pathways, APRIL 09
God bless our contradictions those parts of us which seem out of character. Let us be boldly and gladly out of character. Let us be creatures of paradox and variety: creatures of contrast, of light and shade: creatures of faith. God be our constant. Let us step out of character into the unknown, to struggle and love and do what we will. Amen.
Australian artist, Michael Leunig*
Living in paradox, unafraid of its conversations and possibilities, will provide a future for the Catholic Church in Australia, according to academic and author, Fr David Ranson.
"We live in the belly of paradox (personally, socially and ecclesially). It is our reality as a world at this point. It is our home as Australians. It is our future as a Church in this place," he concluded, in delivering the inaugural Fr John Wallis Memorial Lecture in Hobart recently.
"... we must never tire of looking in the place of blindness in order to bring vision; seeking out the place of deafness to shout out a new message; discovering that place of paralysis to offer new movement; standing in that place of death to dawn new life. To live with this attentiveness and responsiveness is to live in the intersection of mysticism and politics."
Based on the premise, we remember in order to imagine, Fr Ranson explored the character and potential of paradox as the milieu in which "we might discover more fully, and appreciate more wholly, the way in which the Spirit searches for us within the Australian context".
"I wish to suggest that this notion of intersection is critical to the Australian spiritual endeavour," he said.
"... The experience of intersection, most often an experience of paradox, is the Australian cathedral in which we might truly learn how to pray in this place.
"Its buttresses are historical, geographical and social. Taken together, they bring into being a spiritual architecture specific to us as Australians - a frame, I believe, that we are only on the edge of consciously entering but which suggests itself full of genuine invitation for us ..."
Fr Ranson contended that it was only in the presence of paradox that truth could show itself.
"... paradox, a particular form of intersection, protects and nurtures the experience of the sacred. Our own Christian spiritual framework lives and breathes irreducible sets of tensions - virginity and motherhood, fear and love, darkness and light, death and life, humanity and divinity...
"By the parable of Matthew 13:24-43, in which the wheat and darnel are allowed to grow together, we are reminded by Jesus himself that life is full of paradox.
"It is also why authentic spiritual experience does not resile from the apparent contradictions of both the personal and the social, the mystical and the political, limitation and transcendence, emplacement and displacement ...
"If we want to discover what is true there is no other way than risking the conversation between two apparent opposites."
Such conversation opened up the future, he said. There was a price to be paid, but in such a crucifixion, paradox became the tomb from which could arise the possibility of transformation.
"If apparent contradiction is to give way to genuine paradox with transformative capacity, what then are the challenges for us, particularly as Church?
"Firstly, we must not be afraid to speak out an ethic that addresses the intersection in which people live, that respects the ambiguity inherent in the many paradoxes that characterise our lives. When we experience our contradictions respected, accepted, even loved then we are given the interior resource to make those decisions which lead us forward into a fuller life ...
"Subsequently, when we speak as a Church, faithful to both our Tradition and the lived experience of people, prepared to fully engage the conversation of such mutually rigorous fidelity, then new springs of water might begin to transform aridity into verdancy. Here in Australia, a language of intersection will speak to a people of intersection and offer them hope, movement and life.
"The possibility of speaking such a word, however, depends on our readiness to accept the paradoxes that are to be found within the Church itself."
Fr Ranson used two memories from World Youth Day celebrations, July 2008: the wonderful spectacle of the great sea of flags at Barangaroo and the renewed focus on the experience of sexual abuse within the Church.
"At the end of World Youth Day ... we thus had two very different experiences. Their juxtaposition is critical for us. It is the juxtaposition of celebration, on the one hand, and pain on the other.
"It could be all too easy to use the celebration of the week to simply drown out the collective memory of the pain of abuse within our community ... However, we cannot use a positive memory to negate the painful memory. We must take both and both equally.
"Thus, the anguished voices of victims of abuse within the Church were not some kind of media annoyance over the celebration of World Youth Day. Their voices over the week were, in fact, a gift to us, albeit a painful and disconcerting one.
