Nth Sydney: May 16

Reconciling with Self - ..love yourself as I have loved you.."

Recognition of Indigenous land

I recently read - “If the population of the Earth were reduced to that of a small town with 100 people, it would look something like this: 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 Americans (northern and southern), 8 Africans, 52 women, 48 men, 70 coloured-skins, 30 Caucasians, 89 heterosexuals and 11 homosexuals. 6 people would own 59% of the world’s wealth and all of them would be from the United States of America, 80 would have poor living conditions, 70 would be uneducated, 50 underfed, 1 would have a computer, 1 (only one) will have higher education.”

This, my friends, is the world we live in. However, most Australians are hardly aware of what this world looks like or feels like. We have little idea of what it means to be in need and little idea of what it means to be underprivileged at least in a material sense. In a country of such affluence it is a great irony that we have a history of Indigenous dispossession and stolen children that haunts us and is largely unaddressed. There is a clear and widening gulf between the average Australian and the economically disadvantaged be it for social, family or racial reasons; physical and mental disability; systemic prejudice on the grounds of gender, colour or sexual orientation or just bad luck. We are experiencing a disintegrating health and education system and we can no longer take for granted, as a kind of right, reasonably publicly funded health and education for all. Reasonable education and health care is now privatised and increasingly beyond the means of ordinary Australians. We are in denial over the perilous fragility of our land and natural resources and the need for protecting bio-diversity and enhancing environmental sustainability. We are gaining an international reputation for disregarding human rights in areas as diverse as mandatory detention of asylum seekers, Indigenous basic care and international relations (eg East Timor continental shelf boarder dispute). We are becoming increasingly known as a country that has scant regard for signed international treaties, United Nations’ declarations and International Court rulings. We are known to support discriminatory international trade practices under the guise of free trade agreements except in the case of the USA where “free trade” is riddled with tariffs that favour our military partner. We are determined to continue and increase our commitment to an illegal war without international mandate through our joining the invasion of Iraq, a country already broken by decades of colonial interference and Western support for a puppet tyrannical rule. This is the world we live in.

Now you might ask what has this to do with tonight’s topic – reconciling self. Let me take a few minutes to explore the notion that, as Christians, we can only be reconciled with self when we are reconciled with the world we live in. In 2000 I attended the Catholic student Asia-Pacific Assembly in Chennai, India. Its slogan was “Student pedagogy: with and by the marginalised”. The tradition of transformative learning through reflection on experience seen in the Cardijn movements such as Young Christian Workers and Pax Romana, the university student and graduate movement, and the tradition of radical education theorists like Paulo Freire remind us of the role of experience in our formation. The reconciled self is able to embrace the world with eyes wide open. This courage only comes from a freedom in the world and by being open to the other. Cardinal Cardijn – the proponent of the observe, reflect and act methodology - constantly encouraged students and workers to observe cross culturally and internationally because this was the starting place for transformation. There is no formation for the self without standing in the shoes of the other or at least coming alongside the other. As the Chennai students’ slogan suggests – our own pedagogy or learning begins by being with the marginalised and listening to them.

The second phrase of tonight’s topic sounds like a biblical quote. However it is not a biblical quote – but a combining of two biblical ideas - love your neighbour as you love yourself AND love one another as I have loved you. Ultimately for us as Christians gospel love is outward looking. Yet self-respect; self-understanding; self-knowledge and grounded sense of self are central to the process of being and becoming Christian. I suggest the biblical imperative to love others in a “godly” way requires a healthy sense of self and an ability to appreciate one’s self as loved, loving and lovable.

It is the hallmark of Christian living that we enter the human struggle by transforming the self precisely through the struggle to transform the world on behalf of the other. I believe as a Christian that we are called to a communal process of creating civil society that transforms both me and the society. The gospel ethic is not primarily engaging in a lonely titanic struggle with evil to survive this world that we might one day be vindicated by a reward in the next. This is not to say I don’t believe in heaven – it is rather to assert that in the long run heaven is the gospel life lived now with eternal ramifications. Leonardo Boff wrote last month in the Witness Magazine: “The kingdom is Jesus' utopia of a world that has a good end, where the ideals of all the revolutionists will come to be: justice and rights for all, and life without end, the true home and the motherland of human identity, with God. In the kingdom, first are the poor and their allies, all those who are sensitive to those who suffer hunger, thirst, are naked and jailed. Then come faith, hope and love, virtues all human beings can develop and are what in truth save them.”

We author our own story in a dialogue between the self and the world we live in. This allows us to relate to a kaleidoscope of relationships and roles in our world with a sense of integrity. Saturday’s Good Weekend carries the story of Bruce Haigh who arrived in South Africa as a young conservative Australian diplomat and saw state sanctioned abuse and bashing of black people in public. This made him passionate in fighting apartheid, using his diplomatic status to smuggle Donald Woods out of South Africa; to visit political prisoners, including Steve Biko and thereby bringing international pressure to bear on the regime that was eventually overturned. This is the classic conversion process envisaged by Cardijn whereby Christians would learn from experience the story of the other and thus rewrite their own story including the other in a communal process of reconciliation with self, God and the world.

This is why my beginning thoughts are so relevant. The Christian takes up the project of self construction beginning with the analysis of the world in which we live – as the bishops of Vatican II said in Gaudium et Spes (The Church in the Modern World) - “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts. For theirs is a community composed of people. United in Christ, they are led by the Holy Spirit in their journey to the Reign of God and they have welcomed the news of salvation which is meant for everyone. That is why this community realizes that it is truly linked with humankind and its history by the deepest of bonds.”

For Christians the process of self realisation begins at the heart of the world and its peoples struggles, challenges and dreams. Christians cannot write their own story without a glimpse at the poetry of the Cosmic and Earth stories. As Thomas Berry has so long held – we tell our story at our peril when we place ourselves in the centre of history, creation, salvation and the cosmos. Until we can understand where we are on this giant canvas, we are doomed to be lost. We are not at the centre but at the end of a giant history of cosmic creation. We are on an extremely vulnerable planet and we are deeply interconnected with the planet and all things on it. It is in this context that we Christians are called to undertake the sacred authoring of the human story by honouring the truth of our place in the cosmic story. When we write and rewrite ourselves through the lens of this bigger picture, we not only have the potential to honour who we are but we can’t but know that our story is inextricably linked with the story of the other. It is when all are healed that we are healed. It is when all are included that we are included. It is in the love of all that we are loved.

There can be no reconciling with self unless we find ourselves grounded in the bigger story and the reconciliation of the other in the human family and the earth story. So analysis of the world; reflection on the state of the planet and the human project do not proceed from our ability to love self. Loving self comes in a kind of conversation with the world and its most vulnerable. As we learn to love the world in its hopes and challenges; we begin to write the self as loving, lovable and loved. The process of reconciling self takes place in the process of reconciling, indeed reclaiming, that which is most vulnerable in God’s creation as integral to our own making. Making and remaking the self in an ever spiralling call to wholeness can only be done in dialogue with the remaking of all creation because rather than being outside creation, we are part of it.

As we act in creation and on behalf of its most vulnerable we are not only remaking ourselves but reconciling ourselves to our most sacred project – transforming the world.

The gospel for the Sixth Sunday of Easter was about Jesus sending the Comforter, the Paraclete. This word in Greek means “the one who comes alongside”. We are invited by the Spirit of Jesus to come alongside the vulnerable as we engage in the most sacred project of becoming the human community.