Freedom and belief

The real divide today, says Archbishop Bruno Forte,
is not between those who believe in God
and those who don’t.
It is between those who seek for a purpose in life
and those who have given up.

Last October, the bishops of England and Wales invited, as keynote speaker for their annual conference, an Italian, Archbishop Bruno Forte. His topic was freedom, contemporary atheism – and how these challenge our faith and life today.

At the very beginning of the Gospel we read the Greek word ‘metanoéite’, which means change your heart and life (Mk 1:15). We fear to heed this message because it disturbs our complacency. “Very often,” says Forte, “church mission fails because we answer questions no one is asking, or we pose questions which interest no one. The challenge is to discern the true questions, the questions that God writes on the tablet of our heart and of our times.”

What is important for Christians therefore is not so much to provide answers as work out what are those crucial questions. Origen, an early church writer, said: “Every true question is like the lance which pierces the side of Christ causing blood and water to flow forth”.

As a way of exploring this, the bishop presented his theme as “three arches of a bridge joining thought to life”:
• the search for the Father-Mother, infinitely loving;
• religion and freedom in today’s world;
• what is our agenda as church?

Searching for the father-mother
In a famous phrase from his Confessions St Augustine writes: “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our heart is restless until it rests in you”. Every thinking person sooner or later is confronted with the fact of his or her own mortality. We are born to die. To struggle with the inevitability of our dying means facing questions which spring up in the heart like piercing wounds: what is my destiny? What is the meaning of life? Where am I going with all my worries, consolations and joys?

Yet we, pilgrims on the way to death, are in fact called to life. “Within us there is an indestructible longing for the face of Someone who will take away our suffering and tears, who will redeem the infinite pain of death... When we are most alone and sad we have a deep longing for someone Other who will welcome us and make us feel loved. This longing is the image of ‘Father’ – or, if you like, ‘Mother’ – because ‘father’ and ‘mother’ are in this sense only two metaphors to express the same need, to have someone to trust without reserve, an anchor, a haven in which to rest our insecurity and pain.”

The bishop uses ‘father’ and ‘mother’ freely to express the divine Other. He says: “Father is at the same time Mother – the womb, the homeland, the origin in which we place all that we are.” Yet this figure at the heart of all our longings – infinitely loving, infinitely caring – is also the one whom we humans instinctively reject.

Rejection of father-mother stems from a basic need to find independence, to escape from being possessed, enslaved or dominated. “The ‘murder’ of the father is a sort of ritual murder, an act to affirm our independence, our autonomy.” Because we turn our backs on the loving father-mother we spend much of our lives striving to be free like the prodigal son in the Gospel.

For Bishop Forte this theme of rejection provides a key for understanding the history of the 20th Century. Since the time of the Enlightenment humans have sought emancipation. It is the dream of modernity. Karl Marx wrote: “Emancipation means leading everything in this world back to man, to man alone” (The Jewish Question). But making humanity the centre of all things means rejecting God.

This dream of universal freedom was shipwrecked in events of unprecedented violence. The terrible carnage of two world wars, the Jewish Holocaust, the Gulag, are fruits of the fatherless society which has sought an illusory freedom, but instead found totalitarianism, despotism and senseless slaughter.

As the century drew to a close, modern men and women found themselves increasingly victims of solitude and despair. “Who will set us free from the prison of our solitude? Thus there arises a nostalgia for a hidden face, the need for a common homeland to give horizons of meaning without violence. Life appears either as a pilgrimage towards a promised homeland or as a mere waiting for death. There is no other choice.”

We come back again to the predicament of the prodigal son. He has gorged himself on the delights of a fatherless-motherless freedom and ended up in the pigpen. The crucial decision is for him to say: I will arise and return to my father! (Lk.15,19).

Forte insists that as believers we must identify fully with the human predicament of our age. We must be the first to ‘arise and return to the Father’. In the words of Vatican II, we belong to a pilgrim church. We are part of the journey of discovery.

The bishop concludes this section: “The most important thing for those who believe in God is not to harvest but to sow – a sowing which will bear fruit in time when and how God wills. We must say ‘no’ to frustration and ‘yes’ to a passion for the truth.

“ This leads us to search for the hidden face, the face of the father-mother in love. The core of the church’s mission today is to proclaim this face to all those who are in search of it.”

Religion and Freedom
We can identify two contrasting streams of thought in recent centuries where human beings have explored the relationship between religion and freedom:
• the way of emancipation, which involves turning one’s back on the father-mother figure;
• the conviction that without accepting a transcendent truth there can be no true freedom.

A. Emancipation. The European ‘Enlightenment’ of the 18th Century inspired European society towards processes of emancipation which have gone on ever since. Abolition of slavery; declarations of human rights; religious toleration; parliamentary democracy; anti-colonialism and feminism are all instances. Reason rather than tradition becomes the final court of appeal.

