ME AND MY GOD
A series where contributors reflect on their understanding of God and how it has evolved
ARRESTING EXPERIENCES THROUGH A SERIES OF UNEXPECTED ARRESTS, I HAVE COME TO A MORE MATURE UNDERSTANDING OF GOD BY SEÁN O'CONAILL
The
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avoidance of sudden arrest – at least until the very end – must surely be a primary purpose of education. Cardiac arrest must happen to us all eventually. It has therefore come home to me – via no less than six unexpected lifetime arrests – that nothing could be better designed to prevent us encountering the God I know than a sound Catholic education: you may never meet this God until you are arrested. FIRST ARREST – 1952 Small but vital progress occurs when the parish priest in Sandyford, County Dublin, hauls me out of altar server training on a justified charge of knowing nothing of the Apostles Creed. My sainted mother has me reciting that creed from memory by the end of the following week, aged nine. Even so, the later discovery that innumerable historical persons have also suffered arrest for not knowing the creed – or for contesting some of it – does not convince me of its inherent usefulness, and there's a period when the Communist Manifesto of 1848 seems more to the point. Vatican II is happening around then, however, in the early 1960s. I catch a vibe of 'history on the turn,' and decide that history teaching can be my career. Though the NI 'Troubles' soon ensue in my school context in Northern Ireland, they too cause me to 'think again' about the causes of inter-Christian violence. SECOND ARREST – 1994 Aged just 14, my youngest son tells me suddenly one evening: "I don't believe any of this Jesus stuff, and most of my class don't either!" That statement
REALITY DECEMBER 2021
arrests me, at 51, because by then, after 25 years teaching history and current affairs, the popular project called secularism is – to my eye – close to crisis. Reason, divorced from faith, has clearly been failing since 1789 to give the world liberty, equality and fraternity, so how can it succeed if, in a future global climate crisis, there is a struggle for survival? However, just then, I'm at a loss to explain to my son why I believe the Gospels to be important in our own time. That's the whole point of an arrest. You are stuck – incapable of forward motion under your own power. It isn't yet the creed that I pray then, however. Instead, I frankly admit my predicament in the most direct words and ask to be able to see. What I begin to see, within weeks, are repeating patterns of thinking and behaving that clearly unite the Gospel world and the world of 1994. Those repeating patterns always relate to the issue of honour and shame. Put simply, our consistent mindset in all eras is that we start out as nobodies who suppose we can only become somebodies if we can convince a significant number of other people that we are indeed somebody. We seek this reassurance from others that we are somebody, even though we don't trust our own judgement on the matter. (Q. Is this sensible?) This is a fraught affair, this bid for the admiration of others. Almost everybody else has the very same objective. That's why we tend to bully one another. Jesus's closest followers had the same problem. In the very first Christian century, they argued
over which of them was the greatest. The mother of two of them asked Jesus to prefer her sons as his topmost men in the same kingdom. And this also had started a row. Significantly, less than a century earlier, and in the same part of the world, a character called Julius Caesar had set out to become a somebody by killing as many enemies of Rome as he could. Out of his success had arisen the Roman empire, the cradle of Christianity. Wherever I look in history or news media, I see the same dangerous pattern of belief. Nobody is ever a somebody unless a considerable number of others agree on the fact. Jesus of Nazareth, on the other hand, had an utterly different mindset. He treated everybody as a somebody, without precondition, and did not seek to be a somebody. He said that even children are somebodies before they have impressed anybody. He never shamed anyone yet was crucified to prove he was a nobody. With that insight, I began writing on that repeating pattern of honour and shame in the
