The Prophetic Imagination We Are Surrounded by a Cloud of Witnesses, Let Us Therefore Lay Aside Any Weight . . .And Let Us Run W
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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.