep, often called in Coptic tradition, “the little death”, holds no fear, for it has become inhabited by God.

We give thanks for the night that has safely passed, for all previous nights and days that have now passed. It is good to remember that the Lord has never left us. With that knowledge to fortify us, we can look forward to the new day with hope rather than fear. Perhaps today is the day that I will repent truly from my troublesome sins?

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You can find the text of the Morning Doxology in any Psalmodia book, or online, in Coptic and English, at:

http://www.alhan.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=34&Itemid=57

You can also hear it as an audio file or download it as an mp3 from the above site or from:

www.coptichymns.net/

www.tasbeha.org/

Aren’t we blessed to live in an age of technology!

Fr Ant

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41

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the hero discovers the answer to the meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything: it is 42. Actually, he got it wrong. It is 41.

The Coptic Rite frequently uses a hymn which consists basically of one phrase repeated 41 times. I am referring of course, to the KYRIE ELEISON.

The words are Greek, not Coptic, harking back to the early days of Christianity when Greek was the common language in use throughout most of the Mediterranean civilisations. The Gospels were originally written in Greek and the liturgies we use in the Coptic Church were originally all in Greek. It is only as time went on that they wee translated to the vernacular Coptic. Even today, the standard form of the “Coptic” liturgies we pray – when we say we are praying in Coptic – has a pretty significant percentage that is Greek, not Coptic.

But I’m actually not interested in the language side of things today – I wanted to contemplate on the spiritual significance of the 41 Kyrie Eleisons. You might have asked yourself at some stage, “Why do we just repeat the one phrase over and over like that? Didn’t Jesus warn us against just such a practice?”

“And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words.” (Matthew 6:7)

Yes, God knows that we need His mercy. But the prayer is for our benefit, not His. It is a reminder to us of that need for mercy, lest we should ever forget and think ourselves self-sufficient without Him. As I sing the repetitions of “Lord have mercy!” I can have two things running through my mind. One is my deep need for the mercy of God; the other is the mercy of God itself, and the God of Mercy Himself.

Our need for mercy stems from our inherent weakness and moral frailty. God is all-good. We desire to be one with God. Yet we sin. By sinning, we exclude ourselves from being one with God. Oops. How is this problem to be solved? There is nothing we can do about it, for it does not lie within our power. Only He can do something about it … and He did.

God’s solution to the problem was to become one of us, to suffer for us and to die for us, and then to rise again from the dead, satisfying the law of justice, yet opening a door to the infinite possibilities of mercy. On His way to completing this course, He was tied to a post and whipped. The 41 Kyrie Eleisons bring us to the very Roman pavement upon which his tired knees rested, and challenge us to look on as the sadistic whip, sharp stones and rusty nails tied to its cords, is scraped over and over across the bare back of the Humble Servant.

Can you stand here unmoved?

What heart of stone would not cry out, “Stop!” Not only is this inhuman, it is uniquely unjust, for all have sinned, all deserve the reward of their evil … but not his Man. Anyone but this Man. This is He whose gentle eyes gave hope to the woman caught in adultery after He saved her life from the bloodthirsty mob … the same eyes that now weep in pain and agony. This is He whose strong voice echoed over the Mount as He taught the multitudes to be meek, lowly, poor in spirit … the same voice that cries out now uncontrollably in suffering. Anyone but this Man.

Imagine that from the midst of His blood and spasming muscles His eyes glanced out for a moment through tangled, sweaty hair and met with yours … And what will you say now? Can anyone remain silent? There is no “I will do something to save You!” You will find no comforting if futile action to ease the burden of this monstrous event. It is done. It is finished. It has happened. And all because of our sins. He took what is ours, and gave us what is His.

What then will you say? Is there anything else we can say, other than “Lord have mercy!”?

Sometimes we pray this hymn with a fast tempo, as if the pain of it is such that we only wish to bring it to an end as soon as we can. At other times, we pray it more slowly, as befits a dirge of sadness. Always, we should pray it with this image firmly held before the eyes of our minds: the broken Body, leaking blood from a thousand points, submitting to this suffering … that I deserved instead.

