Increase Our Faith

By Fr Kevin Oshea

Luke 17:5-10

The key word in this gospel is ‘faith’.  I would like to think about it under another name, ‘trust’.  Trust is the basis and core of faith.  [Hebrew uses the same word for both.]

How much can you trust the church and the things it does?  How much can you trust anyone, trust them to be around when you need them, trust them to be decent enough to live with?  I would suggest that perhaps we need TRUST all the time.  If we really want to live together at all, we need a lot of TRUST.  I mean we need to put a strange kind of trust in one another, in communities, in the church!  

When we have a disagreement or just a discussion, it is good to distinguish between things that make a real difference, and things that don’t.  It is true that some things do, and some things don’t.  The sort of trust you put in the former isn’t the same as the way you go along with the latter.  

There was a time when we all got up and said other people would go to hell if they didn’t go along with us, not just about the things that make a real difference, but also about the other stuff too.  Nowadays I think we are better disposed.  We are not so judgmental.  We don’t quarrel over the secondary stuff.  You can have your opinions there if you want to. We don’t like wrangling over things that ‘don’t make a real difference’.  Have it your way if you like.  Your views about them make less of a difference than we used to think.  There is more respect around.  There is more tolerance.  

In our lifetime, things in the church have changed.  Some mandatory things are so no more.  What used to be prohibited is now permitted.  Some things we thought were essential are now, if not trivial, then secondary.  Bans have been lifted on a lot of things.

There is a story, from the Anglican bishop Tom Wright, of a taxi driver in London, who said he was a catholic, but not much of a one.  He explained that he stayed just with the basics.  The basics for him were faith in the resurrection of Jesus. He then added that if the resurrection wasn’t a fact, then all the other stuff is just rock and roll!  

At the gathering of bishops and others in Rome in 2008 to talk about ‘lectio divina’ – a devout reading of the Word of God – the slogan was: Baptism and the Bible.  Grant them, and the rest is open to different angles of vision and different cultural backgrounds.  Rock and roll!

I think this is not just loose logic, or laissez faire.  Nor is it just ‘do your own thing’.  I think too there is more in it than a bigger charity and patience and practical love of others and gentle acceptance.  I think we have discovered more interest in the ‘things that do make a real difference’, and that has given us less concern and anxiety about other things.  

What are these basic things?

A gentler sense of a God, positive to us.  A quiet confidence that when we die, that God will be there to look after us.  A better understanding that Jesus identifies with us, and gives his life for us little people.  A surer experience of his risen life, as he lives it among us and actually in us, right now.  A recognition that when we did things in the past we called ‘sins’, they never really affected God all that much.  A greater attention to the needy ones around us than we ever had.  And with all that, a realization that there are new standards of living put before us now: a new purity of speech and sex whatever our state of life is, a new obligation to forgive ourselves (and not be so worried about God forgiving us), a new positivity about the present (living in the present tense makes you more present and less tense).  

We can trust all that.  We need to.  If you get excited about all that, the rest is rock and roll – or at best it is mulberry bushes, that anyone can garden whatever way they like.  Real trust is assurance about the basics, and larger openness about the rest.

                    

You could say that there are two main obstacles to TRUST.  One is – quite simply – distrust.  The other is the will to power.

Distrust is rooted in an individualism that has run wild.  It is egoism.  It is selfishness.  It is an attempt to live without reference to anything outside your self. You see it in people who are always suspicious of what might be going on and of what others might be up to.  You see it in a rash of complaints against everyone and everything – against the neighbours, against the relatives, against the government and the political parties.  It is sad that a lot of us nowadays are ready to trust only those who are like us – speak our language, live our cultural ways, have our sort of religion.  It becomes ‘us’ separate from ‘them’ – fences, barriers, even walls go up to keep us apart from them.  Our so called ‘communities’ are mosaics of unresolved differences where inbuilt tensions can only go on increasing.  The root of distrust is a closedinness on the self.  This is where ideologies come from, and inbred patterns of behaviour.  We just don’t want other people, with other backgrounds, or new events. We don’t want them because they question us.  The will to power flows out of this mindset.  It prevents trust when it is exercised without reference to the service of others, and of the common good.  

You can see it in the economic world, in the religious world, and in the world of information and public education.

The economy can work only if there is trust in money and in the banking system.  It failed in 2008/2009.  A massive intervention from governments around the world followed.  As the economy revives, it still needs our trust.  For that trust to be given, there must be rules that assure the ‘game’ of free investment is played responsibly.  Otherwise there is a grab for power, for power’s sake.  We need to trust the rules of the game.

