FIFTY YEARS ON
[This is a work of fiction]
It was in 1959 that we last met, sharing the leadership of a Boy’s Camp for a church group we belonged to. In those hours after we had the youngsters bedded down [in those days we actually expected them to do what we told them], he and I had often chatted in the cookhouse about our hopes for our lives, our understanding of faith, our serious desire ‘to know the will of God’ and to be faithful disciples. of Christ.
So, it was with some enthusiasm and not a little uncertainty about what we would still have in common when I accepted his invitation to lunch in a local restaurant just before Christmas.
After the normal exchanges where we each assured the other that we didn’t look a day older, we launched into a genuine and more honest sharing of our experiences, taking it in turns to contribute as we moved through the swinging sixties to the years of marriage, children, changing jobs, and on to the later stages of our careers, the directions our children had taken and how we were coping with the years of retirement
Four hours later the staff of the place were giving hints that they closed at 4.30, so we began to wind down and make plans to meet again.
I left with a range of impressions and feelings: pleasure at renewing an old friendship, and a certain wistful envy at the way in which his life seemed to have been so successful in sharing his faith, nurturing his children into an authentic adult faith and impressed by the clarity of his commitment to Christ and his confidence that his local church and denomination were doing great things for God. I also noted how little he seemed to have been confronted with the dilemmas that I had faced over those years and I found myself wondering how my own journey might have developed if we had moved into an established eastern suburbs church and I had continued teaching in the private school system.
I’ve inherited my mother’s ability to rationalize, so it wasn’t long before I found myself pondering upon the extraordinary range of beliefs and practices which can be found within any faith and how much richer we are because of this extraordinary diversity.
How then is it possible, I mused on my morning walk, for us to affirm this diversity yet still build and maintain bridges with one another when the differences seem so fundamental.
Indeed I want to go beyond the connections between people of the same faith and ask the same question about differences of faiths and cultures.
Why do we need to have us and them?
In our early days , it was us, the Protestants and them the Catholics.
It was even a matter of divisions in Protestantism between
us, the evangelicals and
them the liberals who didn’t really seem to accept our view of the atonement and our respect for the Bible. At University we were the EU and they were the SCM. We barely knew one another and yet we were fellow disciples of Christ.
The excitement about the ecumenical movement with its drawing together of various denominations and beginning to talk with Catholics was a step along the way, but it was still us, the Christians and them the other religions or those who had no religion at all.
There is now a growing focus on what is called the interfaith movement and it is time to ask where that may be heading.. At its best, I believe this is a very significant movement, particularly where it recognizes that in this global village people who care about justice and peace need to support one another and not let their particular religious faith become a hindrance to the pursuit of a more just and peaceful world.
Some take the view that one day there will be one great religion which embraces the best of all faiths . However I am much more drawn to he view that in interfaith matters we will always see some things in a different light and we will always express our theology differently but the very sharing our lives and faith more intimately carries the great promise of enriching our understanding of our own faith. For example , I have a friend who attended a series of lectures on Buddhist existentialism and who as a result dug deeper into his own understanding of his Christian faith and began with great profit to read Meister Eckhart’s reflections.
It helps sometimes, when we get caught up in the us and them mentality to ask if we believe God loves us more than them. Occasionally in the Hebrew scriptures we are left with the uncomfortable feeling that Israel's God is on their side at the expense of the others. The God who sometimes features in the Psalms is attributed with characteristics that are not consistent with the God whom we encounter in Jesus. Is it so difficult to accept that God is still being revealed to humankind and that we would do better and be more in keeping with the spirit of Christ if we rejected the idea that God is more on our side than on their side, whoever they may be?
So, I’m looking forward to our next meeting at that local restaurant and I hope that together we may explore more deeply some of these issues that emerged at our December meeting.
Mac Nicoll
