268 The Prophetic Imagination

We are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, let us therefore lay aside any weight . . .and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us. Hebrews 12: 1-2

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centred men have torn down, men other-centred can build up. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Nobel Prize Speech.

Priests, in the way that anthropologists tend to think of them across cultures, are men of establishment, custodians of the God-given. Prophets are women and men of disturbance, moved directly by spirits to challenge power in the present for some future outcome. Kings, in the metaphor that comes to us from scripture, personify authority and power. In baptism, Vatican II taught, we are made Priests, Prophets and Kings in Jesus Christ. It is a trio of attributes that sits awkwardly on us. Priest, Prophet, King are keywords of another age. We tend to soften the sharpness of their image with words like priestly, prophetic, empowerment, although it is hard to imagine celebrating a Feast of Christ the Empowered! Priestliness I take as the grace we have to bless and give, prophecy the vision of a just world we are missioned by our baptism to accomplish, empowerment our responsibility and ability to enact what we envision.

That world towards which we are priestly, prophetic and empowered is not ordinarily giant and theatrical, although many of that cloud of witnesses around us have used those ordinary qualities to giant effect— Mary MacKillop, Ted Kennedy, Frank Cox, Dom Helder Camara, Oscar Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton. The world in which the Spirit of life in Jesus Christ has set us free (Romans 8:21) is very small and momentary. But as Edward Schillebeeckx said. ‘God is new each moment’ of our momentary world. I would like to tell how the Parish performs its prophetic imagination momentarily.

The Prophetic Imagination is a phrase that comes to us principally from the 1978 work of a scholar named Walter Brueggemann. The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us, he wrote. I read that right at the beginning of my research for Church Alive! I was troubled

269 at how I could describe the great changes in religious experience in the Parish that came with Vatican II without appearing to denigrate the experiences that came before it. I realised that both the before of Vatican II and the after shared a prophetic ministry—the desire to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness of the dominant Australian culture.

There was much of the Fortress Church in the particular prophetic imagination of pre-Vatican II. We said the Prayer for the Conversion of Australia after every Mass and Benediction: O God, we prayed. who has appointed Mary, help of Christians, St. Francis Xavier and St. Teresa of the Infant Jesus Patrons of Australia, grant that through their intercession our brethren outside the Church may receive the light of faith, so that Australia may become one in faith under one Shepherd. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. Mary, help of Christians, pray for us. St Francis Xavier, pray for us. St Teresa of the Infant Jesus, pray for us.

No sense of pluralism there. They—with whom we were forbidden even to say an ‘Our Father’— would have to change. But there was also an enormous confidence that Catholicism offered Australian society a moral and religious system that, in its strictness based on a culture of sacrifice, would lift its standards of public life.

The vehicle for the pre-Vatican II prophetic imagination—the lamentations, the proclaimed visions of an alternate future, the engendered hopefulness that the world was changeable—were the great encyclicals of Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum, The Conditions of Labour, 1891) and Pius XI (Quadragesimo Anno, After Forty Years, 1931). Although these encyclicals were basically conservative documents, blinkered by Europe’s peculiar experience of revolution and liberal social thought, the Australian (Irish) bishops, close as they were to the working class, translated words like ‘socialism’ and ‘liberal’ into the Australian context and gave social justice movements here a Catholic dimension. What mattered was that the Church had a social conscience.

But the great vehicle for a particularly Australian Catholic prophetic imagination has been the Social Justice Statements that the Australian Bishops have made since 1940 and the annual statements since 1973 of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace. Michael Hogan has edited the first from 1940 to 1966 in Justice Now (1990) and the latter from 1973-1987 in Option for the Poor (1992). Taken together, they make remarkable reading. The 1940-1966 period is bound together by a corporatist metaphor, which had both theological and political dimensions. The statements idealise small communities, privilege the family unit, favour craft rather than industrial production, and give rural life some centrality. They have a nostalgic, sort of Chestertonian-Bellocian romance about them for a proper world that never was and never would be.

270 There is a giant step between the 1966 end of the Bishops’ Statements and the 1973 beginning of the Commission of Justice and Peace. It is reflected in the Parish. These are times when the Parish priests, Paul Coleman, SJ, George Belfrage, SJ and Peter Quin, SJ are reading Harvey Cox’s 1965 The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective. Cox developed the notion that the Church is primarily a people of faith and action, rather than an institution. ‘God is just as present in the secular as the religious realms of life’, he wrote. The Church should not be a protective religious community. It should step into God’s ‘permanent revolution in history’. The priests understand that nostalgic rural metaphors don’t work in the high-rise urban communities of their Parish. Theirs has to be another sort of prophetic imagination.

