The Spirit of the Synod
God’s way
WHEN JESUS’ Passion drew near, John tells us that he said: “The time has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (12:24).
The Synod on Synodality, the three-year process of listening and dialogue which will reach its climax in Rome this October, will only be fruitful if it is also a time of a little dying. After the first assembly of the Synod finished last October, there were complaints that nothing much had been achieved. After all of the razzmatazz, the final document, the Synthesis, said the question of women deacons should be “studied” – for the third time! The document even seemed to retreat from the preparatory document on the welcoming of LGBT people. The word was not even mentioned. It was all seen as rather a flop by many.
The Synod had anticipated this misunderstanding. When seeds fall into the ground, nothing much appears to happen. They quietly germinate underground until springtime. Pope Francis insisted time and again that the Synod is not a parliamentary body, gathered to make quick decisions. The Holy Spirit is the protagonist of the Synod. Any change is deep, organic and at times hardly perceptible. That is God’s way. When Jesus died on the Cross and rose on Easter Sunday, the world appeared to carry on as before. The Empire seemed unchanged. But the Kingdom was here.
I SEE THE SPIRIT at work in the Synod in at least three ways, and each of them invites us to a sort of death so that we might live. The first is through learning to share in the divine friendship. It might sound odd to say that the first stage of the synodal process, whether in Rome or in your local parish, is to be open to new and unexpected friendships. But the Kingdom of God burst into the world 2,000 years ago when Jesus offered friendship to all sorts of odd, marginalised sinners. He ate and drank with prostitutes and corrupt and despised tax collectors. This was a sharing in the life of God, which St Thomas Aquinas believed was the eternal equal friendship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
At the first session of the Synod, the Holy Spirit worked through our encounters with each other. Barriers fell and friendships were born. I had been to three previous synods. They had what I call “an ecclesiology of hats”. At the centre was a white hat. Then a couple of circles of red hats. Then lots of purple hats. And then on the fringes were the un-hatted, like me. We all read out eight-minute speeches we had prepared at home, and then left. Pretty boring on the whole. This time we all sat at round tables. Cardinals and bishops sat with young people, women from Latin America, religious brothers and sisters. The youngest was a 19-year-old from Wyoming.
All the members of the Synod engaged in “conversations in the Spirit”. Everyone at the table was asked to speak for four minutes. No one could interrupt. Then, after a brief silence, a round of reactions and, finally, an assessment of where they agreed, disagreed or might converge. Each table had a facilitator, often a woman, who stopped anyone – including the cardinals – from talking too much. A senior Vatican archbishop said to me: “Look at those Roman cardinals. They are having to listen to the baptised in respectful silence. They will never be the same again.”
In friendship, you do not just draw near to others, you are transformed. You have to die a little bit, let go of who you have been. Every profound friendship carries you outside of yourself. You become a new person, even if only in a very small way. Recently I had a major bout of cancer, my second go. As I faced my mortality, I began to make jottings about my life and I realised that I am the fruit of all the friendships and loves that I have formed, and sometimes of my failures to love too.
Who we are as citizens of the Kingdom is yet to be fully discovered. St John says in his first letter: “It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when [Christ] appears, we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). Our identity is hidden in Christ. To be open to friendship demands that you do not care too much for your identity. As Iris Murdoch said: “The chief requirement of the good life is to live without any image of oneself.”
So the challenge for the Church is to become the community of God’s friends. This is incompatible with “clericalism”, the elevation of the ordained above the baptised into a superior caste. It is not surprising that some priests and bishops have been the most resistant to the synodal path of any group in the Church. It can look like a rejection of their priestly identity. But without the support of the clergy, the synodal process will not take off. It is urgent we evolve an affirmative vision of the priestly identity that cherishes this vocation as a beautiful calling at the heart of the Church. What this new priestly identity is to be is not yet clear to me, though it surely means being ordered, ordained, in every fibre of our being, to friendship, as was Our Lord. Visiting a gathering of tribal people in the north of Pakistan, I spotted their priest, an American Dominican, sitting on the ground in the midst of his people, wearing their clothes and doubtless “smelling of his sheep”, as Pope Francis likes to say. Yes, I thought, that is what priesthood looks like.
