27.04.2020:
Dear Friends,
It’s more than a month since the nationwide lockdown
is clamped in order to prevent the spread of the deadly Covid-19 pandemic
through social distancing and other necessary hygienic practices remaining
indoors.
For us, the clergy, it is an unheard of experience to
keep our churches too closed since then, having no public worship, including
the Holy Week. Some of us had the live streaming of their liturgies through
social media for their faithful. Otherwise most of us seemed to be jobless!
Though hard to believe, heard that some of us even joined their peers to stay
together idling away their time in playing cards etc.!
In this context, thought of sharing with you something
I was rather impelled to share with you after reading some good books,
especially ‘The Drama of Atheist Humanism’ by Henri De Lubach, SJ, (Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company, NY, 1969) a book first
published decades ago, precisely in 1963(1950).
Let me start with a quote: ‘Let us make no mistake.
Covid-19 is forcing a paradigm shift. We are unlikely to return to a
pre-coronavirus homeostasis after the war against it is won. No section or
sector is going to remain untouched and unaltered by the devastation… (it) is
unleashing. The virus is going to stay around for a while. Its annihilation in
the near future in not on the cards…’ (The Hindu, ‘The occasion to revisit the sovereign’s role’ by Parakala
Prabhakar, on Tuesday, April 21, 2020 in the editorial page)
Let me also share with you some of my concerns, as one
among you with some 39 years in the ministry. I presume that we take many things
for granted, without ever worrying to know the worth or seriousness of what we
perform, even preach by exercising rather repeating rituals mechanically.
Though I was reflecting on this for long, the book in reference challenges me,
and I think every serious Christian, I would love to call a disciple, to ‘rediscover
it (Christianity) as it is in itself, in its purity and its authenticity.’
P.72
This particular section, am almost copying, is titled
‘The Spirit of Christianity’ in the chapter ‘The Spiritual Battle’ after
dealing with ‘Feuerbach and Nietzsche’ and ‘Nietzsche and Kierkegaard’ the most
vibrant and influential thinkers of their times. This would mostly a quote
after quote of relevant passages with my minimal introductory notes so
necessitated.
‘Nietzsche’s feelings with regard to Jesus always
remained mixed, and so did his judgments on Christianity. There are times when
he sees in it not so much of a false ideal as one that is worn out.
“It is our stricter and more finely tempered piety,” he says, in Zarathustra,
“that stops us from still being Christians today.” Thus his animosity is
against the Christians of our day, against us. The lash of his scorn is for our
mediocrities and our hypocrisies…’ p.68 He reminds us of the ‘robust and joyous
austerity of “primitive Christianity” and calls shame on our “present-day
Christianity” as “mawkish and nebulous”. Then he challenges us: “If they want
me to believe in their Saviour, they will… have to look more like men who have
been saved!” p.68 ‘Are our hearts the hearts of men risen with Christ?’
p.69
‘…the Christianity of today, your Christianity is the
enemy of Life, because it is itself no longer alive.’ P.69 Jacques Riviere
observed way back in 1907, “I can see that Christianity is dying…
People don’t know why our towns are still surmounted by those spires which are
no longer the prayers of any of us…” p.69 But Claudel’s answer, “Truth is not
concerned with how many people it convinces” doesn’t really hold water, because
‘if those who have remained faithful to truth have apparently no “virtue”, that
is to say no inward strength, does not that seem to justify the
surrender of the others?’ p.69 As for our worst enemies as well as men of good
will, ‘the tone, the intention and the underlying inspiration are different,
but… the judgments are… the same. Among the best of those… find themselves
caught between two conflicting sentiments:’ the Gospel and the Church.
‘But on the threshold they pause, repelled by the spectacle which we present –
we, the Christians of today, “the Church which we form”. They are moved to
think and “to say that what still remains of the Gospel ideal in the
world survives outside our camps”. P.69
‘…our Christianity has become insipid.
