GOD IN OUR POCKET?

Benedict sweeps all of that aside. The Eros which begins falteringly as passion is disciplined by self-giving and self-sacrifice to become Agape. He points out that in the Hebrew there are two words for love in the Song of Songs. These two words respond to the nature of love. At the beginning love is unsure of itself. It is only as love continues, that it becomes Agape. There is no “instant” love. Nor is love static. Romance is yet to become maturity: or Agape. Ascending love or Agape then is love as it has matured, purified by self-sacrifice.

He goes back to the Last Supper. Jesus anticipating his death gives to his disciples the bread and wine which is his body and blood: the new manna. It is this which will feed his people as the old manna had fed the Israelites in their trek through the desert. But it is also the Logos, the eternal wisdom that the pagans of Greece or Rome had sought, which now given in the form of love, becomes our real food.

We now understand what Benedict means when he says that this sexual freedom which makes of freedom an obsession with the body, cannot free. We are freed only when the whole person is freed. This whole person, Benedict reminds us, is not only the body: it is also Intellect and Reason.

Eternal Wisdom

Benedict is saying nothing new. It is already there in Biblical Judaism in the Book of Wisdom. It would be pushed farther by the Early Fathers of the Church.

The Faith (I use the particle deliberately to exclude the popular use of Faith to mean belief) is not, and cannot be, in conflict with Reason. The God-man is not limited to love. He is also the Logos, the Word, Eternal Wisdom. Strange how Reason has never arrived here as an important component of Catholicism. Rather there is a suspicion of Reason and an increased anti-intellectualism within the society as within the Church. Our preoccupation with the body to the exclusion of Intellect or Reason has been translated within the Church as the priority given to emotion in liturgy as in spiritual experience. The instant love or feeling is privileged over the disciplined, or if you like the “mature.” Rather than self-sacrifice we demand to be entertained.

Pagan and Christian

But Benedict has replied, obliquely it is true, to other preoccupations often expressed in theology. Here Benedict is a gentler Ratzinger but losing nothing of his academic rigour. Eros and Agape, the Logos of Eternal Wisdom, are not found only in Judaism or Christianity. They are already in pagan religions.

Paganism as evil or as the devil disappears. But this does not mean that all religions are the same and all gods are the same. Rather — and Benedict says this — the One God is the One Unique God or the one and only God. It is through him that we can “purify” the Eros or the Logos since it is He who is both.

It follows from this that there is no real contradiction between Christianity and any culture. What is in Christianity is already there in “pagan” cultures.

Inculturation?

Christianity “purifies” — it does not impose. There is therefore no inculturation, or if you like Christianity adapting to another culture. Nor is Christianity so different that it must be integrated into cultures. There should be no “cultural imperialism.” In line with this Benedict, speaking recently to Cameroon Bishops, requests that they keep their culture — but constantly purifying it. He says the same of our “modern culture” — and proves it in his Easter acceptance and use of evolution.

If the duality between Eros and Agape disappears, if the duality between the Greek Logos and the Jewish Wisdom disappear, so does the duality between traditional and modern pagan and monotheist.

But the disappearance or, if you like, the reconciliation, only comes through the total self-giving of Calvary. I need not underline the importance of this to us. We don’t have to become European or North American. We do not have to constantly seek for some alternative Caribbean culture. We have a culture that we daily live through. It is this culture that we must purify.

Ethics and Faith

Benedict reminds us — and we need reminding — that in the Eucharist we are not only united to Christ. I cannot have “God in my pocket” as my husband would say. Benedict puts it like this: “I cannot have God for myself alone. I can only belong to Him in union with all those who are or who will become His.” (My translation from the French)

With all Christians — I use the word in its proper sense — Benedict returns to oneness. We have already seen it in Eros and Agape: so called profane or erotic love and pure and ascending love. Faith, the Mass and Ethics are not three separate things, existing side by side. They are One. It is this One that we share in the Lord’s Agape, the love feast, or the Eucharist.

Values

Benedict, replying to some theologians, insists that Ethics or Values are not separate things which can be imposed by external regulations. They are rather what we ourselves freely adopt as part of our relationship with the Crucified One. Catholicism as catechism learned by heart, as regulations and laws, disappears.

There has been much talk of Trinis losing their former values or not having any values at all. But anthropologists know of no society without values.

These values flow from what is held as central to the society. What is held as central to Trini society is the material: the body, the new car, the swimming pool, the gold earrings, the mobile telephone, the next hip hop festival, the women or men that are trophies proving our success, religion which proves our righteousness and consolidating our power.

These values are not only the values of the urban poor. They are above all the values of the wealthy and the powerful. Criminality is only the same values of the powerful which are held by the marginalised and excluded. None of these values are of the Eucharist. The value which is central to the Eucharist is self-giving, self-sacrificing love

And what that means to come.