Restoration Comedy

Well, for once I’m going to say that Pope Francis is getting a bit of a bad rap from whoever is handing out raps these days.

Because his homily to the Council of Bishops’ Councils of Europe ….wasn’t, you know…that bad.

It was a call to the continent’s bishops to wake up, embrace the profound need that all people have for Christ, and to share him, without fear or constraint.

Unfortunately, though, what limits the effectiveness of Francis’ words – as ever – is his absolute, apparently pathological fixation on a caricature of “the past” and “structures” as the enemy of the spread of the Gospel.

Ever since his election, reading his words, scripted and unscripted, there’s a sense that he’s in a continual internal argument with someone or something that often leads the listener to scratch her head and want to ask, Who are you fighting with? What are you talking about?

I am going to set down more thoughts next week about this fixation on – and against – the “past,” being as it is not only a poor fit with, you know, the totality of Catholic thinking, but for now I just want to take a look at this homily, which you can read here.

Let’s set the liturgical and historical scene, first.

It’s providential, really – the first reading at a Mass with the bishops of a continent marked by a collapsing faith is about the return of the God’s people to their land, traditional faith challenged and collapsed by conquest and exile.

The reading is from the minor prophet Haggai – the book is only two chapters and you can read it here. The setting is after the people’s return to Jerusalem, after decades of exile. They’re back, living and surviving, but the Temple remains destroyed, and the people are reluctant to rebuild it.

Haggai rises to the occasion. He tells them that while they are rebuilding their own houses, they’re neglecting God’s house, and they’re suffering for it. They need to be brave and faithful, get to work on the Temple, and when they do, they’ll be blessed.

Francis takes off on this, weaving his usual theme setting new against old:

After reflection, there is another step: rebuilding. “Build my house”, God says through the prophet (Hag 1:8), and the people rebuild the Temple. They stop being content with a peaceful present and start working for the future. Yet since some were opposed to this, the Book of Chronicles tells us that the people worked with one hand on stones, in order to build, and the other hand on the sword, in order to defend this rebuilding process. It was no easy thing to rebuild the temple. This is what is required to build the European common house: to leave behind short-term expedience and to return to that farsighted vision of the founding fathers, what I would dare to call a prophetic vision of the whole. They did not seek a fleeting consensus, but dreamt of a future for all. This is how the walls of the European house were erected, and only in this way can they be consolidated. The same is true for the Church, the house of God. To make her beautiful and welcoming, we need, together, to look to the future, not to restore the past. Sadly, a certain “restorationism” of the past is currently in fashion, one that kills us all. Certainly, we must begin from the foundations, yes truly from our roots, because that is where rebuilding starts: from the Church’s living tradition, which is based on what is essential, the Good News, closeness and witness. We need to rebuild from her foundations the Church of every time and place, from worship of God and love of neighbour, and not from our own tastes, not from any alliances or negotiations that we might make for defending the Church or Christianity

Francis gives a nod to roots, but the force of his words is directed, as per usual, at scolding a viewpoint that is centered on “restorationism” rather than looking together to the future.

Here’s the problem. Well, one of them.

In this context of return, sorry to tell you, the rebuilding of life in Jerusalem was understood as, yes, a restoration. No way around it.

Life was different, certainly. The monarchy was gone. The nation’s independence was gone. The wealth of Solomon which had made the previous Temple of glorious memory what it was, was gone forever.

So no, in a sense, the previous Temple in its original context could not be exactly and precisely  “restored”  – for that time had past. And it would not only be a waste of time to attempt to rebuild a duplicate, it would be a distraction from what was needed in the present. So yes – “restoration” in that sense, works as an obstacle to spiritual growth.

But that’s not what these prophets – of whom Haggai was only one – were calling for. Nor did they call on the people to “look to the future” and get dreamin’ with God, or, least of all, characterize “the past” as a useless place, inimical to God’s action in the present.

