For many years now we have been accustomed to come together. Together, to set aside time for reflection and prayer; to raise our consciousness that we are a divided community of faith who earnestly seek and desire unity.
Over the years, too, we have had a series of joint statements, conversations, studies around the central themes that divide us. Slowly we have discovered that perhaps the divisions are not necessarily as deep as we once thought or at least the passage of time has made them appear less insurmountable and maybe even allowed us to appreciate just how much we share rather than reject. Even where there are considerable theological obstacles, or obstacles of Church Order, we have discovered that they need not prevent genuine agreement and action around practical living and the demonstration of Christian life.
And it all takes time. While this aspect of our common life and practice seems to move with a sort of cautious, sensitive, deliberate lack of haste, the world moves on -our churches move on. But we continue, a little less passionate perhaps, a little more despairing as the complexities mount and we face not only inter-confessional tensions and divisions, but the new intra-confessional ones as well. Yet dutifully we continue our seasonal prayer together.
And the texts too are often familiar. The standard being Christ’s great prayer from John’s Gospel ‘that they may become perfectly one. (Jn.17.22) It is, of course, a profound and beautiful text in which Christ’s prayer is not the manufactured unity of formulae, words and structures but the unity between himself and the Father, ‘that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, are in me and I in thee ..’ (Jn.17.21) And you’ll notice that this grace of ‘indwelling’ is not desired because it is a good in itself but ‘so that the world may know .’ It is the testimony of grace before the world, it is the very proof that the world seeks that Jesus is truly and eternally the Son of the Father. Unity is witness and demonstration of the Spirit of the Lordship of Christ, the Father’s gift to the Son in answer to His prayer, not ours.
Our Gospel text (Mt. 17. 21ff.) with its great theme of forgiveness is not so familiar in this context. Nevertheless it is distressingly necessary within our communities as well as between them. For the prayer for ‘unity’ the need for forgiveness comes out of the painful experience of disputes, often ugly and savage disagreements, within our own households of faith.
And so we gather and the world looks at us. Sometimes curiously, sometimes mockingly, and then moves on. Perhaps a little more convinced that the issues which produce such anger and passion are largely irrelevant to its life. It moves on content in its judgement that religion is petty, otiose, and, for all its talk of love and peace, a source of violence and unreasonableness. The secular life is the future. Our disputes and divisions only confirm it in this view. Indeed they leave allow the secular world to argue its own superior plausibility with its programme of human and social emancipation from the irrationality and primitive passion of religion of every sort. As we attend to this world and its way of seeing us gradually we become aware that our prayer for unity is not just about ourselves, not just a calendar custom or dutiful gesture. It is about the future of faith itself in contemporary culture. Unity is not just a happy virtue for those who have it; it is something necessary and precious for the whole of humanity whether they share belief or not.
For a moment, let’s just listen to that world. Listen beneath the surface noises to the quieter but persistent voices of our secular world. In a collection of essays on the sociology of religion, there’s a report of an intriguing survey, ‘Understanding The Spirituality of Non-Church Goers’.[1] It affirms that although our churches may be in decline, people haven’t stopped believing and searching. They may not know how to speak about it, they may not even want to speak about it in our terms but they ‘do believe in something.’ Through their broken, halting speech we hear a different voice like that of Joanne in her thirties, “I think that some people who are just religious are just fanatical, aren’t they? But I think if you’re more spiritual, that’s not, you’re not fanatical, you’re just, does that make sense?” Or Sharon, who can only say that she “believes in something ..” Or Sean, “I just find it hard to believe that there is nothing ..there just has to be something more…” Or John who knows he’s on a journey with this ‘something’; knows that he must disregard the images that he has received from the Church and cultures past and present; recognises that he “can’t visualise or see what God is” but can say that maybe that vision will come in the future. He’s on a journey, one that perhaps many of us can share for in John’s searching and hope is there not an echo of our searching and hope, “For now we see in a mirror dimly ..now, I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been understood.”(I. Cor.13.12.
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The other fascinating feature that emerges from the spirituality of non-church goers is the need for ‘sacred space’ – physical and metaphorical. The need for a place of refuge, peace and security; an atmosphere in which our bruised souls, minds and bodies can rest and touch ‘this something’. In which we can somehow sense its presence and feel that this ‘something’ waits for us, has been waiting for us, patiently, lovingly, silently; this Mystery which we long for but cannot speak.[2]
Could it be that our ‘unity’ is more than the reconciliation of division and conflict? That it is, in fact, the creative making of this space in which this ‘something’, no longer vitiated by our fractures and the endless noisy Babel that they produce, can begin to come into vision? Could it be that this unity is the restoration of the home that the Church is for the weary soul, the tired heart and mind that people carry? For this secular world, though it celebrates its humanity, does not love or cherish the human being. It can only commodify us, use and instrumentalise us until we are exhausted and evacuated of substance by the culture that drives us
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If, for a moment, we can leave behind all our wordy prayers and discussions, put aside our formulas and orders of service, simply to attend to the silence then, quietly drifting in we might begin to hear the prayer of this secular world in the voices of Sharon, Sean, John and so many more. We may begin to see that behind this moment of our prayer for unity is more than just a healing of our own wounds but a prayer that the Holy Spirit would once more gather us, as only the Spirit can, and make us again a place of healing for our world. And in gathering us, the Spirit would make us the place where He, the ‘something’ can be known as the ‘someone’ Jesus. Our prayer for unity is our prayer for the Spirit to remake us, truly gather us and re-create us again as Church.
