Peter CostelloA View from the Pew: Wrestling with Belief
Note the nuance in the title: these pages are about wrestling with belief, rather than, as is so often case in spiritual books, with unbelief. In fact, the book is a most interesting experiment in presenting modern faith.
Louis Hughes is a Dominican, the sort of man who is behind the lectern on a Sunday. Paul Balfe, on the other hand, is a surgeon practising in Kilkenny, the sort of professionally-trained person in the pews whose intelligence is so often insulted by the sort of things said in some homilies (especially those that begin with golfing stories).
The text is made up of 31 essays by Louis Hughes to which Paul Balfe responds. They were originally given as homilies in Kilkenny over a two-year period, so the themes are very varied.
In his preface, Fr Hughes reminds us that the Church is not the hierarchy: “It is all of God’s people, flawed and all as we are, seeking to go about our daily lives, struggling to believe in a loving God, to do our best to follow the path of Christ and of course failing – miserably at times – but, thank God, not all the time.”
What he says in his pieces is absorbing, but what may well strike many readers are the responses of Paul Balfe. They are what have given the book its truly original form. He is like many people in the Catholic community today (a better term perhaps than Church): an angry and a puzzled man.
When people speak about the Church, they think of the hierarchical institution with which we are all familiar.
Root
But getting back to the root of the thing, the real meaning of ekklesia in Greek was (so my Liddell & Scott informs me) “an assembly of the citizens regularly summoned, the legislative assembly”.
This sense seems to have been lost: that the ekklesia, the assembly, is self-ruling, or at least that seems to have been the understanding of the early Christians. Episkopos, from which a bishop derives, was originally a lookout, a guardian. Church derives from kuriakon, and was originally the building, “the Lord’s” house.
So perhaps we need to recover a sense of what the early Christians meant by assembly, to concentrate on the people rather than the structure.
Paul Balfe writes of his dismay at what the structure, the hierarchical form, has become, and thinks instead it is open to each of us “to seek and hopefully find God by making that journey inward and allowing the whisper to be heard”.
True enough. Yet at the heart of Christianity from the beginning has been an essential sense of a small supportive community. It is sense of support which has been lost to many by the institutional Church, which sometimes seems to be separated from the people.
The dialogue – the debate between the pair – emphasises that we should listen to that still small voice, to what in effect the Gospels and the Acts tell us.
This is not to abandon the Church, but to contain it more completely in a way that recently has been impossible for many.