If you ever visit Assisi, where St Francis once lived and worshipped, you may be shocked to fall foul of the ‘silence’ police. Turning to a friend to share the beauty of the art or architecture, you’re likely to be reprimanded by the roving Franciscan militia. This raises the question: Are churches sites of sacred mystery, or are they meeting places for believers to share companionship?

The balance of history

When St Paul wrote to the Christian Church in Corinth, he was writing to a group of probably around 40-50 who met in one of the larger houses. For Paul, these groups were ‘the Church’, and each member a temple of the Holy Spirit. As congregations grew and Christians were more tolerated in the Roman empire, a significant change gradually took place.

The sacredness of place

When great scholars and saints have lived and died in a place, a sense of sacredness grows there. As worshippers came to grasp the mysterious presence of God in such places, they began to talk less and listen more. Sacred art and architecture strove to focus this awareness. In the great medieval cathedrals the statues and stained glass windows tried to embody this sense of presence.

The contemporary scene

Many of us have become so conditioned to incessant noise that we panic if a cell phone or TV set is not at hand. That’s why we need places of reverence and mystery, places where we can sit in silence in the presence of God. True, we also need places to talk and share with other believers – but without a sense of what we’re seeking such chitchat could be futile.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

The original Mass

On the eve of his death, Jesus invited his closest followers to join him for a parting meal. It was a meal that looked both to the past and to the future.

It recalled the escape of the Jewish slaves from Egypt after they’d smeared the doors of their homes with the blood of a lamb they’d shared with their family  – food for their dangerous journey to freedom.

It was also a meal to prepare Jesus’ followers for the next day when Jesus himself would become the lamb, his body broken on a cross.

When Jesus then rose from the dead his followers tasted great freedom. They saw that death was not the end of Jesus’ life and mission – nor of theirs. They came to see that the refusal to retaliate, to take revenge, or to scapegoat also brought about deep inner freedom; it was sacrifice but also liberation.

At that last supper Jesus had invited others to share his life and mission by eating his body and drinking his blood in the form of bread and wine. And within a few years of his death, small Christian groups throughout Israel and Asia Minor were following his lead.

The Mass today   

The Mass that Catholics celebrate all over the world today is that same act of sharing and self-sacrifice that Jesus modelled for his disciples. The words and rituals have changed much over the centuries, but their significance has never wavered.

Through the priest and ministers the words of the Bible are proclaimed and explained, and those present give the assent of their hearts in word and music. In sharing in the bread of sacrifice and the cup of union Catholics join Jesus in moments of joy and intimacy that stand outside time.

They then go forth to proclaim Jesus’ values and relive his sacrifice in the world today.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

In his great novel, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad questions whether the darkness in the heart of the Congo in central Africa is any different from the darkness hovering over the London docks in the heart of England. Sin is, of course, a disease of the heart.

A world shaped by love

Every culture and civilization is shaped by love – or a lack of love. No matter how bizarre its expressions and demands, love sits at every table. Efforts to confine it to family, clan or nation, never fully succeed. Love permeates every niche of society; as Aristotle pointed out, even thieves love one another.

Sometimes giant myths, such as race, have been trumpeted at the highest levels. Scapegoats, such as the Jewish, are singled out to weld a people together in the loyalty and honour of the nation. Love of the genuinely ‘us’ is fanned by hatred of the utterly ‘other’.

The gift of gratitude

The desires of the human heart know no limits. Like the fabled princess in her gilded room, in her luxurious bed, just one pea can prevent all rest. On the other hand, one tiny gift, any source of gratitude, can be the spring welling up to become, in time, a great river.

What of those who have never been wanted or known love? Even there, an unprovoked act of kindness, a smile of recognition, a stunning sunrise, may break through the gloom. For the mercy and grace of God still glows at the heart of a darkened world.

At heart, sin is a refusal to love or be loved. It’s a determination never to offer thanks.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

The statistics

The chief coroner has just released the number of suicides in New Zealand for the first six months of 2017. At 606, marking three years of successive rises, they make grim reading. The dominant age group is 21-24 year olds and the largest ethnic group is Maori; at 130 Maori people represent more than a quarter of those who have taken their own lives.

The causes

Suicides arise out of many causes: loss of a loved one or job, sickness or psychological afflictions – often deep depression. It represents the failure of hope, and depicts a world that has shrunk into a black hole where personal misery has absorbed and obliterated all else. Financial and social ruin may be overwhelming but deep down there’s also spiritual collapse. Suicide states there is no one out there whose love shines bright enough to overcome my darkness.

The solutions

Some years back one of my students, who had been a senior public servant, wrote a doctoral thesis on whether Catholic social teaching had anything to offer government policy on areas such as poverty, housing and education. She concluded that government has good direction and aims, yet its efforts are too centralised. It’s too heavily reliant on bureaucratic control in Auckland and Wellington, while large numbers of volunteer groups, local communities and dedicated individuals languish for want of recognition and funding.

As Kiwis one of our engaging qualities is a hands-off attitude – we’re reserved and refrain from butting into other people’s private lives. But when suicide is a possibility we must learn to change. When depression, talk of death and withdrawal into solitude begin to show on someone’s face, we must stand up – by resort to counsellors, wider family and friends or caring neighbours.

Life is sacred, so warding off senseless death is a duty as well as a blessing.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

Our knowledge of self and others

If you’ve studied a little psychology you may be familiar with a handy tool called the Johari window. It uses a simple diagram to show how much we can know about ourselves and others. Where the lines described as ‘unknown to self’ and ‘unknown to others’ intersect lives the mysterious region of the totally unknown. Somewhere in my early childhood lies a dim sense of an episode where I felt deserted and alone. I don’t know its origins, nor do I think there’s anyone still living who can explain it for me. It dwells in the unknown.

Jesus and judgement

Jesus’ saying, “Judge not, that you be not judged”, is recorded in Mt 7.1 and Lk 6.37. These are the words of a great master of human behaviour and its subtlest motivations. Even he stood silent before the paradoxes of our unpredictability. Did he choose Judas to be an apostle knowing that he’d turn out to be the betrayer? I don’t think so.

The complexity of human behaviour

Many of our actions have a multitude of outcomes, some predictable, some not. Often there are elements of risk, a need to make a balanced guess, like letting a teenage son drive alone at night for the first time. Such uncertainty is truer when weighing up motivations. Which one of us is bold enough to say, “I always know fully and precisely what lies behind every one of my actions”? Why then do we feel so confident in judging the motives of others? In evaluating others don’t we often read our own worst failings in their deeds?

Judging the motives of others is quite different from evaluating their skills, abilities and the value of their inputs, which is something we may do well. In judging motives, are we not stepping into a flickering and changing landscape faintly shadow-lit? We may be astray in preferring to impute good motives to others but are we not then closer to Jesus who also said, “Be merciful as your Father is merciful” (Lk 6.36)?

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

Talking across the miles

As a young priest I learned a lesson about love from an elderly couple. He, a rural doctor holding clinics deep in the backblocks of Hawkes Bay, was often away from home weeks at a time. Before leaving, he’d hide tiny love-notes around the house and in his wife’s drawers where she would chance upon them. Though he was physically far away, his wife would have a sense of his presence.

