Ann Rennie Reflects

Catholic is my language, Catholic is the coat I wear, Catholic is the house in which I live, wrote the American essayist, Brian Doyle, and I know just what he means.  It’s hard to describe the intangibles of belonging to a faith except to say that over the years it becomes part of how you see yourself and the way you respond to the world around you. 

Catholic is the air I breathe, the prompt for my impromptu prayers and my belief in miracles.  It is the joy in hymns of praise and the muffled mutterings of the creed and the wail of a baby being dipped into a baptismal font.  It is my affection for the Sisters FCJ and gratitude for their gentleness and humility in the attention-seeking hurly-burly of life today. 

It is the family faith passed on from one generation to the next. It is my spiritual inheritance, a work in progress as I age and hold on to the things I know to be true. True for me.

It was my grandmother’s insistence on saying ten decades of the rosary before I retired, exhausted by devotion, to sleep under a picture of the Sacred Heart.  It was feast days and saints’ days and St. Patrick’s for the richness of ceremony and St. Francis’ to light a candle in the Ladye Chapel.  It was my father doling out 20 cent pieces to each of the seven kids for the plate at St. Francis Xavier’s in Box Hill, putting the boys to the Jesuits, reading The Advocate after Mass and sending money to the missions in India.  It was singing at rock masses in the seventies and knowing Jesus before he was a superstar.  It was my convent school where the nuns ruled in their black habits and the devil’s job was to tempt us at every turn.  It was my mother’s devotion to St. Gerard Majella and St. Jude and St. Anthony and running us up to church for the confession of pinching a sister or four.  It was three Hail Mary’s and a Glory Be as penance.  It was the smell of incense caught at the back of my throat and the slippery bees-waxed pews in the school chapel and the plaster-cast saints in front of whom I knelt.  It was swapping holy pictures and learning that God loved me.  It was the importance of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, and the power of prayer and guardian angels watching over me as I slept. 

But this is a holy picture of the past and it is gone. 

It is held close with affection, glued into the album that tells of how we worshipped half a century ago.  But now we have a new landscape to navigate, a new way of being, if we are to continue as the pilgrim Church on Earth. 

This will involve some letting go!

As I look ahead and imagine the future of the Church and its people, I wonder how God will lead us.  The Plenary Council has asked us to consider what the Holy Spirit is asking of us at this time.  We are trying to find answers that acknowledge the here and now, the secular reality, whilst holding onto to those traditional and sacred elements that have steadied us over the years; those deep anchors that have moored us for centuries. 

The teenager I was at fourteen is light years away from the fourteen-year-old today.  The things that were normal and accepted by me fifty years ago are now seen as antiquarian, antediluvian.  The rules are changing.  There are multiple choices, distractions and ideologies.  The world of technology and its influence, for better and worse, is ubiquitous.  The moral authorities of the past no longer prevail, institutional respect is in decline, much leadership is lacklustre and our young people want and deserve a world of their making, a world that is hospitable to all, a world that offers hope and justice and peace.

What I do know and understand is that we must prepare the future with what we have now.  We can help that goodness flourish in a new way.  It may be hard to accept the looser strands of connection and affiliation that are evident in young people.  I am disappointed that this is the case, but I cannot hold back inevitability, so I must work with what is and hope and pray that small seeds of faith are planted and will bloom later.  What I see is a new paradigm that is vastly less judgemental and more inclusive.  That can only be good.  So, we have the detraditionalization of many of our young people from the formal practice of Church-going and its attendant communal aspects, but we also have a new openness to other, to dialogue, to inclusiveness, to ways of being spiritual in just causes and stewardship, in acceptance and celebration.  Yes, we can rue what is no longer, and I do sometimes, but we can also work with the reality of the lives of our children and grandchildren. 

How we witness in the way we are with each other will be the gospel lessons of love and forgiveness and inclusion passed on.  Perhaps hierarchy and dogma will be less pre-eminent and attitude and behaviour will be the marks of those who follow Christ.  I hope prayer and Eucharistic gatherings will be central to this redefined fellowship, as will the honouring of sacred texts and the stories of the faithful over millennia.

Like Brian, Catholicism is the house I live in and that house needs renovation! 

My Catholicism, too, is a coat of many colours, patched and darned in places, growing old with me, keeping me warm, a fabric of faith sometimes shot with the gold and silver threads of mystery and wonder, sometimes shabby with shame and sin, but a coat I will wear till the end of my days. 

And so, I wonder what threads will bind the next generation and how they will identify as a believing people.  I will not know the Church of the future but trust it will serve its people in a new way, responsive to the times, vibrant with love, alive with hope, refreshing the Good News and its eternal story for the ages that come after us. 

By Ann Rennie