Community of Sant'Egidio - Community of Sant'Egidio - Naples 2007 - A WORLD WITHOUT VIOLENCE

22/10/2007 - 16:30 - Sala Dione - Stazione Marittima PANEL 12 - A Space for God in the City
David Albert Beetge Anglican Bishop, South Africa

CITIES AND THE PLACE OF GOD

Christian scriptures begin with a garden and end with a city.

We start with the Genesis picture of Adam and Eve, our first parents, everyman and everywoman, in the garden of Eden.

We conclude with the Revelation of St John, and the vision of the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from heaven, lit by the glory of God. Its gates are always open, and through it flows the river of life, spanned by the tree of life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.

It is an inspiring picture.

Yet it is not only the 100 million or more slum dwellers of our planet for whom the experience of city life is far from heavenly. Those in decent housing and employment, the middle classes and the well-off also increasingly find that urban life has become a disabling and barren wasteland.

People struggle with a polluted environment and increasingly unstable ecological systems. The gap between rich and poor widens shamefully. Institutions of democracy and government are experienced as distant and ineffectual.

In the face of manipulative media, addictive lifestyles and demeaning entertainment, we find chronic levels of anxiety and increasingly dysfunctional families; we find a sense of powerlessness and abandonment among the young; we find a confusion between personal and social morality; and we find the loss of religious authority and the dangers of shallow syncretism.

How are we, the faith communities, to understand and respond to this sense of psychological isolation and social alienation in urban life?

The malaise of the modern soul needs the redemptive touch of timeless myths that remind us of the eternal questions and the eternal truths of what it means fully to be a human being.

Urbanisation in Europe and beyond grew dramatically with the industrial revolution.

Populations moved in great numbers from the countryside to the towns and cities. Now, I am not saying that rural life is easier than city life, but rather that something precious was, if not lost, then to a great degree mislaid along the way.

Rural life, the life of so many generations and centuries before us, placed humanity within creation ï¿½ part of the mystery of life and death, of winter and summer, of spring and harvest.

Human beings played their part, daring to sow and till, and to raise crops, knowing that there was both predictability and unpredictability in the seasons, the weather. We dared to love and care, bear children, raise families, and mourn the dead, knowing that there was both predictability and unpredictability in human lives and human relationships.

Humanity was part of something greater, and our own rhythms of birth and growth and ageing and death were contained within it. Yet we were not passive, impotent, victims. We were creative participants in the rolling mystery of the universe, a mystery demanding reverence, a mystery that revealed the hand of an awesome God, a redeeming God, but not a God to be taken lightly.

Industrialisation brought a new myth, a false myth, of human control ï¿½ control of factory processes, sure ï¿½ but control increasingly of every other area of life. Today we expect science and technology to fix our problems, solve our difficulties, and eliminate suffering and sadness; so that from birth (and even questions of fertility) through to death (which increasingly we also want to manage), we are guaranteed all that we want, all that we desire, to live like the people in the soap operas and celebrity magazines.

And if we can control every aspect of human life, what need is there of God?

It is true that we can and do control large areas of life. We press a switch, the light goes on; we hit the send button, emails fly round the world.

But we can do precious little to control happiness and hope, family life and friendship, love and loss, aging and death ï¿½ and so we are at a complete loss as to how to cope with the unwelcome, or even the merely unexpected. We feel we have failed. Yet it is this new myth that has failed us. For these are the areas of life that make us who we most essentially are.

It is to God we must return with our questions concerning true humanity.

More and better technology can assist in the business of living, but it cannot help us address the fundamental questions, the essential mysteries, of what it means to be truly alive and to be mortal.

Jesus, when asked what the greatest commandments of God were, answered that there are two: to love God with all oneï¿½s heart and mind and soul and strength, and to love oneï¿½s neighbour as oneself.

To be fully human is to live in love, in harmony, with the Creator God, with heart, mind, soul and strength ï¿½ on the level of our emotions, our intellect, our spirituality and our embodiedness. It is also to live as an individual in relationship, a person in community, with other persons.