The gap that death leaves

C. S. Lewis, the great Christian writer, married late in life. When his wife, Joy, died of cancer he wrote a work entitled, A Grief Observed. Her parting left a huge hole in his life. He’d once been a confirmed bachelor, but then Joy’s wit, dynamism and love of life filled his existence. He had no sense of how much she had become part of him till she had gone.

Jesus as an abiding presence

For devout Jews the temple in Jerusalem was the seat of God’s presence. The priests left loaves of bread – called the Loaves of Presence – in the inner sanctuary, presumably to recall and thank God for the manna which had served as food during their forty years of wandering in the desert (Cf Mk 2.26).

When the first Christians celebrated Jesus’ death it was originally thought that it was being a powerful witness to his death which had set them free. But as the memory of Jesus faded and those who knew him in the flesh died, a change gradually occurred. The consecrated bread and wine began to be kept for those who were sick or absent. More and more this abiding testimony of his love was seen as a gift for the Church, revered and cherished.

From this arose the devotion to the real presence of Jesus in the consecrated bread and wine in the Catholic tradition. There, believers – and seekers – can come to pour out their hearts’ needs or to sit silently with the one who knows and loves them best. They can be present with the Divine Presence.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

Promises of change

Every day recently we’ve been hearing rousing promises from political parties. They’ve created blueprints and are preparing to throw massive sums of money at providing better roads and transport, clearing the streets of young hooligans and building homes for the homeless. You don’t have to be overly cynical to ask why these solutions are popping up just before our general election.

Jesus as a social radical

Key elements of Jesus’ teaching, such as the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5.5-7.27) and Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, show Jesus plunging into the depths of issues similar to those we now face. In Lk 6.27-38 he puts forward a blueprint for a new society. He proposes a society built on learning to love our enemies and giving to all who ask our aid – imitating the extravagant generosity of God who has forgiven us so much. If we did live in this way, nations would abide in peace with one another, families would fight to stay united – our world would be a different place.

Sadly such personal transformation seems a bridge too far for those who have never known love or have rejected it.

The good news

The extraordinary reality is that Jesus Christ did model his entire life on the extravagant generosity of God. Humanly speaking it seems impossible for those men and women whose life-roots are scarred and twisted even to hear, let alone embrace, that challenge. Yet many have. That’s because grace, pure unearned, gratuitous love can still transform such battered lives.

Our challenge

In one way we’re responsible for nobody’s life and salvation except our own. Yet in another way, reaching out to forgive and offer new starts, as Jesus did, can still shift entire life directions in ways that we could not dare to hope for.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

The lure of blood

What makes a series of novels, The Twilight Saga, based on the love of a teenage girl for a 104-year-old vampire, sell more than 120 million copies all over the globe? Is it because of its obsession with blood? Blood shapes human history and fuels human passions; it has been a fascinating and powerful symbol since the early Christian writings and beyond.

This is he who comes by water and blood (1 Jn 5.6)

Attempts to portray Jesus as a gentle, unjudging, liberal Jew will always fall short. The Letter to the Hebrews, written probably around thirty years after the death of Jesus, is in one way the bloodiest of all early Christian writings. The word blood occurs twenty times. It depicts Jesus as the culmination of the Jewish priesthood and all the bloody sacrifices that marked Jewish faith. Now he is the priest, the victim and the new temple, replacing the former temple and the sacrifices that took place in it. He has taken humankind with all its violence into the presence of God. There his scarred body proclaims that God no longer wants human blood spilt in his name. Jesus’ blood poured out on the cross is humanity’s ultimate peace-offering.

The meaning of blood

Blood is deep red because it carries iron in the form of haemoglobin. This extraordinary protein delivers the oxygen that provides us with energy and passion; it’s the bearer of life, carrying seventy times the amount of oxygen as a similar quantity of water.

When Christ said, This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood, (Lk 22.20) he was presenting his blood, the current of his life and energy, to flow through and rewrite human history till it comes to an end. This is why the symbol of blood is so central and critical in the Catholic Eucharistic that is the Mass.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

Feeling at one in a foreign place

Once when I was on study leave I ended up on the altar of the university parish in Cologne. I spoke not one word of German but the familiar ritual of the Mass made me one with all in that church. This is one of the marks of Eucharist (the celebration of Holy Communion) – it stretches out in space and time to encompass and swallow up such sense of separation.

Living in a fragmented world

Through technology we can contact loved ones in different parts of the globe and diverse time-zones. Skype, Viber, and Facebook make them present in virtual image. But often that is not enough; to touch, to engage eye to eye feels critical especially in times of great joy or loss. When so many of us live in families scattered over many continents, or divided by death or divorce, that need is even sharper.

The Eucharistic family

As a priest when I celebrate Mass I sometimes have a sense of my dead parents, and my Irish and Polish grandparents, being present in spirit. Stretching behind them is a line of ancestors reaching back into the shadows of history – now my history. Sometimes standing beside me are hordes of saints, mystics and everyday strugglers in faith who have celebrated this same mystery – Christ’s life and death enfolding us all once again. Sensing this, what can we do but reach out and extend welcome to all who are present – regardless of age, wealth or culture, and regardless of their sins and struggles.

Unity for a divided world   

Eucharist is celebrated with love and understanding in a world torn by sectarian hatred and divisions. It’s a prophetic sign that a new way of living is possible.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

A change in meal etiquette

I remember the first time I felt anger towards social media. Our small community of priests hosted a woman and her 16-year-old daughter for our evening meal. The daughter ignored us throughout, constantly texting on her phone. I wasn’t sure who I was angrier with – her or her mother. To me, it was an eye-opener as to how rapidly meal etiquette is changing.

Meals as a mark of belonging

In 2000 Robert Putnam produced a remarkable study of social patterns in the USA. Using public records spanning fifty years he illustrated how voluntary groups such as sports clubs, service organisations and churches had declined. He examined a variety of social and economic factors but finally concluded that the leading cause was…television. Why? Because of its passive and low-energy nature and the fact that many family members could watch their favourite programmes in their own rooms.

Families sitting together at the dining table has become one of the victims of this trend. Rushed meals, stand-up meals, and eating in front of a screen are now the norm in many households.

Sunday worship as a meal is now declining

Inevitably churches have also been impacted by this trend. It’s one of the reasons that fewer people attend Sunday services. It also erodes the very meaning of the gathering itself. In the Catholic tradition Sunday eucharist is very much a shared meal. The values of community, common worship, hospitality and social outreach were built around and reinforced in the re-presentation of the last meal that Jesus shared with his disciples. This symbolism becomes more and more eroded as younger generations drop out. They find the services boring; it’s not where their friends are, and there’s great fear of being seen as different.

The challenge of eating together

Sunday eucharist can be a counter-cultural sign in our increasingly fragmented societies. It still remains one place where food, celebration and openness to all who enter can shine forth as a sign of hope in a common human belonging.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

Reading the statistics

A recent survey commissioned by the New Zealand Book Council revealed that 400,000 adults didn’t read a book in 2016. This is a disturbing fact, especially given that reading as a child is an indicator of longer life and higher achievements (about 65% of our prison population lacks basic reading skills). More worryingly, is this statistic the waving of a flag signalling emotional and spiritual impoverishment?