That was also Vatican II’s redefinition of what social justice now must be. Justice was a theological rather than an institutional virtue. The Church is sacrament to the Good News. That change can also be seen in the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace statements. Now they address the affluence of Australian society, social rather than personal sin, women, multiculturalism, poverty and power, just peace, aborigines.

And the Jesuits are redefining their prophetic imagination. Energised by their efforts to formulate the mission for their Province is social apostolate, they have used their publications and their missionary calling to educate the Parish to its prophetic role. They preach what they announce on their website. There is: No service of faith—without promotion of justice, entry into cultures, and openness to other religious experiences. No promotion of justice—without communicating faith, transforming cultures, collaborating with other traditions. No inculturation—without communicating faith with others, dialogue with other traditions, commitment to justice. No dialogue—without sharing faith with others, evaluating cultures, concern for justice.

For the moment, let us note merely the intertwining, encircling character of everything—faith, justice, culture, difference, communication, dialogue. This is no step-by-step plan of action. Everything affects everything else, but ‘culture’ has some sort of primacy in their minds. The last time I looked there were 355 anthropological definitions of ‘culture’. I like mine: ‘Culture is talk. Living is story’. I’ll work on that.

Brueggemann reminds us of a number of important things about prophecy. First, prophecy is about language. Prophets are always breaching the double-speak of power. Second, just as the prophets of old confronted the People of Yahweh not the pagan outsiders, so the prophets of the new will confront the people of God in their churches. Third, prophets are always teasing Dangerous Memories.

Brueggmann says: ‘It is the aim of every totalitarian effort to stop the language of newness, and we are now learning that when such language stops, we find our humanness diminished’. The philosopher Jean-François Lyotard puts it another way. ‘To arrest the meaning of words, that is what the Terror wants’. The Terror: the terror of fundamentalism, the terror of auto-da-fé, the terror of science in

271 service of power. ‘Political correctness’ is a ‘booh word’ these days, but many women will know the terror in exclusivist language. The Parish has a proud record of ‘just doing’ its prophetic imagination in inclusive language and in the use of words that speak to the whole person.

Brueggmann says the prophet ‘invites the king to experience what he must experience’. For ‘king’ read pope, bishops, Parish priest. They all need to experience some otherness, whether it is the otherness of the love of a gay couple, the otherness of the pain of the ‘excommunicated’, the otherness of a dialogic theology, the otherness of a joyful, free, bodily-whole celebration of the Eucharist, the otherness of democratic collegiality, the otherness of free, open and committed scholarly journeying. Perhaps they might be reminded of St. Augustine’s experience: When I am frightened by what I am for you, then I am consoled by what I am with you. For you I am the bishop, with you I am a Christian. The first is an office, the second a grace; the first a danger, the second salvation. Karl Rahner does his own sort of prophesying when he urges the Church to experience the diversity within itself: I am thinking of a theology which can no longer be uniform in a neo-scholastic approach . . .. I envisage a theology, which in the Church at large must be the theology of a worldwide Church. That means a theology which does not only recite its own medieval history, but one that can listen to the wisdom of the East, the longing for freedom in Latin America, and also to the sound of African drums.

Social Justice Sundays have been important in the Parish since the Australian Catholic Bishops began to make their Social Justice Statements in 1940 and the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace began to make their annual statements in 1973. The Parish has housed the executive of the Commission in the appropriately named Leo XIII building at Lavender Bay. Its Director, Dr. Michael Costigan, has been a Parishioner and has helped the Parish focus its attention on the issues raised in each annual statement.

But it has been the Parish itself that has given theatre to its prophetic imagination in their Social Justice Market Place at the back of the three churches on Social Justice Sunday. There they spell out the very ordinary ways in which they can set themselves free to be self-giving for others. There you can learn of Bridges for Asylum Seekers, Cana Communities and their shelters for the homeless, Compeer in which you can make a one-on-one friendship with those disabled by mental health. City Streets has its own prophets—an international one, Jean Varnier, and a local one, Brian Stoney. If you go back to our chapter on New Church, New Priest, you will realise that Brian Stoney, with George Belfrage, has had a great influence on the prophetic imagination in the Parish. You will begin to realise that prophecy and mysticism come together in reflection and prayer. Christian Meditation, David’s Place will help you. Uniya, the Jesuits’ social apostolate with the indigenous peoples and the global poor,is very insistent that there is little justice without entry into other people’s cultures— Muslims, for example. Teresa House is the Parish’s own responsibility on Sunday nights—one of our Word Pictures will tell you more. There is also work to be done in Aceh, and among those with Aids in Kuala Lumpur.

