Disclosure Moments

Six “Disclosure Moments”

Last month and within the space of six days I spoke to five people–and wanted to speak to one more, who was, however, absent. Each by presence or by absence showed me more clearly some of the issues that Chistians have to deal with now.

On a visit to Scotland I met Dennis, a school friend during World War II. Now retired, he was obviously successful in his profession. In retirement he has not a free evening in the week, being deeply involved in some of his former school’s activities and with a symphony concert every Friday. I asked him about religion in Scotland. “Religion?” he responded, twisting his nose left and right as if puzzled by the question. “I haven’t even thought about religion for sixty years. It did mean something to me growing up, though.”

Joan was the first speaker at the Chautauqua Interfaith Conference a few days later in London. Addressing the theme–“Building Civil Society: Faith, Diversity, and Pluralism”–Joan, a Benedictine sister from Erie, PA, is a vigorous advocate of peace: “Is preemptive war moral or immoral?” she asked the audience with vigor. “Is the use of strategic nuclear weaponry–weapons that will necessarily kill thousands of the innocent–moral or immoral? And what about torture? President Bush is clear–sort of. But....”

The first Jew to speak was Ori Z. Soltes, whose areas of specialization include Jewish, Christian and Muslim art and religions. Addressing the theme of respecting the nobility of each religion, Ori warned, like Joan, that war has now become the key problematic for the world’s religions. “We won’t fix the world here in Kensington,” he concluded, “but we can help to effect change by getting to know each other and become part of a process that has positive effects.”

The star of the conference for me was neither rabbi, theologian, nor Imam. It was Baroness Pola Manzila Uddin of Bethnal Green. Bethnal Green was one of the poorest slums in London in the 19^th century, the home of Jack the Ripper. A community activist, the baroness, who was born in Bangladesh, headed the development of initiatives in domestic violence in Bethnal Green. Raised to the peerage as one of Tony Blair’s “working peers,” she became the first Bengali and the first Muslim woman to sit in the House of Lords. She swore by “Almighty Allah” as she took her seat.

The Chautauqua Institution had invited the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, to speak at the conference. He was embroiled at the time, however, in the Church of England Synod, painfully divided by another bitter bitter and long-simmering dispute over homosexuality. Beyond the synod, Williams was very much aware that African bishops in particular are threatening to create a schism in the 70 million world-wide Anglican communion.

I huddled in a corner one day with Rafiq Abdulla. He is a poet, a translator of Rumi, a barrister and a university administrator. Rafiq describes himself as a “secular Muslim.” Asking him what he meant by the phrase, he replied, “Before coming here this morning,” he replied, “I was in a bookshop further up Gloucester Road. I looked through a book of photographs of some of the outer reaches of the cosmos, photographs taken from the Hubble telescope. They were simply overwhelming. On this tiny dot in the cosmos we are entirely insignificant. If there is a God, then God is something altogether other than what the religions have said about the Creator.”

The conference in London represented but one part of the world that religious people occupy–the world of those who see nothing in religion that has any appeal or value; of those whose religion inspires them to give their lives working among the poor; of those for whom the scriptures and liturgies of their faith demand of them resistance to war and injustice; and of those for whom “secular” is not necessarily a term of abuse as applied to a religion. Christians like me have to give a credible reason to each of them for the faith that is in us.

How? Facing these five “disclosure moments” in the course of six days of winter, I offer six comments.

1. With Dennis, I agree that religion is unnecessary for people like him. But for me, the “finitude of mundane existence,” in Huston Smith’s phrase, cannot satisfy the human heart completely. When Augustine of Africa wrote, “our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” he meant that there is something built into us that turns us to a “more” we can glimpse, however dimly. And if Dennis finds his “more” in activities (including music) that delight him, part of the Christian task today is to show how that the “more” is part of creation, therefore seen in the light of the Holy.

2. I agree with Joan that religion has been the source of distortion, deceit, cruelty, and war. If, therefore, the churches are to be something other than places for developing a personal piety, then Christians are to be involved in putting the broken parts of the human family and of the natural world together. If the water of baptism does not point us to the necessity of purifying the waters of rivers and oceans, and if the breadt of the Eucharist does not force us to address the reality that eleven million children younger than five die each year, mostly from hunger-related diseases, then our rituals will have become garden gongs and crash cymbals–pleasant sounds but not much more.

3. So I agree also with Baroness Uddin that the chief honor we can seek is to serve the human family, especially the diseased, the dangerous and the needy.

4. Ori in his address cited the painting of Diego Velazquez, “The Surrender of Breda,” to show how even as late as 1635-36, enemies could embrace one another, recognizing that they could still recognize in each other a common humanity. Modern military technology in contrast reduces “the enemy” to utter anonymity, and with the modern battlefield now potentially on every street corner.

5. If Archbishop Rowan Williams had been present and spared me five minutes of his time, I’d have said something like this. “Stephen Bates, an English newspaper religious affairs correspondent, recently wrote a book, A Church at War, to cover the struggle over homosexuality in the Anglican communion. The general impression I’ve formed is that the conservatives in the debate have been militant, exclusivist, mean-minded and vindictive in fighting homosexuality tooth and nail–though with few exceptions. And it seemed that the liberals in the debate have been craven-hearted, evasive, and wooly in their thinking. Do you agree? And if you do, Sir, may I request that you come out publicly and say that whatever the Bible may say about sexual behavior, it’s time to say that much in the Bible and more in the long Christian tradition is wrong, especially on sexual matters.”

6. Finally, I want to ponder, prompted by Rafiq, what it would mean for me (or any other Christian) to be a “secular Christian.” I agree with him that to draw a line separating secular and sacred is to miss the point. In a post-Einsteinian, expanding cosmos words like these have no meaning. And I also agree that the closer we come to awe and wonder, whether in contemplating the stars revealed by the Hubble telescope or the indeterminacy of the atom, the closer we come to what the mystics of all religions have described as the Holy, the Sacred, or the Other. Being preoccupied with Christian orthodoxy or with right ways of believing on this tiny dot, third planet from the sun, is like insisting that Ugaritic, not English, be the international language.

So I end with two of the closing sentences in Hans Kung’s Christianity and the World Religions (New York: Doubleday, 1986). “There will be no peace among the peoples of this world without peace among the world religions. There will be no peace among the world religions without peace among the Christian churches” (p. 443).

No doubt there will be many more “disclosure moments” for me in future months, but six within a period of six days were a pretty good start.

Ross Mackenzie

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