How books open doors to other worlds

The Harry Potter mania that we recently witnessed underlined a deep need for children – and many much older children too. It’s the wonder of passing into the world of imagination, of the fantastical, of new ways of seeing the age-old struggle between good and evil.

We’re now living in a more visual and electronic world – and our reading, among other things, is suffering because of it. Viewers increasingly absorb news from screens and phones. The long-term consequences of this pattern are laid bare in Sherry Turkle’s book Reclaiming conversation: the power of talk in a digital age (2015). She argues that texts, tweets, emails and Facebook posts are replacing face-to-face conversations. They are eating away at our attention span and diminishing our capacity for empathy.

After years of extensive interviews with teenagers, workers and bosses Turkle sums it all up, “We turn to our phones instead of to each other” – in friendships, families, in romantic relationships and at work.

What is education?

Many of my friends are teachers, and all feel the pressure of parents demanding that their offspring get the best opportunity to pursue jobs with high incomes. With constant exposure to e-books, tablets and interactive teaching tools, aren’t we eroding the ability of our children to be alone? For it’s in such solitude that critique and wider reflection can grow.

In doing all we can to prepare young people for a technological world are we undermining our capacity to prevent it from enslaving us? Are we poisoning our spiritual wells?

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

To find out more about the teachings of the Catholic Church and other issues, order your free set of ten ‘What Catholics Believe’ booklets

A familiar scene

In 2013 I spent four months’ sabbatical in Chicago. Walking around the college where I lived I was stunned by the number of homeless haunting the streets. Now, walking the main streets of our big cities, I have alarming moments of déjà vu – I’ve seen this all before.

Homelessness in New Zealand

The government tells us that our economy is booming, that lack of housing is just a transient problem arising from unexpected growth. The 2013 census, however, told us that one in every hundred was homeless, often sheltering with family or friends, urgently seeking a place of their own. But homeless is not just, or even primarily, an economic issue – it’s a spiritual affliction.

A Christian perspective

One of Jesus’ central teachings was that he had come to replace the Jewish temple. His risen presence would abide in believers and communities; he’d make his home with them. This would be a home marked by justice, open to hospitality, and alive with a sense of community, stability and hope.

What the research suggests

This year a brilliant study was published – Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst, by Robert Sapolsky. As a biologist, Sapolsky explains how every ethical decision touches every human level – from the brain, hormones and genes, to upbringing and culture. The most recent trend has been to stress how genes shape upbringing and culture. Sapolsky shows at great depth how upbringing and culture significantly shape the action of brains and genes.

He is adamant that in our first five years our environment – very much the home – has a huge impact on the way we deal with anger and aggression. Though there are always exceptions, the emotional and spiritual effects of living in squalid surroundings, or with no permanent home, are very predictable. They include a sense of lovelessness, of worthlessness, and of low self-image and expectations. Those who emerge from such upbringings often believe that life is unjust; that’s what they expect and that’s what they dole out to others.

This explains why homelessness is far more than an economic problem; it’s a spiritual affliction.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

To find out more about the teachings of the Catholic Church and other issues, order your free set of ten ‘What Catholics Believe’ booklets

Signs of the Spirit

Those of us who live in Wellington are very familiar with the power of the nor’westerly wind. It rips through intersections, howls under the eaves of houses, and picks up trampolines, bowling them end-over-end like discarded newspapers. And then, when the wind subsides, the sun emerges, bathing us in warmth and light. Are these signs? From the earliest Christian tradition wind and sun have been images of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus and the Spirit

After he had shared his final meal with his disciples, Jesus assured them that despite his death, he would not leave them alone. In a series of sayings in Jn 14.15-16.15 Jesus outlines what the Spirit will do and be for them. He tells them the Spirit will be the living presence of himself among them – speaking for them, teaching them truth, steeping them inwardly with peace (15.26), helping them to judge aright (16.7-10), and proclaiming Jesus as the Christ (16.12-15).

The Church and the Spirit

Reflecting on these and other texts, the Church has elaborated on the gifts Jesus spoke of. To our minds the Spirit brings understanding, wisdom, eloquence, prophecy and discernment. On our will and emotions it bestows courage, leadership and perseverance. Yet this is no glorification of individualism. Repeatedly in the Acts of the Apostles when the Church prays and reflects on what God asks of it (for instance, what Jewish law it should lay upon gentile converts), it is with the assurance of the Spirit, the spirit of unity, that the Church pronounces its decisions. (cf Acts 15.28)

At times, like when the Church becomes complacent or hypocritical, prophetic voices need to be raised to challenge it. When such critique springs from the Spirit, its goal is to purify, inspire and sanctify; it’s never marked by self-assertion, arrogance or the desire to dominate. The Spirit may be wind and fire but it comes to reshape and remould, never to wreak havoc.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

Jesus and baptism: a paradox

Jesus’s own baptism by his cousin John in the river Jordan was a turning point in his life. The skies literally opened (Matt 3.13-17) – despite John’s protest that he was the one who needed to be baptised, not Jesus. At the end of Matthew’s gospel, when Jesus proclaims his continuing mission, he gives his followers the task of going out to baptise all nations (Mt 28.19). In the story of the early Church, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, baptism is mentioned frequently – about twenty times. Yet we hear that Jesus himself never performed baptism, only his disciples. (Jn 4.2) Why is this so?

The meaning of baptism

Among observant Jews, rituals of cleansing and washings were very common. John the Baptist insisted that the ritual go far deeper. He demanded it be accompanied by giving up injustice and exploitation, even for soldiers. (Lk 3.10-14) For the first Christians baptism had an even deeper significance. It was a cleansing from sin, but even more, it meant being part of Jesus’s own dying, so as to be part of his resurrection (Col 2.12). Or as Paul explains, baptism is putting on Christ (Gal 3.27) – that is, being reshaped and transformed by Jesus’s values, vision and relationship with God.

A gift of life

Water has always been a precious resort, especially in arid countries such as Palestine. Our planet, nonetheless, could be called Ocean rather than Earth, as water covers 70% of its surface. Water also makes up 60% of our body weight. It is the gift of which we take little notice but without it we die. The Christian sense of baptism echoes this; it brings us vitality, life and energy; it is Christ; it is life; without it we become the living dead. It is Jesus’s way of reaching out to us.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

A seeming paradox

Recent phone polls asking New Zealanders if they favour legalised euthanasia found about 70% in favour and 30% opposed. Interestingly, these figures are an exact reversal of the more than 20,000 personal submissions to a parliamentary sub-committee last year where 70% opposed any change to the legislation.

The reason for this seemingly odd result is, I’m sure, as follows. Those who made personal submissions were mostly people who had been personally involved with euthanasia: doctors, health workers, and the handicapped, as well as those who had studied the impact of similar laws in Holland, Belgium and Oregon.

Many of the poll respondents, on the other hand, are likely to have reacted to the dramatic cases of those seeking legal deaths as covered by local media, in newspaper and television.

The pull of the heart strings

It’s normal and natural to be deeply moved by the sufferings of the terminally ill or profoundly disabled. We resonate with their desire to be freed of burdensome and pain-filled days. Visual and print media excel in depicting their sad stories. What the media never shows, however, are the dramatic effects upon societies where such laws have been in force for some years.

