Walking together
'Experiment with Light', Sunday 4 May
Edge of a structure, like a wooden deck, that isn’t quite finished. It’s sodden. There's been lots of rain. I’m looking over the edge of the deck, down to soaked ground and bushes - a steep, sudden drop.
Now its Francis standing on the edge of this sodden, half-finished platform, looking down to the wet ground. At one point, looking out to crowds and crowds - the world.
Now we’re down in the bushes below the platform. A wet muddy path, very boggy and dark. Vines and creepers, thick bush all around.
The path ahead becomes straighter, wider. Thick bush thins out into trees. Francis is here, silent, assured. We’re walking the path silently together.
We leave the big trees, the forest. We’re out in the open. Low bushes and greenery on either side. The path gets boggy again as we come to a crossroads. One path, to the left, heads up a steep hill, back into thick bush. The path to the right keeps us out in the open, headed gently downhill. Which path will Francis take?
Silent and confident, he turns right. Keeps walking ahead.
Discernment and reflection:
Francis prefers the lower path, out in the open, rather than return to ‘elevated ground’. He walks into the low places of the world.
This in my path and challenge too: lower your spirit. Not in the sense of feeling oppressed or depressed, but in staying level, grounded, awake to the Spirit enfleshed and all around. As Francis wrote at the start of his papacy: “realities are more important than ideas”:
time is greater than space, unity prevails over conflict, realities are more important than ideas, and the whole is greater than the parts…
Realities are greater than ideas. This principle has to do with incarnation of the word and its being put into practice… (1)
Today is my first Sunday as the new Vicar's Warden at St Mary's. Our Vicar is sick. I’ve phoned around and arranged a replacement. I'll head off early to make sure all the little details are right Actually, there's nothing for me to do.
AH has opened up and switched on the heating. JD has all the liturgy stuff set up. AB is gowned up and is prepping our gracious replacement, a former bishop who fills in whenever we call him. I had interrupted him last night watching the rugby.
There’s nothing for me to do but go around and light the candles, smile and greet people, be present and wait.
My hopes for the Catholic Church rest on this one idea:
Synodality.
Or this one idea - a process conception of the church - becoming a reality. As Francis said at the start of his papacy: time is greater than space...
…unity prevails over conflict, realities are more important than ideas, and the whole is greater than the parts. (2)
Synodality brings together these four guiding principles and begins to implement them into the life of the church. It builds on what Vatican II articulated as “the people of God” - both the “hierarchical priesthood” (clergy) and the “common priesthood” (laity) working together in the mission of the church. (3)
The 2024 Synod on Synodality, led by Francis, summarized it like this:
The anointing by the Holy Spirit received at Baptism (cf. 1 Jn 2.20. 27) enables all believers to possess an instinct for the truth of the Gospel. We refer to this as the sensus fidei. This consists in a certain connaturality with divine realities based on the fact that, in the Holy Spirit, the Baptised become ‘sharers [participants] in the divine nature’. From this participation comes the aptitude to grasp intuitively what conforms to the truth of Revelation in the communion of the Church. (4)
On the ground, synodality has so far involved Catholics all over the world - lay people, religious sisters and brothers, clergy, bishops, and cardinals - meeting in their parishes and dioceses, meeting in small groups, or just on their own, discussing their experience and vision of the church, and sending written feedback to their dioceses and ultimately to the Vatican for the Church to read, collate, publish, and listen to.
Ultimately, this feedback is to be used by the ‘hierarchical priesthood’ as it exercises its functions and responsibilities in guiding and leading the church, or feeds into the leadership of all the people of God as they live out their distinctive roles and vocations, what has more recently been termed differentiated co-responsibility. (5). More than just a feedback or listening process, synodality is centred on the experience of being alongside each other, encountering each other, walking together, as the whole, universal (“Catholic”) people of God. Walking with each other in the Church and beyond the Church:
Synodality is the walking together of Christians with Christ and towards God’s Kingdom, in union with all humanity. Orientated towards mission, synodality involves gathering at all levels of the Church for mutual listening, dialogue, and communal discernment. It also involves reaching consensus as an expression of Christ rendering Himself present, He who is alive in the Spirit. (6)
Practically, synodality is what is most unfinished in terms of Francis’s papacy, and what is most urgent - and fragile - in terms of his successor. Will the next Pope keep “walking together” with all sectors of the church, all ‘the people of God’, indeed, “in union with all humanity”? Will the Church keep discerning the Spirit in the midst of this process, leading it on further, encountering new truth and light? Will the ‘hierarchical’ and the ‘common priesthood’ keep talking, listening together? Or will the new Pope turn away, return to higher ground, and suggest all this walking and listening was just a ‘Francis thing’?
The Conclave begins this Wednesday, 7 May (Vatican time).
References:
(1) Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”), (2013), paragrahs 222-237, paragraph 233; retrieved from https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html#III.%E2%80%82The_common_good_and_peace_in_society.
(2) As above
(3) See Lumen Gentium (“Light of the Nations”, 1964), especially chapter II, “the people of God”, for example (from paragraph 10): "Christ the Lord, High Priest taken from among men, made the new people "a kingdom and priests to God the Father". The baptized, by regeneration and the anointing of the Holy Spirit, are consecrated as a spiritual house and a holy priesthood...Though they differ from one another in essence and not only in degree, the common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood are nonetheless interrelated: each of them in its own special way is a participation in the one priesthood of Christ.The ministerial priest, by the sacred power he enjoys, teaches and rules the priestly people; acting in the person of Christ, he makes present the Eucharistic sacrifice, and offers it to God in the name of all the people. But the faithful, in virtue of their royal priesthood, join in the offering of the Eucharist. They likewise exercise that priesthood in receiving the sacraments, in prayer and thanksgiving, in the witness of a holy life, and by self-denial and active charity.”
(4) Synod on Synodality (2024), retrieved from https://fsspx.news/en/news/synod-synodality-ripe-fruit-second-vatican-council-1-48598.
(5) See the excellent, pre-Conclave discussion on synodality, and interview with Anna Rowlands, Professor of Theology at Durham University and a theological advisor to the Synod on Synodality, by the Jesuit “America” team, at https://youtu.be/UMKQUpzJK2Q?si=2LihvpKz7SNRIcov.
(6) Synod on Synodality (2024), as above.
Image:
Pilgrims, from an unknown medieval manuscript.