We cry for mercy because we never meant it to come to this. All those times we gave in to sin … it was never meant to end like this! We cry for mercy for the chains that bind us still to our frail humanity, the undependable, unfaithful, unthankful and brute nature that drags our eternal spirits down into the dust of sin again and again … only the Suffering Servant has the power to break those chains, and so, even while He suffers, we cry out for His mercy. It should be He who cries out for mercy from His tormentors, but instead, it was He who administered mercy to them as He hung on the Cross, asking for His Father’s forgiveness for them. He has taught us to ask, and so we do.

No, this is no vain repetition. This is not multiplying empty useless words (or at least, it never should be). This is our witness, so many times each day, that we know and appreciate the sacrifice of profound love that our loving Saviour offered for us. If any words of prayer have meaning, it is surely these simple words!

Fr Ant

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Criticism of the Criticism of my Criticism of Criticism

Thanks to Romani and Tony for their thoughts (see ‘comments’ on the previous blog).

Of course you are both right in pointing out that there are situations in life where one needs to take a stand and say or do something. Examples that spring to mind might be if I were a German living in Germany in the early 1940’s, watching my Jewish neighbours disappear mysteriously one by one. Another example might be the kinds of subtle and blatant religious persecution going on in Egypt and Sudan and many other places at the moment. In cases of injustice, of the oppression of the poor, neglect of the needy … yes we should definitely not shirk our moral duty to do something.

Even in these situations, where one is morally justified in being criticial, the sins of judgement and pride are never far away. How many people have set out to right a wrong only to end up becoming a wrong themselves? I think there are certain rules one can follow that minimise the dangers of this happening. Please pardon the excessive use of cliches.

Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin.

Or as Romani sportingly puts it – play the ball, not the player. Stick to the issue and don’t attack the person. Personal attacks have the very unfortunate side effect of forcing a comparison between the attacker and the attacked, and such comparisons are never good for anyone. They only lead to a sense of self-justification and pride and superiority complexes. If on the other we just stick to the actual issues at hand, there is a far greater chance of ending up with a good outcome. Besides this, personal attacks hardly ever work. Very few people really change anything because someone just told them to.

But for the Grace of God, there Go I…

Even if you do no share the sins you see in others, do not think that’s because you are a specially holy person! If not for God’s protection and care, that could very easily have been you making that mess. If you had lived the life that other person has lived, might you not have done even worse? What is scarier is that today you may be the judge, but tomorrow you may be the criminal yourself. History is replete with examples of normal, good people who, through circumstances, ended up doign abnormally horrible things. Can you really guarantee that will never be you? The Prize winning novel “The Lord of the Flies” by William Golding is a chilling reminder that just beneath our civilised surface lies a wild animal straining to be set free to wreak its havoc. Recommended reading for those who think they are above the sins of others.

Only Poke Your Nose Into Where It Is Warranted

None of us have been appointed sole and sagacious guardians of good for all humanity. We are given responsibility for certain, proscribed areas – parents are responsible for their children; teachers are responsible for their pupils; policemen are responsible for their beats. Within that area of responsiblility, of course you must be proactive in dealing with wrongs and teaching what is right to your charges – it would a sin to neglect that responsibility. But if you notice something wrong that is not within your area of responsibility, it is often wrong and also damaging for you to take it upon yourself to fix it. Just try disciplining someone else’s child and see what I mean! The best course of action in these situations, I think, is to pass on your concerns to the person who is responsible, and leave them to deal with it. I think that’s what we would all like people to do to us, so we should accord the same respect to others. Of course there will be situations where a certain degree of ‘follow-up’ or lobbying is required, but as a general rule, overstepping one’s boundaries does no one any good.

That said, my previous blog was not really considering these kinds of situations as much as looking at the more common situation where one is tempted to be critical of others in a more general sense: things like ciriticising other drivers on the road, or the way your wife folds the washing, or the person on the news who got themselves into terrible credit card debt – that sort of thing.

Here, I think there is a very important distinction to be made between Judging on the one hand and Discernment on the other. In my definition, for the purposes of this discussion, Discernment is where you recognise the difference between right and wrong, simply and objectively, and it pretty much stops there. Judgement takes it one step further and adds a layer of subjective reaction. Generally this takes the form of classifying the person at fault (“What an idiot!”) or comparing oneself favorably aginst the offender (“I’d certainly never be that silly”).