Therefore we must pay attention to all these areas of life, especially rebalancing the much-neglected spiritual dimension ï¿½ and not merely focus on the externals of control and consumption. We must also stand aside from that other the false myth, of scarcity and competition, which underpins our economic systems. Those experts who take a closer look (such as South African economist Margaret Legum) assure us that if we managed our resources sensibly and equitably, our world provides more than enough for all.

There are also resources more than enough for our emotional and spiritual and intellectual needs, and for our social and relational needs.

This is the promise of the generous God, whose love overflows into creation. Jesus famously said that he came that we might have life, and have it in abundance.

Jesus is also the one who said he was ï¿½the Way, the Truth and the Life.ï¿½

He teaches us that his abundant-life-giving truth is not the truth of clear-cut answers, instant solutions, self-help manuals or quick fixes for every problem.

His is the truth that comes from walking in his Way. It is the truthfulness of the life lived with integrity. This comes through the practice of attentiveness to life as we truly experience it, with all its mysteries and unanswerable questions.

It is a life prepared to live with awe and reverence before the miracle that we find ourselves, and every other human individual, to be.

It is a life that acknowledges humanities frailties and failings, even as we humbly bring our listening, our questioning, before the redemptive hope that we find in Jesus Christ.

This should come as no surprise to any of his followers.

Meditative prayer has been an important thread within Christian tradition from earliest times. The desert fathers, such as John Cassian of the fourth century, were among those who developed these practices, which were pursued particularly, but not solely, within religious communities.

In recent decades, people like the Benedictine monk, John Main, have reminded us of the riches of meditation. There has been a great resurgence in use of the mantra-like ï¿½Jesus prayerï¿½. Others have re-appropriated the lessons of Brother Lawrence on ï¿½Practicing the Presence of Godï¿½ not through withdrawal, but through attentiveness in the midst of busyness. The British writer Joyce Hugget calls this ï¿½Finding God in the Fast Lane.ï¿½

The time has come for Western Christianity to give a more central place to relearning humble and profound listening to God for all the redemptive questions of life ï¿½ a listening that is not just for some clergy, some laity, but that brings to everyone a confidence in the numinousness of life, and that the God who also listens and who cares, walks with us in the unanswerable mysteries of life and death.

Rather than trying to clothe the gospel in the discourse of the Enlightenment or its offspring Postmodernity, we should speak of the good news of Jesus Christ on our own terms ï¿½ of a world suffused with the redemptive presence of its creator.

Perhaps the time has come to move beyond addressing secular authority through ï¿½prophetic witnessï¿½ and ï¿½speaking the truth ï¿½ Godï¿½s Truth ï¿½ to power.ï¿½ Perhaps now is the time for ï¿½mystical witnessï¿½ and ï¿½breathing the spirit ï¿½ Godï¿½s Spirit ï¿½ to souls.ï¿½

Let me return to the vision of the heavenly city with which the Christian scriptures end. This is no steel and concrete dystopia. The new Jerusalem is, as the Hebrew indicates, the city of peace, the foundation of shalom, the possession of salaam.

This peace is not merely the absence of conflict ï¿½ it is the peace of healing and wholeness, of contentment and fulfilment, of flourishing and abundance, of joy and laughter, where everyone and everything is as it should be.

Last month, witnessing the rebuilding of New Orleans after the hurricane, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, spoke about the need for ï¿½the renewal and restoration and recentering of human community in God ï¿½ enjoying who we are and who each other is in the presence of God.ï¿½

Saint Irenaeus said ï¿½the vision of God is seen in a human being that is fully alive.ï¿½

Human beings want, more than anything, to be fully alive. They will find life when they discover the presence of God, whose Spirit fills all of his creation; whose surpassing love reaches out to every individual and every community; whose desire is to bring life in abundance, to our hearts, our minds, our bodies, our souls.

This is what we should preach, without reservation. This is what we should live, without fear. Then others will see we are fully alive, and so find a vision of God, and so dare to share with him the questions, and the mystery, of their own lives.