Article: Outbreak of Faith
An article by Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor in "The Observer" (Dec 18, 2005)
*~*~*~*~*
Have you noticed the new secular wobble? I don't mean just the Narnia fuss over resurrected lions, and the shock discovery of a Christian sub-text in a CS Lewis novel. I mean the queasy feeling that goes hand in hand with the loss of confidence in confident rationalism. I mean the way faith keeps erupting outside the windows of secularism, interrupting the clear view of human beings as autonomous, selfish beings, with only this life to believe in.
Religion never went away, of course. Some 75 per cent of Britons profess or support Christian values, and most people step at least once a year into a church, mosque or temple. There is much that confirms, but also much that contradicts, secular Britain; what to make, for example, of the latest statistics for the Catholic Church in England and Wales that show a decline in numbers marrying in church yet an increase in the number of baptisms and priestly vocations?
What I do know is that, in generation after generation, in an un-newsworthy way, people sit up straight and realise God was born to a refugee family, modelled pure love, and was killed by a violent society so we all might enter a relationship of intimacy with Him. And in generation after generation, that astonishing discovery leads to a turnaround in the way people live and think.
Nothing new there: I would be cautious of talking of a revival of faith. But I do see a loss of faith in no-faith. There is a new uncertainty about our certainties, a questioning of the narratives of the Enlightenment which sought to make the individual the ultimate measure and reason the only yardstick.
Science produces miracles, but also poses questions and challenges that cannot be answered from within the laboratory. The dignity of all human beings, the building of peace, the call to committed love - these are all religious challenges, because they require reaching into the depths of our hearts and minds to find out who we are and why we are here. The Judaeo-Christian narrative, which starts from God making us in his image and likeness and then dying and rising for us, has been the constant current of our civilisation, as evident in the rivers that flow outside religion as well as within it.
What is new is that the rejection of religion seems increasingly dogmatic, while the search for the transcendent appears as gentle and humble as the baby in the manger.
Pendulums swing. It is partly our living remorselessly on the surface of things, which has produced a yearning for depth and reflection. The offspring of hype is banality: bombarded constantly with insignificant or excessive claims, we tend to discount all of them. Yet because we are truth-seeking beings, this leaves us yearning for truths so deep they need to be contemplated - as the popularity of monasteries and spiritual sanctuaries shows.
What is new is that the 'dictatorship of relativism' - as Pope Benedict XVI describes our cultural hegemony - faces new cadres of determined opponents.
Pope John Paul II taught the master lesson in what it means to suffer with patience and dignity; in response, millions gathered in vigil around his bedside. The same lesson has been offered in other, smaller classrooms. One of my most moving moments this year was giving Communion to Abigail Witchalls as she lay, paralysed but smiling, in her hospital bed, the victim of appalling brutality who nurtured a child in her womb. Helpless in bed, she had dictated - through blinking eyes - a haiku, which read: 'Still silent body/But within my spirit sings/Dancing in love-light.' She became a channel of God's peace, and now - with the birth of her son and leaving hospital for home - she and her family glimpse the beginnings of a new dawn.
Faith broke out, too, at the Make Poverty History rally in Edinburgh in the summer, when 200,000 people converged on the G8 summit to press world leaders to fulfill their pledges to the globe's poor. I spoke to many people there: whether or not they expressed it in religious language, they were driven by a deep moral indignation, and a marvellous hope. Why, they asked, do our poorest brothers and sisters go to bed hungry, or die needlessly? The rally was a vast movement for human dignity, a moral awakening, comparable to that which sought an end to slavery.
The Spirit moves and suddenly those we regard as condemned become, in our moral imaginations, our family. Faced with global poverty we did not contemptuously ask, 'where is God?' but heard God gently ask us: 'Where is the humanity I made?'
