Words From The Edge

This is a question I’m asking myself now I’m of an age with way more time behind me than ahead. I’m also a Catholic and have been so since I was thirty two days old. Following religious tradition, my parents took me to their local church where prayers were said and promises made, a priest poured water over my unsuspecting head of black hair, and for better or worse, I was now a Catholic. I have a certificate to prove it. Not that I actually had a choice.

Most religions are passed down through family. My father was born into a Catholic family and my mother became a Catholic not long before she married, so it was taken for granted that my three brothers and I would be Catholics too. 

If I had been born in a Middle Eastern family I would probably have been a practicing Moslem, wearing a headscarf and praying to Allah. Or, with a name like Judith, I would have been right at home in a Jewish family, keeping all the religious rules about food and dress, but leaving the more important religious stuff to the males. More realistically, I might have grown up in a Methodist family like my mother did, going to Sunday school with my cousins, familiar with long hymns and able to quote bits of the Bible, chapter and verse

As it was, I learnt to colour my life the Catholic way. There were rules laid down to deal with any religious issues that might arise and a recognised line of authority to respect. Theology was the province of the clergy and contemplative prayer belonged in monasteries and convents.  These were my boundaries and it wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I began to question them.

Talk about religion is as divisive as talk about politics. Is religion something one grows out of, like a school uniform or a wedding dress that still looks wonderful but no longer fits?. Then there’s the matter of the sexual abuse of children that for decades hid behind religious walls.

We don’t need historians or social scientists to tell us that the rate of change over the last fifty years is the highest it has ever been. Religion has been caught up in those changes. Church pews are more empty than full, churches are no longer open all hours, but locked to keep insurance costs down. Many country churches have been creatively re-purposed into family homes and bed-and-breakfasts.

Weekends have had a makeover. Shopping malls are a go-to gathering space, football moved across to Sunday and children’s sport has done the same. Weddings and funerals, once family affairs marked in a familiar church, are more often celebrated in a garden or a specialised religion-free space and christenings or baptisms replaced by a naming ceremony or first birthday celebration

All religions have a basic common goal expressed in a multitude of ways, namely to seek God. On a world scale, religious doctrines, moral codes and rituals each reflect something that is true and holy. The origins of hospitals, schools and social services can be traced back to a spiritualty that began as something deeply personal that eventually spread and expressed itself religiously.  Religion puts shape around our values – that the sick will be cared for, the hungry fed, the homeless sheltered and justice is a right for all.

Not long ago I stood in the little side chapel where I had been baptised and wondered at the way  Catholicism has  marked my life. There have been times when  I have been tempted to experiment with another brand of Christianity, one with better music or a more open approach to divorced people, a church that welcomes a woman as priest or pastor or minister, a church where a women’s viewpoint is  respected and their skills appreciated. Along the way I’ve learned – and had to unlearn as well – a great deal about religion, catholicity in particular. I’ve discovered that all religions have a common goal: to reveal God’s presence in all of us.

Somehow, I always return to the basic fact that my way to God is to be found in the Catholic tradition, even while I’ve given myself permission to colour outside the lines.

Judith judith@judithscully.com.au

North Warrandyte, where I live, is an edgy kind of place right on the edge of metropolitan Melbourne. Australia Post and the Nillumbik Council don’t like our bumpy street , so once a week  we half dozen home-owners trundle our correctly coloured bins down to the corner and, when we remember, pick up mail from the row of letter boxes on the same corner. Living here suits me, thanks in part to the internet that opens me out to the world beyond  this little valley.

Monday to Friday the Cath News website keeps me in touch with my catholicity and that’s the place I began to notice a word that was new to me- synodal. It constantly popped up in churchy words from Bishops and lay people, accompanied by  invitations to participate In zoom sessions about synodality. To quote Pope Francis, synodality is  “an invitation to all Catholics to be united in harmonious diversity, where everyone can actively participate and where everyone has something to contribute.”

If there is to be synodality, then our religious faith needs to be adult, something we own, not a long ago ritual in which we had no say. The mix of childhood memories, ideas, beliefs, devotions, church-words and  beliefs peculiar to different times and places that we inherited, needs to be sifted for truth and relevance in the everydayness of our adult lives.

 Adult faith is not an affirmation of a creed, an intellectual acceptance of God, or believing certain doctrines to be true or orthodox, although those things might well be good. It means moving to the deepest part of oneself, the place where we are most ourselves and where we can safely acknowledge our fears, our addictions, our insecurities, our memories, as we grapple with the mystery we call God.

Faith cannot be lived in isolation from who and where we are.  That’s where the basics of faith lie hidden and that’s especially true for women, who are more inclined to embody faith than males who have been mostly responsible for distorting it into an exacting and negative rule book. Core beliefs, like Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, sin and forgiveness and prayer are givens, but some customs and traditions that have grown out of those doctrines really miss the point.

As my faith has unfolded from the institutional approach taught and caught in my family and school , and on through what has been a smorgasbord of faith experiences, I’ve discovered that the creedal basics of my childhood religious faith haven’t changed. How I experience and live them has. Today, if I was asked about my religious beliefs, it would go something like this.

I believe that God is the name we give to the mysteries in which we live–mysteries like LOVE that  is always there, somewhere, if I look closely enough, in the mystery of LIFE that keeps on renewing itself, showing me God’s face in the majesty of rolling surf, the peace of early morning mist playing hide and seek with the trees, the joy in the faces of children at play in the most unlikely of places.  God is in somewhere in the fleeting memory of the one-on-one closeness of my new-born self and my mother that is imprinted in me, an all-is-well feeling that I sometimes experience.

I believe that Jesus is God-made-man. By today’s measure he lived a very short life before being executed by a foreign power with the connivance of the Jewish religious authorities, and then regained life- and that’s another mystery.  I believe Jesus left us the blueprint for a life that had one, all-encompassing message: Love one another.

Just this month, Jessie Rogers an Irish biblical scholar speaking about synodality, said that if catholics “hold on too tightly to how God acted in the past, they might overlook the new thing that God is doing in the present”.

 It seems to me I’ve been on an edge for a long time, waiting for the Catholic Church to begin its return to its roots, respect listening and cherish diversity. It’s called synodality.

Judith Scully