Our People

Cultivating a Catholic Imagination

Retreat to Clergy of the Military Ordinariate, Seventh and Last Conference

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
30/11/2005

One charming aspect of the new Divine Office is the inclusion in the appendix of Christian religious poetry from a wide selection of sources. It is meant to provide a change from the usual Compline hymns – although I have found that their recitation in common sometimes problematic. The sprung rhythm of Hopkins, for instance, has a tendency to spring back at the unwary and sounds more like a tongue twister than a prayer. There are very good and long attested reasons for metrical verse and they are not just that its easier to set to a tune. In terms of developing a Catholic imagination though, the breviary’s poem collection is a very positive step. One of my older Dominican brothers, when asked how we could preach better, answered, “Read poetry”. It is not a question of quoting slabs of T.S Eliot to blank-faced parishioners, but of having more beautiful things in the mind and imagination. He might just as easily have said, “Go to the art gallery, the opera, concerts, films and plays. Eat better food, when you are not fasting. Look at beautiful buildings. Delight in the natural beauty of this land. Have conversations with interesting people. Read good novels and biographies and histories.” The same old Father famously said of another brother, “He needs to fall in love and read a book!”

Now this morning I am not going to recommend to any of you that you fall in love, so it will have to be about reading a book or two. Traditionally Catholic philosophy has spoken of two faculties of the soul, that which wills and that which knows – the heart and the mind. They are not, of course, separable – not even as separable as the almost inseparable body and soul. The human being is a unity, but it does sometimes make sense to speak of our different dimensions. It is the same person who breathes, sees, thinks, chooses, talks, runs, loves and prays, is moved by a sunrise or delighted by a tall, cold beer. Imagination is a faculty that in some ways bridges the human mind and the human heart. We might think of it as the will’s attempt to subvert the mind, to stop us being too narrowly rationalistic, too confined by the seen and known. But we might also think of it as the mind’s attempt to subvert the will, making the choice of the Good easier. Its true duty is not to convince us of the impossible, but to make it easier to know and love the real.

The Church has sought consistently to form a Catholic imagination in her children. The care with which Fra Angelico, for example, adorned the cells of his brothers in Florence suggests a very serious endeavour indeed to fill their hearts and minds with images that nurtured faith. The same is true for most religious houses – though not always in as exuberant a style. The Cistercians were notably austere in matters of religious art. When we come to examine Church buildings themselves we find a very definite imaginative framework – the delineation of different spaces, the quality of light created by stained glass, even different acoustic qualities. There was a period beginning in the 1950s when it became fashionable to underplay the role of external things in matters of faith. It’s true, of course, that you can faithfully believe and practice your religion in the complete absence of exterior aids – as persecuted Christians in Japan did for many centuries and my friend Fr Vincent Hai in the concentration camp in Vietnam. There is, though, a natural tendency for faith to express itself in art – in image, music, gesture and architecture. I think we are beginning to see the re-emergence of an appreciation of beauty in the service of faith, of a renewed Catholic imagination. Whatever arguments people may have about matters of style or theology, few would still say that art is irrelevant to faith.

Imagination is crucially important for us as preachers and pastors. The report of the Church Life Survey last year in the UK makes very sombre reading indeed. We don’t ask all the same questions in our Church Life Surveys here, but I suspect the UK results are broadly applicable here. The 14,000 respondents had some very harsh things to say about the standard of preaching in most churches, not just the Catholic churches. Well, there’s no excuse for that and I remind you of yesterday morning’s conference. Yet we might also say: Alleluia, at least they are there to notice, and at least they care about the homily. In fact it surprised those who undertook the UK study to find the level of importance most people placed on the sermon or homily. People are really interested in hearing the Gospel proclaimed and their faith explained to them – particularly how the teachings of Christ affect their daily life. They also want to be encouraged to live a distinctively Christian life. Surprisingly, perhaps, what many expressed a desire to hear was homilies that gave an exposition of the moral law – why some things are right and some wrong: a finding to warm the cockles of the heart of a moral theologian like myself!

If we are successfully to engage congregations with our preaching or creatively to approach new pastoral challenges (or old ones in new ways) then a well-furnished mind is a necessity. When there are pressing duties all around us, picking up a good novel or hopping on a bus to go to the gallery seems almost wicked luxury. So many clergy seem to be so busy, and like to talk about how busy they are, that leisure is regarded as criminal. High brow leisure is even worse, since you should be too exhausted for that. The plain fact is, though, that if we are to be interesting preachers, imaginative preachers, we have to keep putting good new things into our minds and hearts. And that will usually require sources other than the TV or the Internet, much as I love both. Reading theology may help expand and deepen our faith, and so I thoroughly recommend it. But rarely does it help our language and accessibility. For that we need to read good English, and that is rarely offered by theologians. Preaching is more than a job, but it is also a job like any other: it requires the perspiration of preparation and practice much more the inspiration of old and new insights, much as we treasure the latter if and when it arrives. Perhaps the most important aspect of that job is delight in words, to take joy in their ability to express thoughts and feelings, their beauty, their truth, and to do so accessibly yet interestingly.
 