There is a war of religions going on.  There is a war within most religions going on.  It is about pluralism.  It is about how much control there ought to be on (religious) freedom.  There is a rightful attitude against all forms of integrism, but there is not yet a willingness not to impede the free expression of religious views for the sake of the common good.  In many religious groups there is a new clericalism in which priests (and bishops) want all the power and act to eliminate lay claims on power.  The lack of real dialogue is a symptom of this.  There are parallels in civil society.

It is not just a matter of making information available.  There are lobbies.  They control the media.  The media stakes out what we can call ‘public space’.  It is an arena in which persuasion becomes manipulation and manipulation becomes intoxication of consciences with unexamined ‘values’.  The result is a dictatorship of feeling and emotion, and the triumph of largescale spectacles and public theatre.  

The future years will depend on how much TRUST we have – on how much we can get past our selfishness and will to power.  That TRUST is the cement of daily life.

                    

Daily life could itself be the problem.  I see it as a construct of history – the history of recent centuries.  It has made life out of divisions and separations and class distinctions.  [Modernity gave us specialists as a result of these distinctions – they know a lot about a little and little about a lot.]  You get these distinctions in terms of your finances (rich or poor), of your education (graduated or not), social sanity (with it or not), formation in church life (‘practising’ catholic or not), place in the family (centre or fringe).  There are lots more examples.  As a result we all live compartmentalized lives: internal and external, deep and surface, full and empty, etc.  We even get to look at ourselves that way: we think soul and body (heavy emphasis on soul for ‘spiritual’ people), and hereafter and here (heavy emphasis on hereafter if you are really into religion), and yes, we think clergy and laity (heavy emphasis on clergy) and we think men and women (heavy emphasis on men)!  We have all become bilingual – speaking a couple of languages (I hope not with a forked tongue) according to political correctness.  Maybe we are polyglots!  With a fall back position of ‘globish’!  

Some people manage to live ‘around’ this.  They can touch a layer of life inside themselves and in their relationships where none of this is important.  There is peace there.  

But even for these people, and of course for those who don’t touch this peacepoint, the system strikes back.  The side of the split you aren’t on, doesn’t like you and won’t leave you alone, and goes after you, in a way that is often punitive.  Its language about you and at times to you amounts to a kind of sledging.  It is inherently and socially abusive.  No wonder the scandal of the century is abuse of children and minors and the inadequate among us.  It is the manifestation of an even deeper abuse at the root of it all…. Maybe we never knew how to finish a war without one side winning and the other side losing.  We don’t know how to disarm.  

So, can you really trust life?  It’s not as easy as it sounds.  Not as easy as a ‘feel good’ sense in response to some bible text.  Can you trust anyone who is the product of this sort of ‘civilization’?  
        
Today’s gospel suggests two things.  Even a tiny little bit of trust (the size of a mulberry seed) can do wonders. And – whether you have it or not – work inside the crazy system and do your daily best.  I would add that neither of these two proposals is possible unless you have the gift of touching that peace point inside you….

 While we are talking about trust…I often get questions about sacraments.  Do they really do anything for anyone?  Can you trust them to ‘work’ – that is give grace, make people better?  Well, if you don’t trust them, they surely won’t work!

There is often an impression among church goers that the ‘better’, that is, the more elaborate and beautiful, a sacrament is, the more it ‘works’ because it reflects God better.  The trouble is: there’s a limit in how ‘good’ a sacramental liturgy can be, and there’s no limit in God.  So there’s a limit point in what sacraments can do for us?  From that angle, yes.  But I wonder…I wonder if the very weakness and limitation of even the ‘best done’ sacraments offers God a wonderful opportunity.  I mean the opportunity of working through our weakness and nothingness and being ‘free as God’ to give us something hugely out of proportion to anything we can symbolize or ritualize…. Could we trust God to do that?

What about the church?  Nowadays we often hear comments: “I don’t trust that lot in the Vatican”, or “how could trust head office in this diocese?”  At times there may be little reason to trust any of them!  But perhaps that too is the point of opportunity for God.  Perhaps it is through the weakness, the stupidity, the inadequacy, the failures of these people to do any better, that God – in a divine freedom – can give us the gift of what church can be?  Can we trust God to do that?  Perhaps that is the ‘peace point’ when we do.  Perhaps, too, we can then notice a few mulberry bushes in the church yard…