Maybe it begins in this unexpected Gospel. In her book, The Human Condition, it is the Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt who reminds us that it is Jesus who discovers forgiveness. It is this grace that we pray for in our prayer for unity; it is the grace which we pray for our world. Forgiveness is infinitely more than a pragmatic or exhausted truce with our adversary or denial of the past in pursuit of a utopian future. It is the demonstration of our freedom in history. It is the gift which cannot be manufactured or pretended or conferred by some human logic. It transcends both logic and the justice of retribution, punishment and equity. In its very nature it is ‘gift’ it cannot be compelled or come at the end of some therapeutic process. It is always free, given without condition or demand for recognition. It is God’s own gift that belongs to the essence of carrying His sacred Name; it is the grace that we live and pray for each moment in every day. It is the prayer that Christ prays in the moment of his crucified death. It is not a desire or hope but an act which is performed each time we pray it, ‘forgive us as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ It is the prayer act in which the Kingdom is already present and it is also our proclamation that by God’s grace we are free. Free not to be bound by our past or conditioned by its prejudices and partial memories. We are free because we live in the memory of Him who has set us free, who is our past and our future; who has made us free to learn, to create something new, not in forgetfulness but in truth. And so the Gospel calls to us across our division and our past; it takes up our questions, ‘how many times?’ the ways in which we seek to set a limit, mark a boundary, legitimate our anger and defend our cause. How many times? There is no limit! There can be no limit because forgiveness is the gift of love, the God who is Love, infinite, inexhaustible, boundless. You cannot count it God does not keep accounts, He does not check our balance. Christ is our security and with Him we are always in credit. The Gospel simply says ‘forgive’; it does not stop, it cannot stop, for there is no end to God’s love. The Church that lives in this forgiveness has no limit; it does not set a boundary to the grace it offers. It is always free free to give this most precious gift.
When we live it, put away our desire always to measure and calculate, and just live always beyond our resources in this inexhaustible gift of God, then we begin to discover that we can change, our world can change. We discover that division becomes difference and difference becomes gift. This is unity: the gathering of gifts without any threat to our difference or uniqueness. In such unity we are honoured, our history is honoured, and that ancient primal sin which made Cain slay his brother Abel is healed. When we offer the gift of forgiveness we begin to enter a new world, filled with possibilities, in which we can make mistakes because we know we are not trapped by them. In forgiveness we live beyond ourselves to Christ. And so we begin to discover a new understanding of togetherness, of unity which is dynamic, alive, always striving to celebrate difference and rejoice in difference because it lives beyond fear and threat. It has learned not to be caught in the struggle for ascendancy or justification for it has a vision of Christ who is always greater than the nets we make to contain him and claim him as exclusively ours. You cannot capture the wind in a web, the Spirit cannot be bound by arguments we weave or the conditions that we set. Our prayer for unity is, therefore a pray that our hearts may grow in love of Him. That our love may be so great that like the new wine of the Gospel, it will ‘burst the skins’ with which we try to contain it. In our prayer for Christian unity we pray to love Him, that this love may be so immense that our divisions can no longer obscure Him. We pray that He may be seen in our midst. This prayer is an act and it begins in forgiveness. There’s a beautiful Jewish teaching from the kabala called ‘Tikkum Olam’ the healing or mending of the world. It is part of a teaching that creation a vessel of God’s light which is broken and splintered by our division and sin. ‘Tikkum Olam’ mending the world is the gathering up of the fragments again. This gathering and healing, the restoration of wholeness comes through all our acts of mercy, compassion, generosity and love.
Our prayer for unity is an act of this mending. It is ‘Tikkum Olam: slowly, with great gentleness, with care and patience we begin to collect the fragments, to gather the light, gathering it into a new wholeness that it may shine even more brightly. We do not gather it for ourselves but for Sharon, John, Sean and all those who, in the fractured shadows and darkness, are seeking and mending and praying that our divided, tortured world may be healed. This is our prayer for unity: by letting the Spirit lead us back, not to a nameless ‘something’, but to that Carpenter of Nazareth who mended the world in the wood of his cross. It is our prayer that we may be that sacred space where together we recognise in each other the Face of Christ.
James Hanvey SJ