272 We have only scratched the surface of the Parish’s outreaching to the poor and suffering It comes in all sorts of modes in these fifty years and the hundred before that. ‘The Flying Squad’ looked to the aged and sick and single parents. The Nest was home for young refugees seeking education and employment. The Parish St. Vincent de Paul Society members will tell you how extraordinarily generous the Parish is in every appeal they make. Op Shops, hospital visits, visiting the sick and elderly in their homes, visits to Detention Centres—the litany of charities is long.

Perhaps the ministry that has taken the most energy and attention over the years has been the Jesuit Mission in India. On February 2, 1951 at St Ignatius, Richmond, ‘The First Six’ Australian Jesuits were missioned to Hazaribagh. It was a giant step for the young Australian province. The Jesuit Parishes and schools responded enthusiastically to the challenge for raising the funds for the infrastructure the mission would need. The Indian Bazaar at Riverview and the Maytime Fair at Xavier were the focal points for rasing money and interest.

If there is an Honours Board somewhere for those of the Parish who took this ministry on vigorously, these names would be on it: Claire Givney, Eileen Madden, Justice ‘Jock’ McClemens, Peter and Joy Anderson, Dennis McCarthy, Terry and Dolor Meagher, Lou and Joan Benaud, Joan Ward, Kath Lecke, Bill Fox, Sheila Timmoney.

The Jesuit missionaries themselves had a ministry in the Parish to educate it to what a mission might mean in a post-Vatican II Church. They discovered that they were at the end of an era in the missionary Church. Their heroes were Francis Xavier and Matteo Ricci, both of whom believed in ‘inculturation’ long before the word was invented. But they discovered that they were at the dawn of a Pentecost in Asia, a new way of being a Church without colonial powers to sustain it. Pedro Arrupe wanted the Australian province to have not just an Indian face, but also an Asian face. The province became part of an East Asian Assistancy. A province which emerged out of an Irish Mission and, with that, possessed a comfortable self-image of itself, was and is confronted with something of the unease that the Australian nation has as it begins to discover a past that is uglier than it ever dreamed and a future which has none of the predictable dimensions because of its growing Asian face. It is hard not to think that the Parish’s prophetic imagination in twenty years will be differently coloured.

The St. Vincent de Paul Society gives them all a text from the Prophet Micah: This is what the Lord requires of you: Only this, to act justly, to love tenderly and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8). Micah is a toughy. He scourges the moneyed capitalist, the inexorable usurer, the swindling tradesman; he berates families divided by rivalry, avaricious priests and prophets, venal judges. He doesn’t mind some coarse expression, and loves wild images and plays on words. The Vinnies have caught him in one of his gentler modes, but ‘to deal justly, to love tenderly, to walk humbly with God’ is at the heart of the prophetic imagination.

273 It is in the liturgy that we confront the otherness of pain and injustice and walk humbly with God, James L. Empereur, SJ has written with justice in mind. For us the liturgy does justice. When, therefore, we seek liturgy, which fosters justice, we are confronted with an immense challenge— celebrating liturgy, which challenges not only the hearts of worshippers but through the way the world and the Church are organised and function.

They are there—the street-dwellers and all the poor and suffering they represent—at the back of the church and in its dark corners. At St. Mary’s, at least, this is so. St. Francis Xavier’s and Star of the Sea are locked. Charity in these places is to be found at the Parish Centre or in the caretaker’s flat. At St. Mary’s, the homeless and disoriented have a quiet presence. Sometimes they are awkwardly present in a liturgy, moving around, speaking in a loud voice. The trick is how to make them—and all for whom justice needs to be done—always present. That is a liturgy that does justice. Liturgy is not an escape from the world; rather it is the arrival at advantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world. (Alexander Schmemann)

Making such liturgical space, Jane Walton writes in a piece that inspires these thoughts, requires imagination, courage, curiosity, and practice. It takes imagination to break with the fixed and finished and to enter the pain, vulnerability, shame, failure, worries, and differences of others. We need love to get in touch with this otherness, but we also need rage and anger to name the evils that are overpowering. We need the courage occasionally to curse. Of course, a ‘don’t want to know’ attitude is a comfortable sort of blindness. A liturgy that does justice, on the other hand, is full of curiosity about other cultures, even if they are sub-cultures of our own, of other languages and symbols. It won’t happen just sitting there listening. All the letters of the word ‘silent’ are the letters of the word ‘listen’, someone has said. Listening is an active silence. Silence is most active when it is an engagement in someone else’s story. The prophetic imagination is fed by story—Christ’s story, the stories we see in our neighbour’s eyes when we look closely, the stories in the homilies, the stories triggered by a bare mention in the prayers of the faithful. No liturgy that does justice needs to be quiet, but it needs to be contemplative. It needs to cultivate an inner silence.