WE ARE ALL INVITED to a sort of Good Friday in which we die to the narrow, defensive identities which we construct to shore up our sense of who we are. Our society is obsessed with identity. Gender identity, ethnic or class identity (the British speciality), sexual identity, the politics of identity. Identity is to be chosen and constructed. I watched Barbie on my way to Australia, and it was surprisingly profound. Barbieland embraces the American Dream that you can be anything you choose to be. Absurd. I could never be a mathematician or run a four-minute mile. For Christians, identity is not chosen or constructed. It is discovered or even left behind as we say, Jesus is Lord.
In Barbieland, death must not even be mentioned. But Christians embrace Good Friday, when the solitary seed falls into the ground and dies so that it becomes multiplied. This began to happen in the Synod, as barriers fell, and we were invited to step beyond the constricting identities of left and right, north and south, even, I hope, young and old, and become one in the Lord, as the Son and the Father are one. This is a sign of hope in a world increasingly divided by war and violence.
This brings me to the second way I think the Spirit is at work in the Synod. The Holy Spirit invites us to move
beyond
our comfort zones as westerners. At Pentecost the Spirit came upon the
community in Jerusalem, sending them to the ends of the earth. But the
Apostles did not want to go. They wanted to remain in the Holy City and
enjoy each other’s company, a small Jewish community. It was persecution
which drove them out of the nest to embrace all of us Gentiles. If that
had not happened, we would not be here today.
This is what the Spirit does. It drives people out of their comfort zone into the wider world of God’s friends. When I lived in Rome, kestrels used to nest over my office window. Every year there would be the drama of when the parents kicked the little kestrels out of the nest. They used to hover in front of my window, desperately trying to fly. The Holy Spirit is like a big Mother Kestrel, booting us out of our comfort zone.
Something similar began to happen to many of us westerners at the Synod. We came with our own western agenda. We had our hot-button topics. We saw the world through western eyes. But we got a shock. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, many argued that we had entered a new era, the triumph of western liberal democracy. Every nation was destined to “evolve” into our way of life. If some countries, especially in the Global South, did not agree with us on, for example, the welcome of gay people, they would catch up eventually.
We were wrong. We are entering a multipolar world. The West is no longer the automatic point of reference for most of the world’s population. I’m not sure we have even begun to imagine what it means to be one in Christ’s body with our brothers and sisters from Africa and Asia and Latin America. During the first Iraq war, the Dominican family organised a month-long fast for peace in Union Square, New York. We gave out bumper stickers: “We have family in Iraq.” Imagine the consequences of really being their brothers and sisters? We are called to be primarily citizens of the Kingdom of God, not of Britain. At the Reformation, embracing that Catholic – universal – identity before any national identity brought many people to poverty and even to martyrdom. What might it cost us today to see the world through the eyes of the Kingdom? Perhaps even our lives.
And here we get to a crunch point for the synodal process. We must open ourselves to other cultures, other brothers and sisters in the Kingdom. Fratelli tutti! But Pope Francis also asks us to open the Church to everyone, whoever they are. Todos, todos, todos (“All, all, all”): the divorced and remarried, gay people, transgender people. But in some parts of the world, the welcome of gay people is seen as scandalous. Most Catholic bishops in Africa see it as an attempt to impose a decadent western ideology on the rest of the world. Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo of Kinshasa, president of the organisation which represents all of the Catholic bishops of Africa, sees this as symptomatic of a doomed western culture. A few weeks ago, he said: “Little by little, they [the westerners] will disappear. I wish them a good demise.”