Just as the summit closed, havoc and pain exploded on the streets of London. Terror is a provocation: in its contempt for human beings as political collateral, it tempts us to respond in the same vein. Yet what do we remember, in retrospect, about the response of Londoners to the bombs on the underground? Who forgets the efficiency and care shown by the emergency services, the way that Londoners put their arms around each other, and nursed each other? By their refusal to be corroded by violence, in their countless small acts of compassion, the British showed they believe in God's design for humanity.
Witnesses stepped forward with words to proclaim it. The 7 July attacks in London blasphemed God with violence in the cause of a religion unrecognisable to religious communities; yet the mother of one of the victims, Marie Fatayi-Williams, was given a prophet's tongue, pardoning her son's killers and pleading with tears for reconciliation in the name of the God she knew. What but faith summons from a grief-stricken mother the words: 'Anger begets hatred, begets more violence, so let us forgive'?
We saw Hurricane Katrina as an indictment of society, and so it was: it exposed alarming gaps in the human chain of solidarity. Yet everywhere people appeared to supply new links: like the 200 students who, hearing at Mass that the homeless needed shoes, left theirs at the altar and went home barefoot.
I leave on Christmas Day for Sri Lanka, to see the effects of the tsunami one year on and to give thanks for the astonishing generosity of the British people in assisting relief and reconstruction. That tidal wave of innocent death stunned us all, and left many asking God the question posed in The Brothers Karamazov: was it worth creating a world with so much pain in it?
Anyone who has lost ones they love must reject glib answers to that question. I hesitate before offering any. Yet there are clues, surely, in the confident responses that compassion makes to suffering, in the light that beams from a Marie Fatayi-Williams or an Abigail Witchalls. Why do we love, irrationally and without benefit to ourselves - why are we able to peer beyond pain and loss to the place beyond - if we were not so much more than what we see?
God knows, the world is worth it: the dignity of the divinely-created, divinely-nurtured human being is a wondrous thing, and when it shines through - as it has so often this year - it leaves everything changed. I say it not with satisfaction, but in gratitude: this year the light of the manger has burned very brightly indeed. No wonder that, in its rays, unbelief trembles. Happy Christmas.
*~*~*~*~*
Have you noticed the new secular wobble? I don't mean just the Narnia fuss over resurrected lions, and the shock discovery of a Christian sub-text in a CS Lewis novel. I mean the queasy feeling that goes hand in hand with the loss of confidence in confident rationalism. I mean the way faith keeps erupting outside the windows of secularism, interrupting the clear view of human beings as autonomous, selfish beings, with only this life to believe in.
Religion never went away, of course. Some 75 per cent of Britons profess or support Christian values, and most people step at least once a year into a church, mosque or temple. There is much that confirms, but also much that contradicts, secular Britain; what to make, for example, of the latest statistics for the Catholic Church in England and Wales that show a decline in numbers marrying in church yet an increase in the number of baptisms and priestly vocations?
What I do know is that, in generation after generation, in an un-newsworthy way, people sit up straight and realise God was born to a refugee family, modelled pure love, and was killed by a violent society so we all might enter a relationship of intimacy with Him. And in generation after generation, that astonishing discovery leads to a turnaround in the way people live and think.
Nothing new there: I would be cautious of talking of a revival of faith. But I do see a loss of faith in no-faith. There is a new uncertainty about our certainties, a questioning of the narratives of the Enlightenment which sought to make the individual the ultimate measure and reason the only yardstick.
Science produces miracles, but also poses questions and challenges that cannot be answered from within the laboratory. The dignity of all human beings, the building of peace, the call to committed love - these are all religious challenges, because they require reaching into the depths of our hearts and minds to find out who we are and why we are here. The Judaeo-Christian narrative, which starts from God making us in his image and likeness and then dying and rising for us, has been the constant current of our civilisation, as evident in the rivers that flow outside religion as well as within it.
What is new is that the rejection of religion seems increasingly dogmatic, while the search for the transcendent appears as gentle and humble as the baby in the manger.