The effects of legalised euthanasia

Statistics show that in Oregon assisted suicides have risen nearly eight times and one in every six people allowed physician-assisted suicide was suffering from an undiagnosed and untreated depression. In Holland euthanasia now accounts for one death in every 26 – and the Dutch legislation is much more stringent than what’s proposed in the David Seymour bill.

The fact is there are virtually no medically verifiable tests to protect patients and doctors from moving towards a death-on-demand scenario.

It may look like compassion but euthanasia is an open agenda for much needless and hard-hearted putting down of the helpless.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

Next Steps

To find out more about the teachings of the Catholic Church and other issues, order your free set of ten ‘What Catholics Believe’ booklets

We live in a symbol-laden world

Driving to work I cross an intersection with a stop sign in each lane. I see friendly waves and indignant one-finger gestures as drivers negotiate the tricky crossing. What a weight of meaning  –  anger, thanks, contempt or respect  –  such nearly identical gestures can convey.

The significance of symbols

Our use of symbols distinguishes us from other animals. Alphabets, traffic signs, wedding rings – each is a product of thousands of years of reaching out, mind to mind, heart to heart, in increasingly complex societies. Many people have felt the power of God in certain signs. Statues of the Buddha, the cross, and even the Declaration of independence are layered with multiple levels of religious associations.

Divinely crafted symbols

Many folk of some or no formal religion believe God has spoken to them in signs, either in personal events or in the wonders of nature. Many Christians see the life of Christ as full of dramatic signs: words of power and transformation, sacred rituals such as baptism or the last supper before his death. Jesus himself prophesied that some of these signs – being washed in the waters of baptism, or eating the bread that enshrined his presence – would continue to embody not just his memory, but also his inner reality. These are what Catholics know as sacraments – sacred signs that recall, empower and embody the divine in our lives.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

Us and them

In recent days we celebrated the 350^th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. While studying in Rome I visited the Church in Geneva where John Calvin had preached. Its stark bareness reminded me of a gymnasium. A small altar was parked on one side of the stage; a preaching rostrum dominated the front centre. Standing there, I had a sharp sense of the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism and wondered if it could ever be bridged.

A vision of wholeness

Most scripture scholars agree that Jesus’ central message was to proclaim the coming of the Kingdom of God (Mk 1.15, Lk 4.43). This wasn’t to be a brutal reign built on violence and the threat of violence. Instead, it would show itself in communities of justice, love and peace where to lead would be to serve.

The Catholic Church sees itself as the first fruits of that kingdom, still just a growing plant, at times almost smothered, but having nourished many peoples. It views other Christian Churches as offshoots with their own fruits and gifts, but detached from the mother plant and in danger of losing energy and becoming sterile.

Can Christian Churches ever reunite to become one blooming tree, heavy with new fruit, once again? Given a history of mutual distrust and sometime persecution that seems a futile dream.

Every now and then, however, there are encouraging doctrinal breakthroughs, such as the agreement on the nature of justification between the Catholic and Lutheran Churches. And often it’s in working side by side in common prayer or protection of the poor and vulnerable that all Christians detect deep roots of mutual belonging and respect – and the dream of unity seems much more than a mirage.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

Symbols of hope

Some years ago I visited the new cathedral in downtown Los Angeles. I was struck by the multi-coloured woven banners, each about five metres high, decorating both side walls and depicting saints of all the Americas, north, south and centra

l. As well as bishops and nuns, there were married and single lay people, of every age and nationality. These are the images I recall when I encounter the anger and scepticism of those who question the holiness and integrity of the Catholic Church.

A crisis of credibility

The Church has been confronted and rocked by revelations of sexual abuse, especially of children, and financial scandals, even in the Vatican. To say that such behaviour is equally as prevalent in other professions (e.g. among doctors an

d counsellors) is no defence; the offenders had professed sacrifice and selfless service and had instead serviced their own distorted needs.

There’s no alternative for Catholic leadership but to openly acknowledge such failure and to work for structures of training and supervision that will do all possible to eliminate such calamitous scandals.

Redressing the balance

At such a time it’s imperative to balance these failures against the record of the ‘ordinary saints’ of the Church. It’s easy to extol extraordinary men and women such as Pope Francis or Mother Teresa. But it’s also crucial to remember the many thousands of Catholic teachers, health workers and defenders of the poor, often living in the most dangerous of places, like the seven Cistercian martyrs of Algeria who were slaughtered in 1996.

God calls ordinary people to work in his service. Some fail, as Judas did. Yet it’s the ordinary saints who, as priests, sisters, teachers and social workers, bring life, support and the vision of a fuller existence all over the world.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

A treasure trove of thoughts

There’s a standard joke among those committed to justice in society that Catholic Social Teaching (CST) is the Church’s best kept secret. It’s a vision derived from biblical texts on the creation of humans and God’s covenants with the Jewish patriarchs Noah, Moses and David, up to Jesus’ parables about Dives and Lazarus (Lk. 16.19-31) and the rich man and his barns (Lk 12.16-21). This vision has been developed over the centuries, right up to the recent pastoral letter of Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, on the environment.

What does this treasure include?

CST covers an eye-opening range of topics: human dignity and development; freedom, rights and reciprocal responsibility; the family as the basis of society; social justice and equality; as well as respect for cultural autonomy and diversity. Then there’s a whole series of topics on the principles of political economy, such as economic justice; the universal destination of goods; dignity of work, fair wages and workers’ rights; subsidiarity and the role of government; participation in civil and political processes; and global development and peace.

The Church’s right to speak out

Modern critics sometimes question the Church’s right and competency to speak out on political and economic issues. Yet these are precisely the areas where the stability and dignity of families and workers are deeply rooted. Such claims have a long and noble history. As early as the start of the 5^th century, St Augustine tackled care for the poor, fighting hunger and making peace for the people of his city, Hippo, in the north of Africa. In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas developed teaching on property ownership, church/state relations and the role of government. This tradition was carried on in the University of Salamanca where teachers like di Vitoria and Francisco Suarez publicly debated current issues such as slavery of the Indians, usury and even inflation.

From Leo XIII’s letter Rerum Novarum in 1881, dealing with the evil effects of the Industrial Revolution, modern popes have battled to defend the poor and marginalised. How current and how necessary such messages remain today resonates from these words of John Pope II in his World Day of Peace message in 1990:

It is manifestly unjust that a privileged few should continue to accumulate excess goods, squandering valuable resources while masses of people are living in conditions of misery at the very lowest levels of subsistence. Today, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness – both individual and collective – are contrary to the order of creation, an order which is characterised by mutual interdependence.” (8)

Sometimes it is only the Church that has the courage and possibility to utter such truths.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

To find out more about the teachings of the Catholic Church and other issues, order your free set of ten ‘What Catholics Believe’ booklets

The power of story telling

Like all good teachers Jesus hardly ever answered a question directly. He either replied with a counter question or told a story, or parable. He never imposed truth on anyone; he let it seep up slowly, even hesitantly, from the gut.