The most remarkable instance of this great movement was the French Revolution. The impetus towards emancipation continues today in the liberation of the working classes and of the oppressed races and peoples of the ‘Third World’.

One common feature has been the ending of aristocratic and hierarchical societies. “A society without fathers is constructed,” says Forte, “where there are no vertical relationships, no ‘dependence’ – only horizontal ones, of equality and reciprocity...”.

However, “the abolition of a ‘father-lord’ figure led to a complete rejection of God. Just as on earth there must be no fatherhood creating dependence, so in heaven there must be no Father of all.”

The bishop concedes that this historical movement is a mighty project, and that we are all in some measure in debt to it. Who would want to live in a society that had not undergone this process of emancipation?

Worship without Sacrifice

As I write this, news has just broken that a suicide bomber has destroyed himself after killing the Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto. As has become sadly familiar, this young man left his house that day with the intention of murdering someone, then blowing up himself and, indiscriminately, any number of others. Motivated by political or ideological beliefs, perhaps fired by seeing poverty, suffering, repression and powerlessness, a young man like this is also likely to have been driven by religion. His religion tells him he is a martyr, a saint. He is sacrificing his life.

By way of contrast, earlier this year I saw the film Amazing Grace. It depicted the struggle of another young man, William Wilberforce, and his largely Quaker supporters to achieve the abolition of slavery in Britain and its empire. William sacrificed standing, reputation, health when, year after year, he stood before parliament to be jeered at, ridiculed and mocked as he re-presented his bill. Like the young man depicted above, he also was sustained and inspired by religion.

From where we sit, it seems easy to see one of these young men as tragically misguided and the other as a hero and prophet. But it would be simplistic to attribute the difference to Islam on the one hand and Christianity on the other. There are Muslims who are devoted to peace, as there were Christians who vehemently supported slavery as being part of the divine plan. Whatever its expression, worship or religion (and I will use the two terms interchangeably as both appear in versions of Gandhi’s sins) has enormous potential for good and for evil. It can be a source of life – or death. This is the meaning of a ‘deadly sin’ in the Christian tradition, a sin which is a root sin, one which leads on to other sins.

When Gandhi named worship without sacrifice as a deadly sin he was, I believe, acknowledging that religion by itself, no matter how devotedly adhered to, is not the final arbiter of human conduct. “As soon as we lose the moral basis,” he said, “we cease to be religious. There is no such thing as religion overriding morality. Man [sic] for instance cannot be untruthful, cruel and incontinent and claim to have God on his side.” His words sit well with the life of Jesus who healed on the Sabbath, forgave sinners and placed compassion above law.

For both Jesus and Gandhi the regulations of religion and the rules of religious leaders are insufficient guides to human behaviour. After all, the witch hunts of the Middle Ages, the Crusades, and the bombers flying over Dresden and Hiroshima were blessed by certain religious authorities, as are the terrorists, suicide bombers and invading armies of today. Religion can be serving of personal, political and ideological interests just as much as commerce and politics can be. Gandhi himself said, “Millions have taken the name of God and in His [sic] name have committed nameless atrocities.”

Compassion, not self-flagellation
To say that worship or religion requires sacrifice to keep it honest is not the same thing as calling for the kind of self-denial that for a period of history governed much Christian living especially in the English speaking world, including New Zealand. When my Scottish Presbyterian ancestors built their main church hall in Dunedin with a sloping floor to discourage any possible temptation to dance, they were life-denying in a way that makes little sense today.

When my Catholic forbears told young people that they were committing a mortal sin to ‘entertain’ even a sexual thought or desire they were walking in the same territory. Young people of today will find it hard to believe that this was ever seriously taught and practised. Modern spirituality seeks God in the joys and beauties of life as much as in its sorrows and sufferings. It is right to do so. The sacrifice that Gandhi considered essential to ensure the truth of worship, or “worship in truth” as Jesus put it, was not a dour denial of human pleasure but a pursuit of goals that required sacrifice for their attainment.

For Gandhi, no less than for Jesus, true worship always involved compassionate action for human beings. When we go beyond our prejudices of age, race, language and religion, then the suffering of any human being will move us and impel us. The battered child in New Zealand no less than the starving child in Africa; the victims of war, Muslim, Christian Hindu or of any faith; those who suffer from injustice, poverty, fear and powerlessness will matter to us. We may not be able to attend to all these needs but those that touch our hearts will call us to action.


