REDEMPTORIST FATHER ANTHONY KELLY delivered the keynote address at the Brisbane College of Theology’s annual graduation. Fr Kelly’s address to the graduates explores “the things that matter” and how studying theology makes a difference
THERE have been times, I imagine, when, under interrogation from friends or relatives, you had to admit that you were studying theology.
Once it was made clear that you did not mean “geology”, you probably glimpsed in your questioner a glassing of the eye and slackening of the jaw, indications of some pensive moment of wonder – that you, otherwise sharp and competent, perhaps of imposing athletic stature and great physical beauty – that you, you of all people could be wasting the years studying theology!
While you were busying yourself with odd arcane things, of no possible relevance to the real world, that real world was getting on with job, doing the things that matter.
Ah yes, “the things that matter”. I wonder what they are? What difference do they make?
Students of theology, usually in the context of some Church or religious community, have made their option about the things that matter.
The things that matter make a difference.
Three billion of our contemporaries on the planet at this moment receive as their daily earnings less than it takes us to buy a cappuccino or a glass of beer.
And yet there are strong voices, within the Churches and governments, who express what they think matters, when they propose that it is time for an international allocation of aid to poorer countries; not the current 0.2 per cent of our GDP, but the 0.7 per cent agreed upon at the Monterey Financing for Development Conference in 2002.
Also, given the conflicts, threats and injustices of the present, not many would deny that amongst the things that matter is the fact that we do belong together, fellow earthlings on this one little planet of a medium size star in a galaxy of about 100 billion such stars, in a material universe of perhaps 100 billion galaxies.
Is it not time, we ask, to come up with some new system of world governance that privileges the things that matter – peace, justice and the sharing of the planet’s abundance?
It matters historically as well when we are amongst the first generations to awaken to the wonderful fact of this 15 billion years of cosmic process that has brought us forth, and become conscious of itself in the mind and heart, in the imagination, the wisdom, intelligence and prayer of our human consciousness.
We begin to see Heidegger’s point when he reflected that, given the uncanniness of our existence, thinking must be radically “thanking-thinking” – if it is to be truly a way of intelligence.
And yet, there is also a sense in which our culture has been “running on empty” for some time.
The things that matter do not seem to matter so much. What can’t be counted doesn’t count. The ecology of values, including simple decency, is now finding that there are non-renewable resources.
Moreover, there is little point in becoming ecologically-minded if the ecology of our own minds has been stunted and atrophied.
The once noble declarations of human rights, implicitly recognising the dignity of each human person and an overarching sense of the common good, seems to be spiralling down into neurotic litigiousness.
The momentous recognition of human rights for all, is being replaced by an intense, defensive, unsleeping consumerist assertion of my rights against everyone, and “the devil take the hindmost”.
Wise cultural commentators point to the “unemployed self” of modernity. Have we exchanged our hearts for an artificial image, our souls for a flat, calculating rationalistic ego, our creative imaginations for a heap of disjointed impressions?
If Dr Freud worked to liberate the psyche from unhealthy repressions relating to our sexual being, it is becoming clear that repression can work, not only in the depths of libido, but also on the heights of our spirits.
Old Marx declared that religion was the opium of the people; but now we know what that opium is: the crazed consumerism that is intent of having to the detriment of being, on possessing, owning, dominating, at the expense of belonging, sharing, thanking, giving and surrendering to the Lord and Giver of life.
But you, fellow theologians, have considered, through study of sacred literature, the history of religion and Church, the meaning of faith and its doctrines, and the world-forming moral actions that flow from all this, that there are things that matter most, and that these make a difference.
To such a vision, what we most care for is not in the end at the mercy of what we most detest.
It makes a difference if our intelligence works within an horizon open to the transcendent creative truth and goodness in which we live and move and have our being.
It makes a difference if we see the world in which each human being that has ever existed as the object of an infinite love.
It makes a difference if that love has revealed itself irreversibly in Christ, and in a great cloud of witnesses, the apostles, martyrs, mystics, reformers, great saints and good people everywhere, irrespective of culture, religion or nationality.
It makes a difference if we have hope, not only for an all inclusive future, not only in our present, but even for the past, even our past, in which healing and forgiveness are at work beyond human calculation.
It makes a difference if we choose to offer the service of mind and critical enquiry to the Churches, religious communities and to the millennial traditions that seek to work in the deep reaches of a culture’s soul, and give hope to a world.
You have opted to make a difference; and you have put some years and much energy into it.
This reminds me of a little poem of that tragic Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas. He is writing about the art and craft of poetry.
Could we not replace this with theology, for, in its own way, theology is the language of the heart as it imagines the world “otherwise”:
In my craft and sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light,
Not for ambition or bread,
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
True, there is not much money or celebrity in either poetry or theology. We must be content to labour for “the common wages of the human heart”, in the assurance that a great love can heal the grief that all love must suffer, and wipe away, in the end, every tear that truncated, mutilated versions of our humanity have caused.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
Go well, then, with the theological craft and art you have begun. Be ready for a splendid frustration, since words will never be enough to serve the Word; nor will our hearts ever have enough imagination to offer that Spirit who makes the young see visions of a blessed future, and the old dream dreams of what has already been given, even if its fullest evidence is yet to appear.