Parables as paradox

Jesus’ heroes were never conventional heroes. Lazarus, the shiftless beggar, got an entrance ticket to heaven apparently for doing nothing, just being poor. (Lk 16.19-31) The good Samaritan, who put himself into danger by helping the beaten traveller on the road, was a despised foreigner. (Lk 10.25-27)

On the other hand, those with apparent business acumen and dazzling CVs, like the rich merchant (Lk 12.16-21), died unexpected deaths, and Dives stood before judgment and hell. The rich merchant had farmed so successfully that he needed to build more barns, while Dives had laid on sumptuous feasts for his friends and didn’t even notice Lazarus at the gate. That seems the extent of their crimes.

Finding meaning in the message

Even in the stories where there seem to be clear winners, a further search poses deeper questions. The merchant who sold everything to gain the pearl of great price (Mt 13.45-46) – was he going to sit around all day looking at it? As for the story of the prodigal son, who is to be commended? The father who foolishly doted on his erratic boy? The younger son, whose motives for returning home were dubious? Or the older son, whose loyalty and hard work may have been just a waiting game, waiting for his father’s death? (Lk 11.15-32)

These stories are like pools in a slow flowing stream. They gleam attractively, but once we jump in we find them much deeper than we guessed and full of unseen hazards. They stop us in our tracks, making us ask questions such as, how real is my virtue? Do I really love and serve others or do my own needs subtly shape my relationships?

If we persist in reflecting on these stories, we’ll find that we stop interpreting them and they begin interpreting us.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

The disbelief

One of the objections devout Muslims have with Christianity is that the All Holy and All Powerful One could die as a man. Others, who lean towards conspiracy theories, believe that Jesus’s disciples rescued him from the cross, then hid him, while spreading abroad the story that he had risen. They, like many non-Christians, refuse to believe in the resurrection.

The inevitability of death

Roman soldiers were veterans at despatching the crucified. They’d done it hundreds of times. Part of the barbarism was to allow bystanders to see the cost of rebellion, even to death, which they ensured with a final deadly lance thrust into the heart. (Jn 19.34) In medical terms, the process involved weakness from severe blood loss, gradual asphyxiation (as tortured lungs no longer draw air), and finally heart failure.

Christ’s body was then anointed, wrapped in a winding sheet, and placed in a tomb sealed with a massive rock. (Lk 23.52-3) Guards were posted to deter tomb robbers. (Mt 27.62-6) This helps us to understand why Jesus’ disciples were so sceptical when the women came to report to them that his body had disappeared. (Lk 24.11)

To die is to be human

The Catholic belief is that Jesus, though divine, was also totally human. Part of being human is to know the inevitability of death, to know that we all have to pass into that dark night. Jesus also accepted that to be totally one of us he had to walk the same road, leaving all else behind, while looking on the apparent loss of hope and desertion of his followers.

It’s this darkness and sense of the loss of everything that makes the Christian story of resurrection so stunning, even shocking. Given such a paradox, what is impossible, humanly speaking?

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

Good and bad cop

Tele-evangelists have given the Holy Spirit a bad name. Often while invoking the power of the Spirit they also evoked a spirit of intolerance and fundamentalism. This is so contrary to the writings of early church saints like Basil and Ephrem who spoke with such eloquence of the role of the Spirit.

The gift of the Spirit

The book of Acts describes an interesting incident in the early church. The deacon Philip had made some converts in Samaria. Hearing this, the leading apostles, Peter and John, travelled down from Jerusalem to give him support. Discovering that the converts had received only the baptism of Jesus they prayed that the converts would also experience the gift of the Spirit. (Acts 9.1-17)

Being baptised in Christ makes one a member of the Christian family with all the privileges that brings: freedom, grace and forgiveness. But when Christ departed his friends he promised he’d leave them the gift of his own inner being, who is the Spirit. (Jn 15.26-16.21)

As a result, they’d never be alone. He would fill them with his Spirit of love; they would enjoy a deep intuitive understanding of the truth. Till he returned, they would be filled with courage when speaking of him and could be utterly assured of seeing him once more.

The Spirit does bestow power – but not a power to dominate and coerce. Rather it’s a power deep within that gently but irresistibly transforms men and woman into the image of God.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

Was Paul the founder of Christianity?

It’s a clever claim, but superficial. It’s a little bit like saying that Shakespeare invented the English language. Shakespeare crafted our language in many ways that will never be surpassed, but what he inherited was already exceedingly rich.

What part did Paul play?

Paul was an ardent and intelligent speaker, and a great preacher. He did much to set up and organise churches throughout Asia Minor. He also created key Christian teachings on the nature of redemption and baptism.

First and foremost, though, Paul saw himself as the servant of Jesus Christ. He regarded himself as the last of the apostles, called personally by Jesus. His role was to proclaim Jesus as the Christ to non-Jews, just as Peter did to Jews. Each was responsible for the same good news.

Paul’s focus was the person of Jesus, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” (1 Cor 2.2) It was Christ who shaped his inner vision, “It is no longer I that live but it is Christ who lives in me.” (Gal 2.20) And Jesus was to be his ultimate reward, “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him.” (Phil 3.8) That desire was fulfilled when Paul was beheaded in Rome in A.D. 67.

Paul was a bright and shining light, a lens that focused and projected a brilliant picture of Jesus Christ that still shines in our time. He was a peerless proponent of Christianity but never, in his wildest dreams, its founder.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

What divides us?

I gnash my teeth whenever I hear the comment, She’s not a Christian, she’s a Catholic. When I recall the millions of catholic and reformed who have poured out their lives in service of the sick, the blind, the poor, the ignorant, out of love of Jesus Christ, I lament. We share so much, so deeply. Is it truly Bible v. Tradition that divides us?

Tradition v. Scripture

So many of the saints of the early Church wrote commentaries and preached on texts from the Bible. For the first nine Christian centuries, illuminating bible commentaries and depicting events of Jesus’ life in stained glass was a way of life for many monks. Over time many traditional understandings of these mysteries became enshrined in traditional formulas that became Tradition. However, as the Second Vatican Council insisted, such Tradition must always be open to review, challenge and purification in the light of the scriptures.

In my work as a university chaplain and theology lecturer I came to know and worked beside many non-Catholic pastors. All based their faith deeply on the Bible. But I also noticed that each denomination had prayers, disciplines and shared insights that were strong traditions and gave them a deep sense of identity.

Scripture and tradition are not exclusive; they explain, make concrete and reinforce one another. It is true that Catholics tend to lean more heavily on tradition than many other faith systems. But both Catholic and other denominations live out of faith in Jesus Christ who is their way, their truth and their life.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

The Left Behind series

From 1995-2007 Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins published sixteen novels collectively titled Left Behind. They sold over forty million copies. They depict a time between the Rapture (a sudden taking up into heaven of dedicated Jesus followers) and the final battle on earth between the forces of God and the anti-Christ. The authors believe that these events are predicted in the Book of Revelation (often called the Apocalypse). Is this what the Bible says?

The Book of Revelation

Most scholars agree that Revelation was written by a Christian called John during exile on the island of Patmos between 90-100 A. D. We know of about twenty works written in a similar style from 200 BC – 200AD. None of these were accepted by the Church in the Christian Bible; being full of mysterious symbols and hidden meanings they were notoriously open to multiple understandings.