We have to discern – otherwise, ignorantly confusing good with evil, we would fall into many sins: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20) . But we also have to avoid judging others, setting ourselves above them and seeing ourselves as superior to them: “Who are you to judge another’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls.” (Romans 14:4) Judgement belongs to God and to God alone. We really don’t want to get into a demarcation dispute with Him!

So long as we stick to the purely objective Discernment, we will be reasonably safe, spiritually speaking. Add to Discernment a healthy dose of humility and compassion, and you’ve got a pretty good system going!

Fr Ant

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Fault Finding and Fallibility

Hypothesis #1: We tend to notice most those faults in others from which we ourselves suffer.

This thought first struck me in High School, when a teacher pointed out that when you point the finger at someone else, you are simultaneously pointing your other three fingers at yourself (try it now if you don’t believe me. Just be careful who you pointing at, though). The message being, of course, that I am likely to be three times as guilty as the person I criticise, but am blissfully unaware of the fact. Oddly enough, I have found this principle to run pretty true, for myself at least. Yes, I am most frustrated by people who cut me off in the middle of a sentence. It really bugs me. Then one day I noticed that I do it all the time. Hmmm. Then I began noticing the principle in action in others. Being a priest, I get to hear people complain about lots of things. Such as, “I can’t believe how my wife goes around complaining about me to everyone!” Or this beauty: “I’m not wasting my time with Bill anymore and I’m not going to lower myself to his level. He’s impatient, and he’s a snob”. Yep. Even the best of us do it. Which brings me to another lesson I’ve learned:

Hypothesis #2: No one is infallible (with apologies to Roman Catholic readers )

I used to think otherwise. I clearly recall a sort of yearning, an innocent childhood fantasy that one day I would meet someone who was perfect. I don’t mean Miss Right, I mean someone on whom I could model my own personality, an ideal character, one who knew the right thing to say and do in every situation and always acted with sagacity and grace. Needless to say, potential candidates sooner or later disqualified themselves by revealing the selfish / cruel / stupid side of their nature. I still recall the deep and coldly bitter pain of these disappointments. Eventually of course I realised, as we all do, that no one is in fact perfect.

Then there was the period where I was going to be the first one to attain perfection. After all, I had the blueprint for perfection in my head, right? I knew how a perfect person should act. How hard could it really be? Those guys just didn’t try hard enough, or didn’t know enough. Well, I’m still trying, but I have to tell you that the older I get, the further I feel from perfection. And the more I fail, the more regard I feel for those fallen heroes of my youth who did, after all, quite a lot better than I have ended up doing, personality-wise. Maybe I was wrong to criticise them in my disappointment?

Hypothesis #3: People who are less critical of others tend to be a bit happier in life than people who are very critical of others.

Then again I sometimes wonder if I wasn’t wasting my time searching for the perfect person. Better to just do my best with what I’ve got and enjoy life. Again, experience would seem to bear this out. If you can keep your smile when all around you are angry, then you’re probably not critical. There are people who prove the adage “ignorance is bliss” daily by going about their affairs peacefully, apparently blind to the faults of others. It’s not that they can’t see those faults, mind you. More that they choose not to let them bother them.

Sometimes I have suffered from the delusion that as soon as I point out to this other person their fault, they will immediately raise a finger in the air and declare, “Why that’s it! That’s the very thing that has been making my life miserable all these years. How could I have missed it? And thank you, O thank you so much for pointing it out to me! I am eternally in your debt!” Needless to say, this has never happened to me in real life. So why waste my time, my breath and my blood pressure?

Of course, this principle has its limits. A bit of healthy criticism might well be well placed for a thug who’s mugging a little old lady as you walk by. Perhaps, one may even be justified in giving one’s criticisms a somewhat physical expression by way of intervening. But by and large, most people’s failings really have very little effect on me or on anyone else. If anything, it is the failings-owner him/herself that suffers most from their own failings, which is no business of mine. So why bother? Why get myself tied up in knots over something I can’t change anyway?