Now there are a variety of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. (1 Corinthians 12: 4-7) Perhaps the most powerful example of the prophetic imagination at work within the Church was the call of the Council Fathers to return to the freedom that Paul calls all who are baptised to, namely, that they exercise their gifts in the service of the Lord. In the inevitable institutionalisation of the Church in the early centuries, that notion of gift and charism became ordered—literally—in the sacrament of order. St. Augustine explained order as ‘the appropriate disposition of things equal and unequal by giving each its proper place’. That is ranking, Thomas Aquinas said a little more bluntly. So priest, deacon, and sub-deacon are ranked. Then come the ‘minor orders’—acolyte, exorcist, readers, doorkeepers, cantors, and gravediggers. The tonsure became the entry point of this clericalisation, and the cassock

274 and surplice its uniform. The ‘imposition of hands’, a joyous, Pentecostal sacrament of the early Church, became ordination, an ordering, with its fatal tendency to build ontological walls around what was ordered. It is a tendency not yet complete, to judge by a recent Church-in-Rome declaration ‘On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World’ (2004) and Redemptionis Sacramentum (2004), a rather sad document for such a joyful sacrament, raging against ‘abuses’ of all sorts, but especially against trespassing over priestly boundaries.

There was probably no bigger boost to the prophetic imagination in the Parish than when the reforms of Vatican II on the ministry began to be implemented in the 1970s. Perhaps there is no more consistent theme in the Word Pictures of the Parishioners than their sense of awe at being entrusted to make a gift of their services. They tell how awesome it is to offer ‘The Body of Christ’ and to get the response ‘Amen—Yes, it is!’. For men, whose boyhood memories include their experiences of learning to be, then being, ‘altar boys’, and then, in manhood, going up to the altar when there was no altar boy, making the responses, carrying the missal from the ‘epistle’ side to the ‘gospel’ side, presenting the priest with small jugs of water and wine, holding the lavabo bowl for him to wash his fingers—for them it was a very rewarding moment when, with an imposition of hands and small ceremony, the Church recognised them as ‘acolytes’. It was an honour for them to be educated for their new role. Women, who stood in the sanctuary for the first time, read scripture, led the prayers of the faithful, and distributed communion found a new dimension to their spirituality.

Let us be clear. This is no lay ministry. This is authorised People of God’s ministry, service, giftgiving. This is the Spirit levelling the Church’s sacramentality. This is ministry in the Church as distinct to the ministries all the baptised have—of parenting, of caring, of comforting and grieving. This is prophecy, a vision of the future. There are not as many ministries as there are responsibilities in the Parish. Let me list the current responsibilities as some indication of how broad the gift-giving is. Welcomers, Acolytes, Sacristans, Collectors, Counters, Choirs and instrumentalists, Eucharistic Ministers, Communion to the Sick, Catechists, Family liturgy, RCIA Programmes, Home Rosary, Pastoral Teams, Finance, Healing Mass, Spirituality Nights, Catholic Women’s League, Legion of Mary, Sacred Heart Sodality, Assumption Sodality, Folk Mass, Teresa House, Spiritual Reading Library, Meditation Groups, Jesuit Mission Workers, Sacramental Programme, Infant Foundation of Australia, Counselling.

Let me go to one of the ministries in particular, Catechetics, and one expression of it, The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. Catechetics is a special form of prophecy. Catechists are essentially mediators. They mediate the mysteries of faith to young and old. They are on their own pilgrimage and are companions with others in theirs. They are the generation of Vatican II. They have to educate themselves to its insights and discover a way of sharing them with others. Fancy Greek words of the early Church have come into their way of thinking. Kerygma: proclaiming the Good News and preaching the Gospel. Didache: teaching, discovering windows into the souls of others, finding a language to talk of faith, reading life’s experiences. Koinonia: making community by conversation,