The expansion and deepening of imagination through good art, music, literature, travel, recreation and conversation is absolutely essential if we are to avoid getting stale. It is also, I think, a great antidote to depression and demoralisation. These things lift us out of ourselves and transport us to new, better or at least different places; they enrich our present; they offer hope for our future. Anyone who thinks things couldn’t be worse for him or that no-one has been through what he’s going through and come out the other end a better man for it, lacks imagination. And the wonderful thing about reading and the other forms of imagination food I have been suggesting, is that we can piggy-back on other people’s imaginations, other people’s inspiration, incorporating the best of our civilisation into our own heart and head. There is no better weapon with which to contest with demons such as sloth and depression. St Thomas, by the way, suggests not only reading and contemplation, but also having a good cry, getting lots of sleep, keeping good company with sympathetic friends, taking a warm bath, or enjoying any licit activity that is fun. (ST Ia IIæ 38)

There is also a point to pointlessness. In our leisure-averse clerical culture it is common for us to feel that everything needs some sort of justification. We go for a walk “for our health”. We go to a BBQ because its “pastoral”. We read magazines to be “informed”. Everything seems to need some exterior validation. C. S. Lewis picks this well. In his Screwtape Letters he has the infernal uncle chiding the apprentice tempter:

And now for your blunders. On your own showing you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends. In the second place, you allowed him to walk down to the old mill and have tea there – a walk through country he really likes… Even in things indifferent it is always desirable to substitute the standards of the World, or convention, or fashion, for a human’s own real likings and dislikings. I myself would carry this very far. I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it quite trivial such as fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue about them: but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books. I have known of a human defended from strong temptation to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions.

You don’t always have to have solemn intentions and grand schemes for doing something. This is nowhere clearer than in the Liturgy. I’m often amazed by the category of “usefulness” applied to the Liturgy. Because it is our work, our job, it is easy for us to forget that there is absolutely no point to any of it, as ordinary pointfulness goes. It isn’t for anything apart from God, and God isn’t any-thing. It doesn’t produce anything but grace, which is no-thing at all. Take, for example, ecclesiastical and liturgical dress. Take its silliest variety: episcopal dress. It has been simplified in recent years in common with much ritual in the Church. My Novice Master said he lost all interest in being a bishop when they abolished the fun bits like buskins. I’m of the generation that has literally no idea what buskins are. But I do get to wear two hats at a time sometimes, and neither of them at all useful. The zucchetto I have been assured by several priests is to cover up the hole where they removed my spine at the laying on of hands at ordination! But what about the mitre? I remember seeing with a layman friend a rather weak sci-fi film starring Mel Gibson called Sightings in which the aliens conquered human beings by putting ideas in their heads, strange and frightening ideas. Our heroes responded by making tall pointy hats for themselves out of alfoil, to keep the alien ideas out. “At last I know what the mitre is for,” my friend announced, “It’s to keep ideas out!”

The fact is, it isn’t for anything really. There is no a priori reason why bishops shouldn’t wear beanies rather than mitres or carry a teddy bear in place of a crozier as a sign of office. You can adduce all sorts of symbolisms, but ultimately bishops wear pointy hats because they just do. The same might be said for some of the things you get to wear, both as clergy and as servicemen. And then there’s Christmas just ahead of us: apart from Yule parties in June, we Aussies have made precious few concessions to the climate of the Southern Hemisphere. Why do we have pine trees and spays cans of Santa Snow and roast turkeys in deepest summer? We just do. It wouldn’t be Christmas without them.

G. K. Chesterton, in a characteristically naughty way, once pointed out that when you read stories of conversion you find that people have been converted by almost anything that happens in Church. People have been converted by the sound of a bell, the smell of incense or burning beeswax, the rustle of vestments or the devotion of the congregation – almost everything except the sermon. Chesterton claimed never to have found an instance of someone being converted by a homily. I’m not sure what he would have made of the recent Church Life Survey, and I suspect old-fashioned anti-clericalism got the better of him on this occasion. His remark is nonetheless a useful reminder of the part imagination plays in our spiritual life. People are often most deeply affected by things other than lectures, homilies, arguments.