Freedom and belief The real divide today, says Archbishop Bruno Forte, is not between those who believe in God and those who don’t. It is between those who seek for a purpose in life and those who have given up. Last October, the bishops of England and Wales invited, as keynote speaker for their annual conference, an Italian, Archbishop Bruno Forte. His topic was freedom, contemporary atheism – and how these challenge our faith and life today. At the very beginning of the Gospel we read the Greek word ‘metanoéite’, which means change your heart and life (Mk 1:15). We fear to heed this message because it disturbs our complacency. “Very often,” says Forte, “church mission fails because we answer questions no one is asking, or we pose questions which interest no one. The challenge is to discern the true questions, the questions that God writes on the tablet of our heart and of our times.” What is important for Christians therefore is not so much to provide answers as work out what are those crucial questions. Origen, an early church writer, said: “Every true question is like the lance which pierces the side of Christ causing blood and water to flow forth”. As a way of exploring this, the bishop presented his theme as “three arches of a bridge joining thought to life”: • the search for the Father-Mother, infinitely loving; • religion and freedom in today’s world; • what is our agenda as church? Searching for the father-mother In a famous phrase from his Confessions St Augustine writes: “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our heart is restless until it rests in you”. Every thinking person sooner or later is confronted with the fact of his or her own mortality. We are born to die. To struggle with the inevitability of our dying means facing questions which spring up in the heart like piercing wounds: what is my destiny? What is the meaning of life? Where am I going with all my worries, consolations and joys? Yet we, pilgrims on the way to death, are in fact called to life. “Within us there is an indestructible longing for the face of Someone who will take away our suffering and tears, who will redeem the infinite pain of death... When we are most alone and sad we have a deep longing for someone Other who will welcome us and make us feel loved. This longing is the image of ‘Father’ – or, if you like, ‘Mother’ – because ‘father’ and ‘mother’ are in this sense only two metaphors to express the same need, to have someone to trust without reserve, an anchor, a haven in which to rest our insecurity and pain.” The bishop uses ‘father’ and ‘mother’ freely to express the divine Other. He says: “Father is at the same time Mother – the womb, the homeland, the origin in which we place all that we are.” Yet this figure at the heart of all our longings – infinitely loving, infinitely caring – is also the one whom we humans instinctively reject. Rejection of father-mother stems from a basic need to find independence, to escape from being possessed, enslaved or dominated. “The ‘murder’ of the father is a sort of ritual murder, an act to affirm our independence, our autonomy.” Because we turn our backs on the loving father-mother we spend much of our lives striving to be free like the prodigal son in the Gospel. For Bishop Forte this theme of rejection provides a key for understanding the history of the 20th Century. Since the time of the Enlightenment humans have sought emancipation. It is the dream of modernity. Karl Marx wrote: “Emancipation means leading everything in this world back to man, to man alone” (The Jewish Question). But making humanity the centre of all things means rejecting God. This dream of universal freedom was shipwrecked in events of unprecedented violence. The terrible carnage of two world wars, the Jewish Holocaust, the Gulag, are fruits of the fatherless society which has sought an illusory freedom, but instead found totalitarianism, despotism and senseless slaughter. As the century drew to a close, modern men and women found themselves increasingly victims of solitude and despair. “Who will set us free from the prison of our solitude? Thus there arises a nostalgia for a hidden face, the need for a common homeland to give horizons of meaning without violence. Life appears either as a pilgrimage towards a promised homeland or as a mere waiting for death. There is no other choice.” We come back again to the predicament of the prodigal son. He has gorged himself on the delights of a fatherless-motherless freedom and ended up in the pigpen. The crucial decision is for him to say: I will arise and return to my father! (Lk.15,19). Forte insists that as believers we must identify fully with the human predicament of our age. We must be the first to ‘arise and return to the Father’. In the words of Vatican II, we belong to a pilgrim church. We are part of the journey of discovery. The bishop concludes this section: “The most important thing for those who believe in God is not to harvest but to sow – a sowing which will bear fruit in time when and how God wills. We must say ‘no’ to frustration and ‘yes’ to a passion for the truth. “ This leads us to search for the hidden face, the face of the father-mother in love. The core of the church’s mission today is to proclaim this face to all those who are in search of it.” Religion and Freedom We can identify two contrasting streams of thought in recent centuries where human beings have explored the relationship between religion and freedom: • the way of emancipation, which involves turning one’s back on the father-mother figure; • the conviction that without accepting a transcendent truth there can be no true freedom. A. Emancipation. The European ‘Enlightenment’ of the 18th Century inspired European society towards processes of emancipation which have gone on ever since. Abolition of slavery; declarations of human rights; religious toleration; parliamentary democracy; anti-colonialism and feminism are all instances. Reason rather than tradition becomes the final court of appeal. The most remarkable instance of this great movement was the French Revolution. The impetus towards emancipation continues today in the liberation of the working classes and of the oppressed races and peoples of the ‘Third World’. One common feature has been the ending of aristocratic and hierarchical societies. “A society without fathers is constructed,” says Forte, “where there are no vertical relationships, no ‘dependence’ – only horizontal ones, of equality and reciprocity...”