275 encouraging others to reveal themselves. Liturgia, doing the work of the People of God in prayer and worship. Diakonia: serving others rather than ruling over them in some way. I hold in my hand a faded Catechism of Christian Doctrine. Adapted for Australia by the 2nd and 3rd Plenary Council. Published in AD 1939, with N. T. Gilroy’s imprimatur. Maybe it is significant, maybe it is not, but there is a picture of a Celtic Cross on the cover. The catechism begins with prayers—The Morning Offering: O Jesus, through the most pure Heart of Mary, I offer Thee the prayers, works, joys and suffering of this day for all the intentions of Thy Divine Heart; Act of Contrition; Hail Holy Queen; Mysteries of the Rosary; Divine Praises and Aspirations. The Catechism begins with Lesson 1. On God and the Creation of the World. 1. Question: Who made the world? Answer: God made the world. The Catechism ends with Lesson 27 On the General Judgement. 1. Question: What does the resurrection of the body mean? Answer: The Resurrection of the body means we shall all rise on the last day with the same bodies, which we had in this life. (Surely a disappointment for many!)

I can’t say that I am ‘holding in one hand’ the Catechism of the Catholic Church (translated from the Latin in 1994). It is a wrist-breaker—804 pages, 50 of them a subject index. Paragraph 1. God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself [sic], in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man [sic] to make him [sic] share in his [sic] own blessed life. Paragraph 2865 and last: By the final “Amen’ [of the Final Doxology “For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and forever”], we express our ‘fiat’ concerning the seven petitions [of the “Our Father”]: “So be it”.’ The frontispiece of the Catechism is a coloured photo of a wood carving by the aboriginal sculptor, Georg Mung. ‘Pregnant Mary’ is its title. Ochre coloured and dot painted, the statue is a hopeful, ‘inculturated’ opening to the Catechism.

The new Catechism is clearly not to be learned by rote. There is a theologian’s saying about theology. The art and science of theology is ascribing levels of certainty to any proposition. In that sense there is no theology at all in the old catechism. Everything was at the one level of unquestionable certainty. The new Catechism, while sure and assertive, addresses the issue that the People of God have the right to be educated—really educated—in their faith as adults. That education in the faith for adults takes place in the Parish, principally in the liturgy. While there will always be some tension between the pastoral and the educative element in the liturgy—a fear that the educative element will be too ‘academic’—it is clear that, in the past decades, the Jesuits have tapped their province resources in theology, scripture and social justice to both inspire and educate the Parish. But there has been another ministry in the Parish, one totally free of apologetics and beyond the resolution of ‘mixed marriage’ problems. Let me introduce it by quoting a letter written to me:

I was attracted to the Church by the life-giving atmosphere and activity of St Mary’s Parish under the leadership of Father Paul Coleman. He had beautiful liturgies, a great deal of social activity, and many lay ministries operating. One just wanted to be part of it. He also arranged excellent

276 opportunities for religious adult education. When I asked him for instruction, he entered me in the RCIA (Adult Initiation) for a year, as well as giving individual instruction. There were many involved in RCIA. Very significant and rich for both cradle Catholics and inquirers alike. He also introduced me into a Christian Life Community group (CLC) to which I still belong 21 years later. This has been a most valuable, prayerful experience.

The Christian Initiation for Adults, nourished by the spirituality Paul Coleman seeded in the Parish and developed by the priests who followed him has been a remarkable ministry of the Parish community. It is not directed at ‘conversions’, except in the sense that we all need conversion. It is for all who have questions of them and of the ministers and of the Church. This ‘initiation’ is a shared pilgrimage. Both inquirers and ministers witness to one another the mysteries they are entering. RCIA is a ministry of the Parish through its Pastoral Associates, more than a ministry of its priests. These Pastoral Associates have found a calling, which takes them to an education in the faith outside the seminary, and a spirituality born of an active engagement in life rather than a separation from it. They bring with their witness a sense of contemplation that the Parish’s needs. They bring a cloud of witnesses in the collection of readings they bring to help in the pilgrimage of the RCIA. They provide what we must hope the Church will provide in its Catechism one day: a way of journeying into faith through doubts and questions, through life experiences and stories. Reading is a dance of the mind, it seems to me. We read slowly. We read fast. We soak up the timelessness of the words of our sacred texts. We fly over the contradictions and errors of writers to join a worldwide conversation. That conversation is babble at times. But when we listen to it silently and prayerfully, it feeds a prophetic imagination.

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A genuine personal life is impossible without Conscience, that is, without conscious choice. It is a voice in each of us that speaks so imperatively that it cannot be silenced. Archbishop Willem Bekkers

To choose what is difficult All one’s days As if it were easy. That is faith W.H. Auden