Pendulums swing. It is partly our living remorselessly on the surface of things, which has produced a yearning for depth and reflection. The offspring of hype is banality: bombarded constantly with insignificant or excessive claims, we tend to discount all of them. Yet because we are truth-seeking beings, this leaves us yearning for truths so deep they need to be contemplated - as the popularity of monasteries and spiritual sanctuaries shows.
What is new is that the 'dictatorship of relativism' - as Pope Benedict XVI describes our cultural hegemony - faces new cadres of determined opponents.
Pope John Paul II taught the master lesson in what it means to suffer with patience and dignity; in response, millions gathered in vigil around his bedside. The same lesson has been offered in other, smaller classrooms. One of my most moving moments this year was giving Communion to Abigail Witchalls as she lay, paralysed but smiling, in her hospital bed, the victim of appalling brutality who nurtured a child in her womb. Helpless in bed, she had dictated - through blinking eyes - a haiku, which read: 'Still silent body/But within my spirit sings/Dancing in love-light.' She became a channel of God's peace, and now - with the birth of her son and leaving hospital for home - she and her family glimpse the beginnings of a new dawn.
Faith broke out, too, at the Make Poverty History rally in Edinburgh in the summer, when 200,000 people converged on the G8 summit to press world leaders to fulfill their pledges to the globe's poor. I spoke to many people there: whether or not they expressed it in religious language, they were driven by a deep moral indignation, and a marvellous hope. Why, they asked, do our poorest brothers and sisters go to bed hungry, or die needlessly? The rally was a vast movement for human dignity, a moral awakening, comparable to that which sought an end to slavery.
The Spirit moves and suddenly those we regard as condemned become, in our moral imaginations, our family. Faced with global poverty we did not contemptuously ask, 'where is God?' but heard God gently ask us: 'Where is the humanity I made?'
Just as the summit closed, havoc and pain exploded on the streets of London. Terror is a provocation: in its contempt for human beings as political collateral, it tempts us to respond in the same vein. Yet what do we remember, in retrospect, about the response of Londoners to the bombs on the underground? Who forgets the efficiency and care shown by the emergency services, the way that Londoners put their arms around each other, and nursed each other? By their refusal to be corroded by violence, in their countless small acts of compassion, the British showed they believe in God's design for humanity.
Witnesses stepped forward with words to proclaim it. The 7 July attacks in London blasphemed God with violence in the cause of a religion unrecognisable to religious communities; yet the mother of one of the victims, Marie Fatayi-Williams, was given a prophet's tongue, pardoning her son's killers and pleading with tears for reconciliation in the name of the God she knew. What but faith summons from a grief-stricken mother the words: 'Anger begets hatred, begets more violence, so let us forgive'?
We saw Hurricane Katrina as an indictment of society, and so it was: it exposed alarming gaps in the human chain of solidarity. Yet everywhere people appeared to supply new links: like the 200 students who, hearing at Mass that the homeless needed shoes, left theirs at the altar and went home barefoot.
I leave on Christmas Day for Sri Lanka, to see the effects of the tsunami one year on and to give thanks for the astonishing generosity of the British people in assisting relief and reconstruction. That tidal wave of innocent death stunned us all, and left many asking God the question posed in The Brothers Karamazov: was it worth creating a world with so much pain in it?
Anyone who has lost ones they love must reject glib answers to that question. I hesitate before offering any. Yet there are clues, surely, in the confident responses that compassion makes to suffering, in the light that beams from a Marie Fatayi-Williams or an Abigail Witchalls. Why do we love, irrationally and without benefit to ourselves - why are we able to peer beyond pain and loss to the place beyond - if we were not so much more than what we see?
God knows, the world is worth it: the dignity of the divinely-created, divinely-nurtured human being is a wondrous thing, and when it shines through - as it has so often this year - it leaves everything changed. I say it not with satisfaction, but in gratitude: this year the light of the manger has burned very brightly indeed. No wonder that, in its rays, unbelief trembles. Happy Christmas.
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