Michael Hill - Editor

venture of faith

Faith, said Cardinal Newman in one of his sermons, is a “venture”. He chose the word deliberately because venture has both a sense of journey and a hint of risk. It is stepping out into the unknown. For the Magi their Epiphany journey involved risk, because they were travelling to a strange land, unsure what they would find when they arrived.

Religious conversion is probably the greatest spiritual venture any of us ever undertakes. We are filled with expectation, eager for new experience, yet aware of the risk that perhaps it won’t work. Jim Neilan (pp 14-15) looks with misgiving at the latest initiative from Rome to enable disaffected Anglicans to come into the Catholic church as a group. Group conversions are always suspect, because conversion is such a profoundly personal journey. You only need to study the life of Newman himself to understand that.

There is a sense in which all of us are called to adult conversion. If we settle down too comfortably in our familiar routine of religious attitudes and practice, then our faith becomes little better than a favourite suit or dress, which cossets our skin but does not touch our inner selves.

Every religion needs its prophetic voices to jog us out of complacency and keep us moving on the way. Those who recently heard the Jesuit Fr John Dear (pp.16-17) had that experience. And no one has done this for Tui Motu readers better than the late and greatly mourned Fr Humphrey O’Leary, whose final piece we publish on page 31. There is also an in memoriam to Fr Humphrey on page 27.

He chose there to revisit a favourite theme: his pipe dream of closing down the Roman Curia and sending them all out ‘on sabbatical’ That could be the ideal antidote for the malaise of our current leadership: a bureaucracy so inward looking that it tends to lose touch with the blood and sweat of real life. Like the Magi, they need to get away from home and find the living Christ.

Christ too made that pilgrimage. Isn’t that the real message of Christmas? In becoming human, the Son of God manifests for us the need to go on a journey, a venture into the alleyways of the city and the dusty byways of Galilee, a voyage to Calvary. That was the price Jesus paid to become Emmanuel – God with us.

M.H.

Our artists have ‘gone to town’ on the Christmas cover to convey also a sense of delight, because the discovery of something precious is always a sublimely joyous experience. Artists down the centuries go to great lengths to depict the Epiphany as an awesome event (in the real meaning of the word) – but also one that brought great joy both to the Holy Family and the visitors.

The music of the Christmas season is also characterised by this mood of joy, and none more than Handel’s Messiah. David Burchell notes (pp.18-19) that the Messiah tells the whole adventure of Christ’s coming, through promise, birth, life, death and Resurrection. It is like an overture to the story of our Redemption.

To understand the meaning of ‘venture of faith’ we have to leave the comfort and security of home and the familiar, and sally forth. That is why pilgrimage is a characteristic of the world’s great religions: pilgrimage to Mecca, to Jerusalem, to Lourdes. People set out expecting hardship, desiring to deepen their faith and hoping for a religious experience. Even a spiritual retreat (see Jane Hole pp 22-23) can be like a salutary escape from the rut of the over-familiar. But you never know until you reach your destination whether anything will happen.