 The categories of “past” and “future” were not as relevant as were the categories that had always been at the center of their relationship with God: “faithful” and “unfaithful.”

And the way we sort that out is always by beginning with what God has revealed. That’s how we discern: first by asking – is what we sense we are called to do consistent with what God has revealed through Scripture and tradition – in the past.

For what is missing (and this will be a focus of what I write next about this) from these contemporary calculations and exhortations is any solid means of discernment. We are exhorted to not be tied to “the past” and listen to the “Spirit” in the present, but never offered any sense of what has occupied countless great spiritual minds over the centuries – how to discern what is authentic and what is just no more than our wishful thinking and egos at work as we look at the work of the Spirit in the present moment.

Are “it’s new” and “owns the Trads” and “it seems pretty loving” enough?

No.

That usually doesn’t work. And is rife with opportunities for exploitation and authoritarianism.

Just trust us.

The big picture of Exile and Return is, indeed, a story of creative restoration. The people’s task had to be creative because, indeed, times and changed, and their self-understanding of what it meant to be God’s People had been fundamentally challenged and had to adjust as they learned to sing a song of the Lord, first in a foreign land, and then deposed and dispersed.

But the task was rooted, deeply, not just in any vague sense of rootedness, but very firmly in what God had revealed to them in, yes, the past – the covenant and the Law and all of their experiences as a people. And the rebuilding of the Temple was not to be a new design reflecting the latest Persian styles, but it was, as much as possible, to reflect the original vision of the Temple – a “vision” which was essentially about God’s glory, God’s presence and God’s centrality in their lives.

The story of Haggai, and more broadly, the return of God’s people to Jerusalem, is certainly an effective and suggestive way to reflect on the present situation of the collapse of Catholicism in Europe – and the West in general, as a well as a way forward. Read Haggai, and you’ll see it all, much of which Pope Francis brings out in his homily: the prophetic condemnation of fearful clinging to comfort, the call to courage, and evocations of the emptiness of life when we rely on ourselves and push God out of His rightful place.

So much more complex than a war between past, present and future, with the past always held up as the enemy.

For besides all the other problems with this framing, we might well ask:  where does “the past” begin anyway?

What’s the cutoff?

100 AD? 1100? 1900? 1962? 2013?

How do we discern which part of “the past” is permissible to keep or draw from?

Because, you know, the Second Vatican Council started three generations ago. Long time!

When does a genial rootedness in “living tradition” transform into ideological “tastes?”

How can you tell?

What is this “restorationism” that “kills us all,” exactly?

Restoration of what from what part of the past?

Birettas and Latin?

Proclaiming Khalil Gibrain and singing Blowin’ in the Wind at Mass?

Which will “kill us all?” And how do we tell?

It’s incoherent, and simply doesn’t work as categories, as criteria of discernment, which is why in Catholic thinking…it never has been.

Effective reform and rebuilding in Catholicism has never taken “bad past” and “dreaming about the future” as a guiding principle.

What has?

Well, look back at Haggai. Look back at the experience of God’s people throughout salvation history. What are the prophetic calls to reform and hope based on? Yes, trust in God’s work in the present. Yes, a willingness to see what radical things God, who makes all things new, can do, far beyond what we imagine or even want sometimes.

But the ancient prophetic calls and the continual journey of reform in Christianity is never rooted in a simplistic divide that tells us to trust – just trust – in a nebulous sense of the activity of the Spirit in the present, privileging that over a hidebound past.

No, it’s fidelity. Faithfulness.

Which, as I pointed out above, has its own complications – after all, the Protestant Reformation was born out of exactly that – a conviction that fidelity to the Gospel meant throwing off the structures and accretions that had accumulated in the past.

But no matter the complexities – which we can’t avoid, and shouldn’t try to with simplistic categories and villainizing and othering those who think differently – that’s where reform begins: listening to the prophets, being honest about the moment, and in faithfulness to what we know is true and real, no matter when or at what point in our blip of human history it was revealed and developed – start to rebuild.