Chapters 1-3 of Revelation are open letters to seven church communities in Asia Minor enduring heavy persecution during the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian (81-96). The letters exhort them to repent and remain faithful till Christ’s final victory.

The author uses a huge number of references to the Hebrew Bible (278 in just 404 verses) to explain the suffering of the churches. The risen Jesus (not Satan) is the dominant character; John uses 33 titles such as lamb, Alpha and Omega (‘first and last’) in predicting his ultimate victory. As he says, “Behold, I am making all things new” (21.5) The famous beasts in the work (encoded as 666) are without doubt the Emperor and his cult which was enforced with utter brutality throughout the empire.

The scenario offered in the Left Behind novels has its origin in an interpretation of history put forward by John Darby (1800-82) one of the founders of the Plymouth Brethren. This is built upon by the idea of the rapture derived from a mistranslation of a phrase of one of the letters of Paul (1 Thess4.16-17).

What the seer John is depicting is the triumph of Jesus over the Roman Empire, not an imaginative totally subjective understanding of our contemporary world.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

The power of Images

Television creates new truths by piling image upon image. One of the central claims of the New Atheism is that many of today’s global problems, especially the violent conflicts throughout the world, are the poisonous fruit of religion. As one commentator remarks, however, ‘The first time you push out a falsehood, people say, that’s a lie; when you repeat it a thousand times, they begin to say, there must be some truth in it.”

Religion and War

According to the Encyclopedia of Wars, of the 1763 major conflicts in recorded history only 123 (just over 7%) are considered to be over religious differences. A BBC survey found that religion played some part in 40% of conflicts, but usually a minor one.

What creates the widespread sense of religious conflict wracking our world? Partly it is because Mosul and Aleppo are in our living rooms at the flick of a switch – and groups Like ISIS are so skilled in their use of social media. The majority of religious people who pray and work for tolerance, justice and peace have no such coverage.

Of course truth is never simple. It is only in the last five centuries, and largely in the West, that state and church, politics and religion, have been considered separate realities. For most of human history, religious beliefs have been used to shore up dubious politics. Great religious leaders such as Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, have been men of peace; sadly, not all their all followers have followed the same path.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

The Jesus of history

For many people Jesus! or Christ! are just exclamations. Yet Jesus Christ has shifted the history of our planet as no other man ever has. He emerged from the riverbed of human history and changed its flow forever. He is not a philosophy, an ideal or myth; those who lived with him are adamant that he walked, ate, died and rose at their side.

The Jesus of mystery

Yet at the heart of this story is an irresolvable paradox. His first followers were blown away by the shocking manner of his death; crucifixion was designed to be the most degrading and disgusting of punishments. They found comfort in the belief that God had allowed, even chosen, this outcome as they reflected on the words of the prophet Isaiah, “he was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity.” (Is 53.3)

These same men, nevertheless, recorded Jesus’ extraordinary claims of his relationship with God. Not only did he call God my Father, but he claimed to come from him, to speak in his name, and would send God’s inner Spirit down on them when he had returned to the Father. (Jn 16.21,26; 17.25-27)

You can believe he was delusional, a schizophrenic, or that his disciples cobbled together this unbelievable paradox. Yet he still strides through history, to this day as a figure who cannot be ignored except at the price of human diminishment and impoverishment.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

What is a miracle?

Words are such plastic and slippery things. How common it is to hear comments like, It was a miracle she wasn’t hit by that bus. What is meant is that it was fortunate that the driver was so skilful in swerving so quickly. Strictly speaking, a miracle is an event that cannot be explained by any rule of nature. It runs contrary to every known human and cosmic process.

Did Jesus work miracles?

It is easy to claim that many of Jesus’ ‘miracles’ can now be explained by our modern understanding of the human psyche or by forms of literary exaggeration common to his times. Yet there are so many accounts of the blind seeing and the lame walking again.

Even more striking are the stories of the return to life of the widow of Nain’s son (Lk 7.11-17) and Lazarus, four days in the tomb and already stinking (Jn 11.1-44). That widow and those two sisters, Mary and Martha, had no illusions about death and its finality. None of these events were side-show events staged to boost Jesus’ pulling power. Each was born out of compassion for the frail human condition.

Are there such parallels today? Can we find modern miracles? Close to home, Mary McKillop, the Australian woman who founded the sisters of St Joseph, was declared a saint in 2010. Two miracles were credited to her prayer: a woman dying of leukaemia and another with inoperable lung cancer and secondaries in the brain were fully and permanently cured – all certified by rigorous medical examinations. Here in New Zealand I know of two similar cases. Miracles do happen – rare, inexplicable but historical facts.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

Images of bullying

In recent years our televisions have inflicted some disturbing images on us –graphic footage of girls and boys lying on the ground being kicked and punched, victims of teenage bullying. The Bible sometimes speaks of Jesus as a victim, “bearing our burdens”. This can arouse ominous echoes in those who have been victims of family violence or bullying.

Jesus as a scapegoat

We learn to love from our family. We’re introduced to love as babies – we’re held, cuddled, patted and soothed when pain troubles our small bodies. Sadly, love is rationed out in many families; because of parental fatigue or sibling jealousy there is rarely enough to go around.

A brilliant Catholic anthropologist, Rene Girard, was stunned to discover that common to every culture he studied was the idea of using sacrifice to placate the gods. This practice demanded scapegoats, and the scapegoats were often the misfits, the family oddballs.

Nearly every family and group, often unconsciously, elects someone to blame for their lack of unity. Heaping hurt on their victim recreates their failing bonds, or so they feel. This is how scapegoats are born.

Jesus knew this well. As his own time drew near he saw that he would be the victim of the need to protect priestly power. By refusing to retaliate, and teaching his followers to do the same, he broke the cycle of violence and counter-violence. By rising from the dead he freed his followers from the need to seek revenge.

Catholics believe that the season of Lent is a time for curbing their indulgences – often in food or alcohol. But perhaps it would be more constructive for all of us to see now as the time to renounce scapegoating, to stop finding others to blame for our lack of loving.

We should use the time to embrace the battered and bruised Jesus, not in passive acceptance of suffering but as a way through and beyond it.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

A mind-boggling conference

Mid 2013 saw a remarkable international conference in New York. To give you a taste of its themes, some of the workshop names included: Brain-computer interfaces, Cybernetic immortality, Meta-intelligence and Neurotransplantation. And the by-lines of two well-known speakers were: “Immortal minds are a matter of time” (Dr Marvin Minsky), and “Immortality by 2045” (Ray Kurzweil).

The Transhumanist movement

Most of the leaders of the Transhumanist movement come from the world of computing, robotics and neurosurgery. Born in California in the 1990s, the movement includes many who see our human future as limited, overtaken by climate change and redundancy at the hands of super-intelligent computers. They believe we’ll find immortality in a marriage of man and machine.

Common to movements like this one is a huge belief in the power of technology and the human brain. Underlying this lurk threads of pride and arrogance. A sober acknowledgment of the power of volcanoes, earthquakes and disasters, such as huge rises in sea levels, help us to acknowledge that we humans may be only tenants and wayfarers on this planet.