Yet without the rational ordering that comes from spoken discourse, even the most beautiful art is only a collection of sense impressions. In any case, even the homily can bring people to faith and repentance if it is done imaginatively. I know of at least one case where a man who had not practiced for twenty years was moved to conversion by the preaching when he came to visit the Cathedral on a sightseeing tour. We should never underestimate the power of our words to draw people to Christ, especially when circumstances allow us to preach to the “unchurched”, as is very much your task as service chaplains. Sermons on occasions such as weddings and funerals provide an opportunity to lead people to Christ who rarely get to hear the Gospel preached. You don’t have to be ostentatiously and offensively evangelical, but a creative and unambiguous statement of the central truths of the faith might be all the urging someone needs to come home.

The most fascinating thing about art, music and literature is their ability to bridge gaps of history and culture. A portrait or sculpture or story or poem or symphony or song or biography or history, existing for a time in the mind of the author and then transferred, as it were, through eyes and ears into another mind, is an analogue of the same leap that we try make when we preach, trying to engage the mind and heart of someone else, trying to get inside them, as it were. Reading The Cross of Anzac these past few days, I have been carried away to foreign lands and times before I was born, and felt at times as if I was almost there. Hear this story told by a soldier about the lawyer-priest Edward Sydes. Following the action of the 2nd Division during the March 1918 offensive, Fr Sydes had accompanied his unit at the battles of Amiens and Beaurevoir. During the battle of Le Cateau in October of that year – the last battle fought by the AIF in World War One as it broke through the Hindenberg Line – he was caught by a release of ‘friendly’ gas which ultimately killed him. One of his men recorded:

Padre Sydes… Lord, he was a dinkum! Boys of all creeds gave him their affection – Tommies, Yanks, Froggies and Aussies all brightened at his approach. That last Mass he said on the wagon lines in the wood of Frechencourt, will you ever forget it? You will remember how we built him an altar under the trees with birch-bark and saplings and camouflaged it overhead to hide it from Fritz’s aeroplanes. It is a scene that will always live in my memory. Five hundred men gathered there in the shadow of the elms and many of them received Holy Communion from his hands. You remember the wonderful setting of that celebration with the occasional bursting interruption of Fritz’s long-range high-velocity, and the distance-softening roar of our own counter-battery effort. And that congregation – men from every state of Australia, from Oklahoma, Wyoming, Virginia, New York, Chicago, ’Frisco, England, Ireland, Scotland, New Zealand, France and Belgium! The old Padre was a great Australian, and never did he miss a change of talking Australianism.

“It is a scene that will always live in my memory,” the young soldier wrote. “You remember the wonderful setting of that celebration”. And now nearly a century later, the scene and setting do live, however imperfectly, in the memories and imaginations of other people, because of the power of a good story, well told, to bridge gaps of time and space, language and temperament.

 “Hoc facite in meam commemorationem”: Do this in memory of me. Our world has amnesia. If you ask many people to put in chronological order Martin Luther King, Martin Luther, Aristotle & Aristotle Onassis they would probably have no idea. Amidst rapid social, technological, economic and cultural change, we have little sense of tradition, custom, inheritance, genealogy or we flail about artificially trying to recapture it. Recently a woman asked if I could instruct her to be received into the Catholic Church: her reason was that she needed a tradition, a history, a structure she could rely on, to be at home in. Some people think memories and history are a constraint on creativity, imagination, the future. But memory, as much as present perceptions, is exactly what feeds imagination. And those who lack a sense of history are doomed to repeat the worst of the past. They lack an identity. They are rootless. People with amnesia are not freer! Those who have a good memory – of history, science, geography, art, theology – as well as a good imagination, have the best minds, for they can draw on all that was, and is, and is to come, or at least some of it, for thinking and feeling in the here and now.

There are two poems, one by Martial and another by James McAuley. They both treat the death of an infant. They are separated by a period of two thousand years and are diverse in language and religion, yet the deep emotion is palpable in both. Martial uses the form of a prayer addressed to the shades of his parents to look after her in Hades lest she be terrified of the shadows or the jaws of Cerberus. He imagines her playing at their feet and lisping his name. It ends with the heart-wrenching line: “O Earth lay not heavily on her, for she was not heavy on thee.” McAuley was a twentieth century Australian Catholic who describes in a short poem Pieta the death of a new born child.

A year ago you came
early into the light.
You lived a day and night,
then died; no-one to blame.
Once only, with one hand,
your mother in farewell
touched you. I cannot tell,
I cannot understand a thing so dark and deep.
So physical a loss:
one touch and that was all
she had of you to keep.
Clean wounds but terrible
are those made by the Cross.

