Sunday October 8, 2017
Cult with Conversion
In an ancient civilization, a caveman discovered fire. He invented a simple instrument for making fire and learned cooking and melting and other uses for it. As he began to share his new discovery with other cavemen the priests got to hear about it. Being afraid that with this new power they would lose some of their hold over the people, they had the fire-inventing-cave-man murdered. But then they were afraid that the people might rise up against them so they have a big picture of the inventor painted and a big shrine made. There in the shrine they put the picture and the instruments for making fire. Through this cult they killed fire and it was several thousand years before it was discovered again.
In today's Gospel story we read of the owner of the vineyard who sends out his servants to collect from his tenants. But the tenants beat one, killed another and stoned a third. After this pattern was repeated the landowner decided to send his own son, thinking, "They will respect my son." But they dragged him outside the vineyard and killed him. The allegory is clear. The owner is God and the tenants are the people of Israel, the Jews. The servants are the Prophets and the various messengers and were sent to convert Israel. The Son is Jesus who was taken outside the city of Jerusalem and killed. The vineyard was then given to other tenants, the Gentiles or non-Jews.
The Savior is still being taken outside the city and being killed today and one of the ways that this happens is through cult and ritual. Cult and ritual play a very important part in our lives: 1) Cult and ritual help us to express the inexpressible. Almost every people known to anthropologists have used ritual to express their awareness of and their effort to relate to transcendence - the something or someone beyond. 2) Rituals underline that something is beyond the ordinary and needs to have some fuss made about it. Examples would be; the installation of a president; graduation at the end of studies; entrance into the Christian community at Baptism. 3) Ritual gives us something appropriate and relieving to do in times of stress. This is the value of the funeral ritual. 4) Ritual signals transition. Having done the appropriate thing we can now move on to the next stage.
While rituals can be very helpful in dealing with difficult or intangible parts of reality they can also be destructive. They can become an escape from facing or coping with reality. Rituals can become an escape from conversion to the Lord and to act according to God's plan. This phenomenon has been condemned in the Old and in the New Testament. The Prophets of the Old Testament ranted against those who offered sacrifice and failed to care for the widow and the orphan. In the judgment scene, in Matthew 25, answering the cry of the needy, and not worship or sacrifice, are the criteria for admission into heavenly glory. We can very easily use symbols, cult, or rituals to put God on a pedestal - up there, out of our way. Through reverence we can take him out of the city and kill him. It can often be done by a sincere reverence.
A few years ago I began having Sunday Mass in the poorest area of the parish so as to make it easy for the poor to come. However, it is not the poor but the middle class of the area who come to the Mass. The poor do not come because they have no special clothes into which to change. The practice of changing to go to church - which is good in itself as it is a sign of great reverence for God - became a reason for not coming al all! This kind of reverence has put people outside the walls of worship.
It has been traditional for communities in the Philippines to have barrio (village) chapels. They are a symbol of God at the center of the community uniting all. But do they? Sometimes they multiply because different groups cannot agree or want to be independent. It has been said that the existence of many church buildings is a sign that people believe in God but it may also be a sign that they do not love their neighbors and therefore a sign that they do not love God.
This issue is becoming very obvious in the contemporary Philippine scene. The preferred way of being Church today is according to the Basic Ecclesial Community model. This has been especially endorsed by the 1991 Second Plenary Council of the Philippines. The important shift that this indicates is that God is no longer sought only in the institution but now is primarily sought amongst the people in the small local communities. This shift in theology brings up the practical question then: Would it be more practical and even more religious to have a multipurpose community center where religious services can also take place rather than just have a barrio chapel, which is often a shelter for pigs and goats in the time between the celebrations of feasts? In this way the secular is made sacred, and the presence of God in all activities of the community is acknowledged.
I think it is true to say that through reverence and ritual we have conveniently taken Christ outside the secular city to crucify him. Today we are called to acknowledge his presence in all things and in all places. This development must begin with our personal prayer lives. As the Constitution on the Sacred liturgy of Vatican II said: "The spiritual life is not limited solely to participation in the liturgy. The Christian is indeed called to pray with others, but he must also enter into his bedroom and pray to his Father in secret; furthermore, according to the apostle, he must pray without ceasing (#12)." It is from being present in prayer at our own centers that we learn to be present in liturgy and worship.
Recently I was instructing an adult who wished to be baptized a Catholic. She had been attending Mass for some time, and I asked her how she felt about the experience. "It is very good when I feel that the priest is in it," she said, "but I often feel that he is not there."
Christian meditation is a way of prayer that will bring us "to being there" when we are with the community listening to the scriptures, in hearing them as they struggle to meet the problems of their lives, and in worship. These will become ways of meeting Christ and being converted by him rather than being ways of taking him outside the walls and crucifying him.