The Transhumanists’ dreams also ignore the tension points of our earth: dwindling populations in rich nations and burgeoning young populations in lands plagued by famine and drought. Access to such technology will increasingly be the privilege of the rich and powerful. How will they fill their fullness of years? What will become of the idealism and social conscience of the young and rising generation? Will there even be such a generation?

A right to die?

‘Right to die’ is a slogan used by those who favour euthanasia and those who believe that life has outlived its utility as the result of sickness or incompetency. I do not hold with that. Yet I do believe that death is part of nature; it shapes and focuses human lives; it’s the source of enormous love and service as well as sadness and grief.

When St Paul predicted, “death, thou shall die”, he was referring to death being conquered by Christ to usher in a totally new type of life, not to soulless machines infinitely dishing up more of the same.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

A response to an inner music

Ancient philosophers believed that as the sun, moon and planets travelled through space, each created a distinct melody – the music of the spheres. Though human ears could not hear it, the music shaped what happened on earth.

Christians believe that the Spirit of God fills the universe with a song that touches all creatures beyond their understanding. Our instinctive response is prayer. The welling up of wonder at the beauty of the Starry Way, the lifting of the heart at the sight of a mother carrying her newborn, the plea for an old friend facing death – prayer comes in many forms.

Playing in the orchestra

Even child prodigies need to learn to play the piano. So too do we need to learn to pray. Parents are often our first teachers, followed by school or church. Prayer draws us outwards, from learning to see our own needs, to seeing the needs of others.

We find numerous examples of prayer in ancient formulas, liturgies and books. Prayer is an art, and like any art it demands practice and discipline. Just as elite athletes need to train for 10,000 hours to compete at the highest level, we need many hours of practice to perfect the art of prayer.

There will be times of discouragement, boredom and dryness. But if we persist with praying, we can eventually become like Yehudi Menuhin on his violin or Jacqueline du Pre on her cello, playing soaring melodies without the need for a score.

Christians gradually absorb the stories told by Jesus, the teachings of the Bible and the lessons of the saints. After long reflection, there’s less and less need for words – prayer becomes like spending time with our best friend. Eventually, even the need for success may cease and prayer becomes its own reward. We become part of the music of creation.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

A sanctuary in the city

Just a few kilometres from central Wellington is an extraordinary sanctuary – Zealandia – where dozens of endangered New Zealand species thrive. What makes it a sanctuary is the mesh fence that surrounds it, bending sharply outwards at the top and sitting deeply under the ground to keep out climbing and burrowing predators. Within Zealandia’s freedom, life doesn’t just flourish but kaka and tui also fly out to nest and sing all around the city.

The nature of law

Zealandia is an analogy of what Christian law should be – not a prison that confines, but a place of safety to escape to, somewhere you can start living your life in a new way. Jesus stressed that he didn’t come to earth to do away with the law but to fulfil it. For Zacchaeus (Lk 19.1-10) and the woman caught in adultery (Jn 8.3-11), Jesus deleted sinful pasts by opening up new futures full of hope.

At its best, Catholic faith kept this vision. St Thomas Aquinas, a great scholar and defender of tradition, pointed out that while the general principles of Christian law don’t change, the more difficult the situation, the greater the wisdom and latitude needed to correctly apply them. Sadly, when the Church felt it was being attacked it often ramped up its laws to defend its members.

A Pope’s vision

Pope Francis, shaped by forty years of hands-on ministry with the poor of Buenos Aires, is deeply aware of the sins of our world. He knows it’s pointless to chastise people for their broken families and addictions; they already live with these burdens. What he brings instead are mercy and love, in word and gesture, and also by providing shelters, jobs, and food. Bringing hope to people’s lives, he welcomes them to living faith.

Catholics are called to live with law, but most of all by the laws of mercy, love and justice

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

The sky speaks

Have you ever felt the enormity of the world? I recall standing in a mountain valley in Fiordland on a winter’s night. The air was so clear, so cold, that the stars seemed to wrap me in a blanket of light. I staggered under the weight of the universe but realised, too, that I could hold that immensity in my one small brain. I could embrace the universe; it could not embrace me.

God also speaks

In many ways God may seem like the universe: vast and incomprehensible. Why should the God who created such immensity spare any thought for me, one who is just a moment’s flickering awareness in an endless ocean of being? The answer is that God is personal, and no matter how great the gap between them, people can speak face to face.

Central to Christianity is the belief that God has spoken face to face with us in Jesus Christ. In one word – Jesus – God has communicated so much to us. He has assured us that the human capacity to understand and reach out in love is a genuine reflection of the inner life of God. Yet he has also shown us that we are flawed images – that our egotism, our fear and rejection of one another is a cracked image in a distorted mirror.

When we look up to the heavens they can speak to us of our tininess but also of our uniqueness, if we will listen. The mountains, the sea and all the beauty God created for us on earth will speak to us.

Similarly, if we look to Christ and listen to his words he will assure us that, though we may seem insignificant, we are of immense importance to God. We are so important, in fact, that God took on a human face and voice so he could speak to us person to person.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

How reliable is the Bible?

“Talking snakes, a boat holding every living species, a prophet who survives three days in a whale’s stomach – how ridiculous!”

This is the kind of argument Christians often face from sceptics when discussing the Bible’s truth. What these sceptics lack is historical imagination, the ability to see how ancient cultures used stories, symbols and poetry to depict the deepest human fears and hopes. The Adam and Eve story may seem quaint but it’s a very real portrayal of sexual trust and betrayal dating back to the birth of human consciousness.

What is truth?

Today even science and technology are losing their stamp of infallibility. Evidence that 95% of our universe is made up of dark energy and dark matter that science cannot detect, and theories that there may be multiple universes beyond our own, help to generate growing scepticism.

More and more, we hear claims that each group and each culture shape their own ‘truths’ to give meaning to life in the face of a heartless universe heading inexorably towards a cold and empty death.

Despite a myriad of diverse cultures and ages, human nature seems remarkably unchanging. To gaze upon the stunningly beautiful cave drawings of Lascaux in France – of animals, humans and symbols – from around 17,000 years ago is to taste anew the same wonder and mystery that we experience in the face of nature today.

The Bible, too, is such a source of human hopes and beliefs in a God that permeates our world. It continues to speak of divine presence and love for this world through many different tongues, cultures and literary forms. The Bible is an unparalleled statement of human trust in the meaning of the universe.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

The birth of the gospels

Nowhere in classic literature do we find anything remotely like the four Christian gospels. They originate from diverse communities scattered widely across Asia Minor and Europe. The bond holding each group together was a belief that God had entered the world in the person of Jesus, someone they loved and worshipped. His life was celebrated in stories and memories cherished by his first followers, and these were recorded and shaped by the gospel writers.

The diversities and similarities

At the heart of each gospel is the story of the death and rising of Jesus. Though details differ, each gospel captures the image of a man convinced that it is God’s will that he be betrayed, abandoned by his followers, crucified, and resurrected.

To flesh out this central witness, each gospel writer strove to put together a picture of his life and preaching. Each portrays a man convinced that he was the one chosen and anointed by God to fulfil all the promises made to the Jewish people. His task was to bring to birth the kingdom of justice, service and integrity promised by the prophets.