Hypothesis #4: Those who are most critical of others tend to be those who are least accepting of criticism, and contrariwise.

I think of this as a sort of litmus test for how critical a person is. Tell a person they are too critical of others, sit back, and watch their reaction. If they start criticising you for criticising them, that sort of proves your case. If they sit back and carefully consider if you are right, you can probably jump in and apologise for saying something about them that is so obviously not the case. It’s not foolproof, but it illustrates this hypothesis. Being overly critical is a kind of self-perpetuating condition. The one who suffers from it maintains their mindset by excessively criticising anyone who criticises their excessive criticism.

Or am I being too critical?

Fr Ant

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Is Genesis Myth?

Thankyou to Tony for his comment on my last post in which he brings up the approach taught by most Catholic Schools in Australia to the first 11 chapters of Genesis. I have come across these ideas before, and I think they are becoming so widespread in the Catholic Church they deserve some attention. In some circles, this approach is called the New Theology and basically jettisons any claim that any of the events in the first 11 chapters of Genesis ever actually happened. That’s everything up to and including the Tower of Babel, so for them, the real history begins with Abraham, and all that came before is called a ‘myth’, which, as Tony points out, may not necessarily mean what you think it means!

The concept of a myth is a very fluid one it seems. CS Lewis has much to say on the subject of ‘true myths’ in some of his essays (can’t remember exactly which ones) in which he more or less concludes that the purpose of a ‘myth’ is the moral or message, and that whether the myth actually happened or not, or whether it happened a little differenty is really of no great importance. I suppose you can think of the parables of Jesus which clearly were fiction, but intended to convey a lesson. Lewis of course was talking generally, but I think that the Catholics are applying a similar approach to the first 11 chapters of Genesis.

I think there are problems with this sort of approach. Once you start categorising bits of the Bible as possibly not having an historic basis, where might this not lead you? I wonder if an extension of this kind of thinking is responsible for people like Episcopalian retired Bishop John Shelby Spong rejecting any historical miracles of Jesus, together with the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection and Ascension and so on.

At the other end of the spectrum you have stubborn fundamentalists who insist that every word of the Bible must be taken as absolute literal truth (LITERAL being the crucial word here) and thus, for example, deny any possibility that the universe is older than about 6,000 years, in contradiction to lots of pretty solid evidence and to the fact that the language of Genesis in no way insists upon this kind of interpretation.

We have to learn from the mistakes of the past. The medieval Church in the West had no business decreeing that the earth was the centre of the universe – what right did they have to do that? The Church is responsible for spiritual knowledge and teachings. The people look to the Church for guidance and wisdom about far more than just spiritual life, but the Church must always resist the temptation that such respect brings and never go outside its limits of competency. On a smaller scale, a parish priest is often asked whether to take this job or that, or to invest in this project, or send the kids to this school. He has a responsibility to make it clear to those who ask for such advice that any advice given is that of a friend, not that of a mouthpiece of God … unless, of course, God has told him otherwise 😉

Sure, one can draw inferences from the Bible about the laws of nature, but they will always be nothing more than guesses, and we must beware of giving them the status of Infallible Truths or putting them on a par with the doctrine and dogma of the Church. Science is always changing. If we as a Church throw our lot in with evolution, or the Big Bang, or even quantum physics, there is bound to come a time perhaps centuries later when these things will be superceded and the Church will be left with egg on its face, much as happened in the great crisis over Gallileo and Copernicus. There is no need for this, especially given that the Bible does not seem terribly interested in giving humanity the natural secrets of the cosmos – rather, it is occupied with the spiritual secrets of truth and love and holiness. We must accept that just because we are a Church, that doesn’t necessarily mean we have to know everything and have the answer to every question! There are times when the only honest thing to do is to admit we don’t know. Which brings to mind a nice proverb: “He is wisest who knows himself for a fool”.

So, yes, my favoured approach would be to say simply something along these lines:

“The science, as far as it goes, can be comfortably accomodated within the Bible’s framework. But that’s all we can say. Whether the science of today describes reality fully and accurately is not a question for the Church to answer – it is for time to answer.”

Fr Ant