HOW CAN WE reconcile the two imperatives of the Francis papacy – to be outward-looking, to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth, to all cultures and to be open to all human beings, whatever their situation and whoever they are? The dilemma exploded over Fiducia supplicans, the declaration of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith which granted permission for priests, in very specific situations, to bless couples in “irregular” relationships, including same-sex couples. Cardinal Ambongo came to Rome to present the African bishops’ firm rejection of the proposal. Never before have all the bishops of a continent repudiated a Vatican document. Every attempt was made to play down the crisis. The Pope had approved the declaration. Cardinal Ambongo maintained that African exceptionalism was an example of synodality. Unity does not mean uniformity, he pointed out. The Gospel is inculturated differently in different parts of the world.
But it raises more complex issues than that. Yes, the Gospel is always inculturated in different cultures, but it also challenges every culture. Jesus was both Jewish and challenged the religion of his ancestors. Is the rejection of the blessing of gay people in Africa an example of inculturation – or a refusal to be countercultural? One person’s inculturation is another person’s rejection of the countercultural Gospel. Another concern over Fiducia supplicans is that there does not seem to have been any consultation – even with bishops or other departments in the Vatican – before it was released – not, perhaps, a good example of synodality. African bishops are under vast pressure from Evangelicals with American money; from Russian Orthodox with Russian money; and from Muslims with money from wealthy Gulf states. There should have been discussion with them before, not after, the declaration was published. Whatever we might think about the declaration, when faced with tensions, to move forward we all have to think and engage with each other at a deep level.
The third way I see the Spirit at work in the Synod is in leading us towards the fullness of truth. This is another sort of Good Friday. From time to time in the life of the Church we have painful moments when we die to a certain understanding of our faith and the Christian life so that we may move more deeply into the mystery of God. It is like kissing someone. You see someone on the other side of the room. You see all of them. They come closer and you hug them. Now they disappear except for their face. You kiss them and they become invisible, not because they have gone but because of a new intimacy. And so it is with God. From time to time we seem to lose God, to enter a dark night, but only so that we may become closer.
This has happened throughout the history of the Church. It happened in the thirteenth century, when the West rediscovered the lost works of Aristotle. It led to a theological transformation, largely through the teaching of Aquinas. It happened again at the Renaissance, often through Jesuit theologians. The Synod is continuing the seismic shift which began at the Second Vatican Council. Each of these moments was a dying and rising.
This is alarming for many people. Friends of mine protest that they became Catholics because they longed for certainty, clarity. The certainty remains: that God became human, died and rose and gave himself to us in the Eucharist. All the doctrines of the Creed remain unshaken. But our search to understand more deeply what these doctrines mean sometimes leads us into perplexity. In the thirteenth century, Aquinas observed that “Blessed are those who mourn” was a beatitude especially for those who seek knowledge and understanding: “We are joined to God as to the unknown,” he said. We have to die to old ways of thinking so as to enter more deeply into the mystery. This can be tough.
NOT ALL of this truth-seeking can be done by the Synod alone. Francis has set up various commissions to reflect on urgent issues, from the role of the bishop to different forms of ministry and the role of women. This is part of our witness to a world which has fallen out of love with truth, which is flooded with fake news and mad conspiracy theories, with “your” truth and “my” truth rather than the truth. As Pope Benedict liked to say, we have lost a sense of the grandeur of reason.
Good Friday is a good day on which to think about the Synod. It summons us to different ways of dying so that we may live. The seed must fall into the ground and die if it is to bear fruit. In a world which sees identity as to be chosen or constructed, the divine friendship invites us to let go of self-images and discover who we are in the mystery of Christ. There is also a dying to our own western-centric identity, as we search to understand what it means to live as citizens of the Kingdom. And, finally, the Spirit invites us to die to old ways of thinking so that we may enter more deeply into the mystery of God. This will be the work of the coming months. In the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa said that we will forever be just at the beginning of understanding God, but Jesus “is the same yesterday, today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).
Adapted from a talk given at Stonyhurst College, Clitheroe, on Good Friday.
Timothy Radcliffe OP is a former master of the Dominican Order, an itinerant lecturer, broadcaster, preacher and retreat-giver. The talks and meditations he shared with the delegates to the Synod are collected together in Listening Together: Meditations on Synodality (Liturgical Press £11.99; Tablet price £10.79
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