All stories talk of Jesus preaching, working miracles of healing, and urging his closest followers to take over his mission after his death. They tell of him reaching out, particularly to the marginal people – to the poor, those outside the law, publicans and prostitutes. And they explain how this led to a deepening feud with the jealous protectors of law and tradition, and eventually to Jesus’s death.

Each gospel in its own way tries to capture the wisdom, the compassion, the humanity and divinity of this man who has indelibly stamped his mark on human history.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

The illusion of control

Disaster always arrives unannounced. Whether it’s a major catastrophe, such as the recent Kaikoura earthquake, or a small dose of misfortune like a bout of food poisoning, it never knocks before it enters. This dilemma is worse today because we live under an illusion of control. Our cities – busy with European cars, swanky boutiques and lush cafes – appear to be orderly and sophisticated, to function so smoothly. But they depend on the coordination of myriad systems and multiple social conventions, all of which are immensely fragile. As we witnessed in Kaikoura, and on a much larger scale, in the earthquake that devastated Hawke’s Bay more than 80 years earlier, everything can change in a heartbeat.

So, given our lack of certainty and control over our lives, how can we ever hope to enjoy lasting happiness?

The persistence of happiness

The philosopher Camus wondered why so few humans commit suicide, considering how fragile and defenceless we are. Viktor Frankl pondered the same thing while enduring years in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Frankl concluded that those who survived clung to some meaning and purpose to life. This is one of the gifts of Christian faith.

Christian faith looks death and suffering squarely in the eyes. But it also believes that God, in the person of Jesus Christ, took his place in our human journey. Because Jesus knew that God treasured every person, he lived with a realism and a compassion that shone no matter how dark the gloom.

To be able to hold on to the conviction that whatever happens, love will always win out, even beyond death, is to live with happiness.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

Shining a light on our suffering

Is there a purpose to our suffering?

The Lebanese mystic, Kahlil Gibran, uses the analogy of a lute when reflecting on joy and sorrow. He points out that until the wood is carved out by knife it will never play a note. Like the lute, we will never sing our song until we are hollowed out by suffering.

This analogy presumes we can find some purpose in our sorrows. Yet so often calamity arrives like a freight train emerging from darkness, smashing all in its way, then vanishing into the night. A husband left with two young children, having lost his life’s partner to cancer, can see no purpose. How can he see anything but an empty life in front of him? He is like the old soldiers Auden observes lying in the surgical ward as part of the wash-up from World War I:

They are and suffer; that is all they do.

A bandage hides the place where each is living.

In times like these, we struggle to find a purpose to our suffering, to find something positive to hold onto. This is when the Catholic faith can save us, filling our darkness with light.

How Jesus’s suffering brings us hope

Dying alone is a form of suffering that not even the Catholic faith can explain. In an attempt to understand it, the Catholic faith turns to the gospels’ accounts of Jesus’s suffering and death. Most portray Jesus as being abandoned by nearly all his followers. In Luke’s account, however, Jesus dies with a criminal on each side of him. He assures one of them:

Truly, I tell you, today, you will be with me in paradise. (Lk 23.43)

Such words can never take away the loneliness of death, the passing into the unknown, but it is a promise that we will not make it alone – nor without purpose.

Jesus’s promise gives us hope that no matter how bad things seem and lonely we feel (in life or when approaching death), our suffering – like the suffering of a young widower or the soldiers Auden describes –  is not in vain. The peace God gives us at the end of our journey makes all the hardship worthwhile.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

How does the resurrection change the way we see the world?

The classical view of life was of an endless circle. In Greek theatre actors entered the stage, played their part and exited before re-entering wearing a different mask. Fate allotted the same roles of youthful exuberance, mid-life blooming, and old-age decay to all, and wisdom came with acceptance. Seasons came and went but the eternal cycle was inexorable.

How the resurrection changes our view

Judaism challenged the classical belief. God had created the world and would judge it at the end of time. But once life was over, it was over.

That’s why the news of Jesus’s resurrection from a public and shameful death came as something beyond belief. Mary Magdalene mistook him for a gardener while his nearest male disciples scoffed and rejected the women’s account of the empty tomb. Once they saw him, however, everything changed. Despite being flogged and imprisoned, they clung unshakeably to their belief. Though they were uneducated labourers, they preached and wrote and travelled to far off countries to spread the word of Jesus’s rising from the dead.

Resurrection is the central Christian belief. It changes how we see the world. Life is no longer a closed circle but a spinning vortex that will sooner or later propel each one of us onto a higher level of existence. A belief in the afterlife affects our now, not just our future – age-old habits and patterns of despair are shattered, cast-iron beliefs are thrown aside. The world flowers anew. Christ is risen. Now he will never die again.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

Grief affects us all and touches us in different ways

Break ups, illnesses, job losses, the death of loved ones – we all face sorrows and disappointments throughout our lives, and any of these can make us feel like the world we knew no longer exists.

How can you carry on enjoying your life when someone close to you, someone who brought you happiness, is no longer a part of it? Surviving a traumatic event or suffering from an illness can equally make you feel like everything has come to a standstill. That’s why it’s important to remember that grief is temporary. Grief doesn’t have the final say.

Finding consolation in your grief

No matter how low you feel when you’re grieving, you will start to feel better. It might take weeks, months, sometimes even longer, but you will begin to find acceptance and the hole in your life will heal. This isn’t to say that if you’re grieving for someone, you’ll forget your loss – memory is a gift that allows us to keep the spirit of our loved ones alive. But you will learn to carry on living your life, while holding on to and treasuring the memories.

To help the healing process, you could talk to a friend or family member about how you’re feeling. Hearing how others dealt with their grief is a great way to help you cope with yours. Praying or talking to your local priest can also be a valuable part of the process. Praying can help us find meaning in our lives, and to see the bigger picture – it can bring hope to what seemed like hopelessness.

Opening yourself to the possibility that God can be found in your grief is another way of helping you find consolation, or peace. Jesus carried the grief of the world when he died on the cross, and transformed it into hope when he rose from the dead. Because of his actions, we can now live in the hope that the grief that grips us will be transformed into peace that lasts forever.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz

The making of a cake

Ever since I was a child, I’ve thought there was something magical about baking a cake. Flour, butter, sugar, beaten eggs, a variety of fruit and nuts, all mixed together. And then, like magic, out of the oven comes a luscious creation that’s nothing like its raw ingredients, yet retains all their savours.

The Church is a similar confection.

The making of a Church

When working in Auckland, I’d sometimes go to St Pat’s cathedral for an early Sunday Mass. When turning to offer a sign of peace, I greeted people of every race and from every nation – white, black, and brown faces, a variety of tongues and dialects. What bound all these people together were shared beliefs and a common worship. Warm handshakes and smiles marked easy acceptance and respect.

When he reflected on how Jesus’s invitation to enter the new kingdom of God had spread to all people, St Paul marvelled, “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and all were made to drink of the one Spirit” (1 Cor 12.13).

Those who enter the Church bring so much that is unique to them – their customs, language and family traditions. They also embrace a wider history and culture, one shaped by saints and scholars, martyrs and mystics, mothers and fathers of Christian families.

Father Neil Vaney
info@catholicenquiry.nz