This is a guest blog by community member Frank Freeman. If you're interested in sharing your thoughts about spirituality and theology with the CSC community, please contact Jamey at stegmaier@washucsc.org.
The following item was copied from a journal (http://ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/rabbi-and-archbishop-connect-and-thoughts-new-theologians) telling about an experience of speaking to Catholics:
"As part of the deal, I was asked to deliver the convocation address, which presented a rare opportunity to speak directly to a sample of the next generation of theologians. Here's a synopsis of what I said.
First, I delivered a simple two-word message, one that, in my experience, theologians don't hear nearly often enough: "Thank you."
Thank you, I said, for putting your intellect, your passions and your lives at the service of faith seeking understanding. It's an arduous enterprise, and you're probably more likely to hear from people mad at you than from those quietly grateful. The vitality of the church, however, depends in no small way on your work."
The above words call attention to the need for theology to interpret for us the end of the world theme in the Gospel of Matthew. Theology tells us what we can’t just “see” without help. Simple morality, the life of the heart, and the pursuit of justice all will continue in existence to the very end of time. And those things all matter now and will come again to matter a second time.
Without the theology, we would be easily subject to the flood of symbols and thoughts that circulate just below the surface.
Just below the surface, we are cynical. We feel that justice and simple morality and the feelings we have are unimportant. Theology helps us to put our faith into perspective and to try to understand that we really are important. Theology can tell us not to become cynical and that God will not buy into it when we become cynical and dysfunctional.
What theology wont do is to “freshening up” our images. Those images are too deeply embedded to change. Theology goes around them, not through them. Theology tells us that even to the end of time, what we are now is what God sees and responds to. Our images don’t tell us that belief. Our images tell us to give up hope! Matthew teaches us about our images and “threads” the images with the moral lessons we need to live without fear and with hope. Otherwise, Matthew’s knowledge of the end of the world is the same as the pagans have.
It seems like very bad news, and Matthew does nothing to cover it up or give it a sugar coating.
Our “Catholic” beliefs about the end of the world (and Matthew’s direct images) come from our pagan ancestors. They also come from certain Protestant and Evangelical non-Catholic-Christians, most of whom do not acknowledge how pagan they actually are. It is tempting to fall for the Protestant non-Catholic theological rhetoric and to believe that we are privileged in a special way. That somehow some of us will be privileged. The Catholic theologians say, “no sale.” They don’t buy into the message that we are privileged. They buy into the message of hope: that God loves us as we are. The Protestant-non-Catholic is selling a privilege. The privilege of watching the end of the world from a box seat where nothing bad happens to the spectators. Not so. God will destroy what he chooses. There are no exceptions.
Sell? We are not sold. We are pretty much the same as the pagans.
Jesus says as much when he says that no man knows, only the Father. He could just as easily have said, the pagans have as much right to their beliefs as you do because you are doing guess work about a subject of which you are ignorant.
Our theologians teach us to accept our images of the end of the world because they are built in. Even though they are nothing other than the common, pagan, estimation, they are what we have inside us. We may substitute a scientific belief; but we will soon find out that even the scientists love science fiction more than their own predictions about the running down of the energy reserves. The point is that we are all caught up in that fiction. We don’t know; but that doesn’t stop us from trying. The fiction points out to us that the world will end. It isn’t stable, and it will, at some point, exhaust itself or else just run out of time. It will fall upon itself; or it will come to a staggering defeat due to some or other force. A merely natural force could do us in. A powerful god might give a decree that also does the job.
We pray that God not extend the end time so long that everyone on earth loses all hope and all faith.
It is a prayer for mercy. Did Jesus command us to pray that way. Yes. He commanded us to pray that way. The prayer will play a role in what God chooses. That much insight comes from our faith. The pagan images don’t seem to leave a lot of room for the fruition of our prayer life. Jesus says that it will be that way and it will be very bad if our prayers are too weak or so nonexistent that God has to act on his own. Jesus has commanded us to hold up our end of the bargain. And that it will bear fruit if we do. Just like the famous fig tree that unlike the faithless one, brought forth fruit. The other one earned a curse for only doing leaves. We seem to be one or the other of those two trees. And we have a command as to which one works. Our prayers will work. That form of belief is not cynical,of course; but we are born to believe otherwise and have to go the whole nine yards to trust in Jesus. We will always have the gut feeling that our prayers are the empty sound of an empty water reservoir. The old kind that each town mounted on stilts. We will never actually see our prayers accumulating into the fruition of the end time events. Until it happens. Until then, have faith. And make your faith produce works worthy of God’s trust in you. Theologically speaking, of course. Who knows any better than that?