Despite so many grand endeavours to restore life and freshness into it, it is
humdrum, listless, sclerotic. It is lapsing into formalism and routine.
As we practice it… it is feeble, unavailing religion; a religion of ceremonies
and observances, of ornaments and trivial solaces – sometimes with no
sincerity, either. A religion outside life, or one through which we ourselves
lose touch with life. That is what we have made of the Gospel, of that immense
hope which had dawned upon the world! Is there any trace left of the breath of
that spirit which was to recreate all things and revolutionize the face of the
earth? ...Are not impatience of all criticism, incapacity for any reform, fear
of intelligence – are not these manifest signs? Clerical Christianity, formalist
Christianity, quenched and hardened Christianity… The great current of
Life, whose flow is never checked, seems to have deposited it some time ago,
high and dry upon the bank…” p.70
‘Insensibly the reproaches leveled against our
Christianity are transformed into a criticism of Christianity itself… There is
no point in shutting one’s eyes to the causes of this deep seated trouble. Stubbornness
in one’s own shortcomings is no more excusable than refusal to see the good in
one’s adversary. An attitude of that sort bears only a false
resemblance to intrepidity of faith. The faithful soul is always an open
soul. On the other hand, it would be no less fatal to lose any of our
confidence in the resources of our Christian heritage, and to go in search of a
remedy from outside. If we wish to regain a strong Christianity
(“galvanic Christianity”), our first care should be to save it from deviating –
as it now threatens to do – towards a “power” Christianity.
Otherwise the expected cure will be merely an aggravation of the disease.’ P.71
‘Christianity must be given back its strength in us,
which means, first and foremost, that we must rediscover it as it is in
itself, in its purity and its authenticity. …what is needed is not a
Christianity that is more virile, or more efficacious, or more heroic, or
stronger; it is that we should live our Christianity with more virility, more
efficacy, more strength, and, if necessary, more heroism – but we must live
as it is… It must come into its own again in our souls. We must give
our souls back to it.’ P.72
‘The question… is a spiritual one and the solution is
always the same: in so far as we have allowed it to be lost, we must rediscover
the spirit of Christianity. In order to do so we must be plunged
once more in its well-springs, and above all in the Gospel…
(It) is enough for us. Only, always new, it always needs to be rediscovered. The
best among those who criticize us are sometimes better able to appreciate it
than we are. They do not blame it for its supposed weakness: they blame us for
not making the most of its strength…’ p.72
‘Christianity, if we would go straight to the heart of
it, is the religion of love. “God is charity,” says the Apostle
John, “and whoso abideth in charity abideth in God and God in him.” Every
advance in awareness of our faith should increase our comprehension of this.
There must, of course, be no misconception of the conditions of that love and
of its natural foundations, especially of that justice without
which it is only a false love – that justice today is no less scoffed at than
love itself.’ P.72 ‘It is the absolute to which everything orders itself, in
relation to which everything should be judged.’ P.73
‘In the present state of the world Christianity must
become a heroic Christianity… It will consist, above all, in
resisting with courage, in face of the world and perhaps against one’s own
self, the lures and seductions of a false ideal, and in proudly maintaining, in
their paradoxical intransigence, the Christian values which are threatened and
derided… Gentleness and goodness, considerateness towards the lowly, pity for
those who suffer, rejection of perverse methods, protection of the oppressed,
unostentatious self-sacrifice, resistance to lies, the courage to call evil by
its proper name, love of justice, the spirit of peace and concord,
open-heartedness, mindfulness of Heaven; those are the things that Christian
heroism will rescue.’ P.73
Christians have not been promised that they will
always be in the majority. Rather the reverse. Nor that they will always seem
the strongest and that men will never be conquered by another ideal than
theirs. But, whatever happens, Christianity will never have any real efficacy,
it will never have any real existence or make any real conquests, except by the
strength of its own spirit, by the strength of charity. P.73