"They were a powerful reminder to us of our vulnerability, a vulnerability that we might prefer not to admit, that we might prefer to have behind us, but, as with all vulnerability, stands to become the well-spring of new life if we can but enter into it.
" 'There is nothing so beautiful, nor so ugly as the Catholic Church' as Bishop Robinson once remarked. We must be honest about this and not be fearful of neither its starkness nor its implications.
"It is the truth of this paradox, and our full engagement of it, that offers us a future.
"The beauty does not negate the ugliness; the ugliness does not negate the beauty. Both exist, and both must be engaged.
"If we only engage the celebration, the beauty, the light, we have no guarantee that we do not get caught up in a grand illusion of ourselves - something that is the opposite of gospel humility and the difficult pathway of sustained conversion.
"If we only engage the ugliness we become overwhelmed by the darkness, and are left paralysed, and in despair.
"The ugliness we have to face ensures that the beauty has realism; the beauty that we celebrate ensures that the ugliness is not the whole, or the final, word.
"If there is to be a new springtime in the Church in Australia - and such, of course, is always the hope after an event such as World Youth Day - such a flowering of new life will only occur to the extent that we stand truthful and honest before the full weight of the paradox.
"Holding two very different memories of that most significant week, we are called to be grateful for both, and in the paradox, not apart from it, work towards a genuine outpouring of new life."
"Our memory of him, invites us to imagine what might be possible in such places.
"We should not fear being lost in the conversations, or being torn apart by the paradoxes from which they originate.
"In entering all the risk and possibility of the conversations that await us, we do so in full acknowledgement of the One who meets us along the way, and in the midst of our conversation - the Risen Christ present in the Emmaus story of Luke 24, who transforms fear into possibility, and doubt into courage.
"The memory of John Wallis gentle yet full of purpose, ultimately reminds us of that symbol of the Christ who keeps rising in our hearts, and who in the midst of our paradoxes offers us peace.
"May our spirit be full of that hospitality of spirit so vivid in John, our hearts aflame, as was his, with that love of the possible forged in the midst of our paradoxes."
The Father John Wallis Memorial lecture was a lay initiative with the support of the Archdiocese of Hobart and the Missionary Sisters of the Service. Archbishop Adrian Doyle and MSS congregational leader Bernadette Wallis MSS were among the 260 people who attended the lecture held at St Virgil's College, Austins Ferry.
pictured above left: Presenter of the Fr John Wallis Memorial Lecture, Fr David Ranson (Sydney) and prominent Australian Catholic laywoman Geraldine Doogue (Sydney). Following the lecture, Ms Doogue engaged Fr Ranson and the audience in a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation. Fr Ranson suggested there should be an eighth beatitude: blessed are they who converse.
above right: Missionary Sisters of Service, congregational leader Bernadette Wallis (left) of Melbourne and leadership team member and one of the lecture organisers, Barbara Hateley (Hobart).
In the caverns of the mind in which our memories reside there the Spirit awaits ready to bring forth freshness and possibility ... There is no future without memory... This evening we honor the memory of Fr John Wallis. We do so not simply as mere commemoration, though such would be a noble thing to do. We remember in order to imagine. The memory of John Wallis, in particular, is full of such invitation ...
I have a wonderful framed photo taken of Archbishop Guildford Young and John, standing together, looking upon an open text of the documents of the Second Vatican Council. There have been many suggestions on the nature of the conversation between these two unforgettable figures as the photo was taken, and legion are the possibilities of what might form the most appropriate caption.
The photo, now framed on my shelf, stands there as a sustained invitation to be open to the same energy, enthusiasm and endeavor evidenced in these two colossal figures of the Church in Tasmania through much of the second half of the twentieth century. They were such different characters, one flamboyant and full of European Romanita, the other understated and vernacular; both of them passionate, personal, and prayerful... (from Fr David Ranson's introduction to the lecture)
* Michael Leunig, The Prayer Tree, (North Blackburn, Victoria: Collins Dove, 1991), 14
photo credits: Pip Barnard, editor, Tasmanian Catholic (the lecture night); Missionary Sisters of Service archives (Fr John with Archbishop Young)
disclaimer: editor of pathways Penny Edman was one of the organisers
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