Burying people before their time is one of the most difficult aspects of our ministry. You might occasionally have children; more often you probably have to bury young men or women barely beyond their childhood. It is emotionally draining and so easy to get wrong. It is the occasion on which we would like most just to be able to say nothing – lapsing into a comfortable silence. The ability to use the voices of others, such as Martial or McAuley – not just by way of quotation, but also by utilising their insights – is one substantial benefit of sustained reading, as of any means of feeding our minds and hearts, our imaginations and memories. As St Augustine said Tolle! Lege! Pick it up and read it!

These past few days you have suffered me as Retreat Master with great patience and good humour. I have genuinely enjoyed your company. I remember once being told by a Jesuit that while Dominicans had community, Jesuits have esprit d’corps. I’ve certainly met esprit d’corps among you. But there is genuine friendship and fraternal support here also, and passion for building up the kingdom of God amongst our servicemen and women. Thank God for that. Please keep looking after each other – and look after your bishop!

I asked at the start of our time together what might be done for those clergy suffering low morale at this time. There are obvious answers, ranging from cosmetic to deep institutional change, from surface to profound personal conversion, from shooting the misbehaving congregant or killing the bishop to living-and-letting-live. I wondered if our spiritual tradition had anything to offer us here. I hope that with my scatter-gun I have hit upon a few things that might help, at least some of us, some of the time. One is to reflect more deeply upon the nature of the Church as the Casta Meretrix, the chaste harlot, both sinner and saved; and to reflect more deeply also on the nature of human happiness, with the aid of that most subversive text, the beatitudes. By turning our ideas of blessedness on their head, Jesus might well have something important to say to us when we are of low spirits, mourning, meek, persecuted or hungering for justice. Our spiritual tradition certainly knows about saints who fail, the dark night of the soul, and the heart that is restless until it rests in God. Likewise we know about hell, whether on earth or in the next life. We can see both heaven and hell on the Cross: God’s desire for our love and the consequences of the rejection of that love. We need to cultivate again the sense of sin and the ‘nonsense’ of forgiveness – not just in our flocks but in ourselves. We need have mercy on the Church, and on ourselves, and bring them to both sides of the confessional.

On Tuesday I suggested that we mine our ascetical tradition for some medicine for the soul. There are strange and wonderful things to be found there about subduing the sense appetites, cultivating self-mastery through moderation, mortification and self-denial, weeding the soul and making room for virtues and good works to blossom. When we are too comfortable with our creature-comforts, judgmentalism or self-pity these might be just what we need. On the other hand, we sometimes need a good laugh, a good meal, a good drink, the company of good friends, to give or receive hospitality. Jesus, I suggested, loved to party; he founded a high-cholesterol religion. He certainly would approve, especially if it helps us to laugh at ourselves and with others. For he wants us to have life, life to the full.

Yesterday I suggested two more pieces of the puzzle: getting out preaching and staying in at the Eucharist. Both go to the very heart of our identity. We must bring our world with us to contemplation and sacrament, and then take that grace back out with us to the world in our preaching and pastoral ministry. Preaching is another antidote to self-satisfaction and self-pity: for it takes the preacher out of himself and exposes him to a world sometimes hostile, welcoming or indifferent, demanding he make the joys and griefs of others his own. At the same time, if it is Christian revelation that informs his words, he will bring a universal and eternal perspective to the very particular concerns of his world. A truly Marian, Eucharistic and Ecclesial preaching, that is above all a work of mercy, offers this. Like the frail old Curé of Ars, we might finish our days preaching in faltering tones but reducing our congregation to tears of love and penitence as they hear the Incarnate and Resurrected One speaking through our words.

But words are not all: the silence and song of the Eucharistic action also change us and our world. I suggested that if we capture something of Mary’s contemplation, Peter’s right order and John’s love in our Eucharistic celebrations we might find them trans-substantiating not only the elements but the priest and deacon as well. With Mark’s help, this coming year, we might learn to make a lonely place for the Father to speak to us in prayer, as we petition with and for the Church and the world, and offer prayers of sacrifice, thanksgiving and praise. And today I invited you to reflect on how we might cultivate a truly Catholic imagination, big enough to encompass all that is good and true and beautiful. So I will conclude with Paul’s last words to the Philippians (4:8-9, 23):

Finally, my brothers, whatever is true, honourable and just, whatever is pure, lovely and gracious; if there is any excellence, anything worthy of praise: think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, do; and the God of peace will be with you… The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.