One of my “systems” of self-care is going regularly to the movies (a revelation which won’t come as a surprise to many of you).
So when I look back over the past couple of months and realise that I haven’t seen any new movies I know that life has either been very hectic or I haven’t been taking as much care of myself as I might or should (and I suspect that reality isn’t something I have on my own).
In fact, I’ve spent a large percentage of my time in recent weeks sitting on planes or at airports and while that doesn’t do too much for watching movies, it does provide the opportunity to read – and in the process I’ve discovered, for me, a “new” author.
Years ago, one of my brothers urged me to read the novels of James Lee Burke. I tried one or two but simply couldn’t get into them so put him aside.
Now, however, I’m reading his books (and there are quite a few of them) voraciously. In a sense, they’re crime novels set in the South of the United States but they’re much more than your ordinary thriller – the writing is outstanding and the works are very high quality fiction.
So, why do I like them now and wasn’t interested at all years ago? I don’t know the answer – other than perhaps to say that things have their time and that was then and this is now.
I was reminded of that the other day when I was browsing through amazon.com and came across publicity material for the new autobiography by Archbishop Rembert Weakland (an interesting man in many ways) entitled “A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop”.
He refers to one of his favourite stories from the Talmud: The sages of the Jewish community, reassembling after the destruction of Jerusalem, worried that subsequent generations might seek a word from Torah and not find it. They set out, then, to collect the results of all the discussions in an attempt to preserve them, together with the names of those who had handed them down. Since the majority of these were binding decisions, some asked why they should preserve the minority voices, especially if it be the voice of a single sage. Someone proposed that in that way those voices could be recalled and refuted and thus deprived of their influence. But Rabbi Yehuda said: “They are preserved so that one may be able to rely on them when their hour has come.”
That story, plus my “discovery” of the books of James Lee Burke, has led me to wonder what are the things we need to be looking at with fresh eyes? What are the ideas, the proposals, the remits over the years that we may have dismissed as unworkable, too outlandish, or simply unrealistic to be worthy of consideration let alone action?
For sure, some ideas or proposals will have been dismissed for the simply reality that they really were unworkable, outlandish or unrealistic.
But others may have been put aside because they were too challenging, too disturbing, too much “outside the box” – which didn’t make them wrong, but simply meant that we couldn’t cope with them at the time.
And some of those ideas keep coming back – keep challenging us to look at the Society, the Church, the Province, the way in which we live and minister with new eyes and new courage.
They are, in a real sense, ideas whose time may have come.
When we look at the Province in recent months, we are inevitably conscious of the number of funerals we have celebrated. When we look forward, we’re also inevitably conscious of the difficulties – the impossibility – of being able to keep things going as they are currently are.
When we focus on the General Chapter, we see that it is a gathering of delegates representing a Society that now has less than a thousand members. We see that it has to grapple with present-day realities while trying to find ways forward for the next eight years that will preserve and strengthen the areas that have life and energy, while at the same time building on the dedication, generosity and heritage of the traditionally strong but now aging regions.
In some ways, the challenge – both locally and internationally – could be seen as being simply too overwhelming. The temptation could be to say that we need to be realists and accept the inevitable.
And that is one approach.
But pure realism on its own isn’t particularly exciting or stimulating. It becomes much more interesting when mixed with imagination – a willingness to think outside the square – courage and faith.
And that, I suspect, is the real challenge for us in these days.
To ask ourselves what ideas, what proposals we might yet examine honestly and fully, not in the context of when they were first proposed, but in the context of the here and now?
To ask ourselves what concepts have never gone away but keep resurfacing amongst individuals and groups?
To ask ourselves why have these ideas persevered and is this the time when their hour has come and when we might rely upon them?
I have no specific proposals or concepts in mind as I write this article – but I do have the strong sense that we have not exhausted all our possibilities. Coupled with that is the very real sense that sometimes aspects of the way forward have already been shown to us in the past (possibly long ago, possibly very recently) – and that it is time to have the courage and the imagination, based on faith, to revisit things and look with fresh eyes.