. However, “the abolition of a ‘father-lord’ figure led to a complete rejection of God. Just as on earth there must be no fatherhood creating dependence, so in heaven there must be no Father of all.” The bishop concedes that this historical movement is a mighty project, and that we are all in some measure in debt to it. Who would want to live in a society that had not undergone this process of emancipation?	Yet even apart from the loss of religion, these movements have often tended to become self-defeating. “Inexorably, this all-encompassing dream becomes totalitarian. All modern ideologies, of right or left, eventually issue in totalitarian and violent expression. The leader, the party, the cause become the new masters.” Freedom in a world without God has failed to make humankind more free, more equal, more fraternal. B. Rebirth of Transcendence. So what has gone wrong? Martin Heidegger, the philosopher, talks about the ‘night of the world’. This passion for freedom eventually leads people to lapse into indifference. Humans no longer aspire to commit themselves to a higher cause. We cease searching for that ‘father-mother’ figure towards whom we hold out our arms. Forte says that by following this path society disintegrates into a “crowd of solitudes, in which people seek their own self-interest, in an endless pursuit of possessions and gratification. This explains the triumph of the most shameless consumerism, of the rush towards hedonism and whatever may be enjoyed immediately. Our societies degenerate into archipelagos, collections of separate islands.” Yet at the same time there are clear signs of a reaction against this tide of nihilism. “There is born within us a longing for the Totally Other... We need our earth to be a shared home, which provides horizons of meaning without violence. Far from being mere nostalgia, there is a rediscovery of the other in the recognition that my neighbour, by the mere fact of existing, can give me a reason to live, because he or she challenges me to go out of myself, committing myself in love to others.” The Archbishop sees great hope in contemporary movements of compassion for the weak and vulnerable, especially for people fleeing from situations of deprivation and poverty. He quotes the Second Vatican Council: “‘...the future of humanity is in the hands of those who are capable of providing the generations to come with reasons for life and hope’” (Gaudium et Spes 31). What is our agenda as church today? When we look out on a world of so much hedonism, violence and unbelief, are we to retire into an ivory tower and turn our backs? Not a bit of it, says Forte. “Christians, engaged in living and working in this changing world, are required more than ever today to give an account of the hope that is in them, with gentleness and respect for all.” A. True belief. Nevertheless there is an interior journey each of us must all undergo – and it may come as a surprise and shock to us. We discover that the atheist – the only atheist – that can be taken seriously, may live within our own hearts. “Only someone who believes in God, and has experienced God as the Father-Mother welcoming in love, can also ‘know’ what it would mean to deny Him, and what infinite suffering His absence would be. The non-believer is not outside believers, but within. “ To believe is to be taken prisoner by the Totally Other. Belief does not claim to have an explanation for everything, but lives rather as if by night... longing for the dawn. Belief is not yet totally lit up by the day, which belongs to another time and to another homeland, but it still receives enough light to bear the burden of keeping the faith. True belief is humble: it hangs on the Cross in the world’s darkness... “ One who does not believe and who lives this condition in a responsible way is aware of the acute pain of absence, feeling himself/herself orphaned, deeply abandoned. The thinking non-believer, like the conscientious believer, wrestles with God. My religion is to wrestle with God: says Miguel de Unamuno. The whole of religion lies in this wrestling with God. “ Believers and non-believers alike ask the deepest questions about their vulnerability to pain and death, not as people who have already arrived but as searchers for the distant homeland. Human beings who stop, who feel they have mastered the truth, for whom the truth is no longer Someone who possesses you more and more but rather something to be possessed – such persons have not only rejected God, but also their own dignity as human beings.” The true believer, therefore, is a pilgrim – someone on a journey in search of the Father-Mother welcoming in love. The temptation is to stop and imagine we have arrived. What Jesus showed us was that this ‘exodus’ consists in helping him carry his cross. To follow Jesus along the path of self-denial is the only path to real freedom. B. Faith as struggle. True faith, therefore, is the meeting that happens when we go out and God comes in: it lies between exodus and advent. “Faith is what happened to Jacob at the ford of Jabbok (Gen 32, 23-33.): God is the one who attacks under cover of dark, who comes upon you and wrestles with you. If you do not know God in this way, if for you God is not a consuming fire, then your God has stopped being the living God and is dead... “ That is why faith is always tempted by doubt. Only those who do not know are shocked by the Baptist’s words when at the sunset of his life and restless with doubt, he sent to ask Jesus: Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another? (Mt 11,3). This is the trial of faith: to struggle with God, knowing that He is the Other, who escapes from our certainties, and does not allow Himself to be tamed by our presumption...” C. “Finally, faith is submission. In the combat there comes the moment when you understand that it is the loser who really wins. Then faith becomes self-abandonment and forgetfulness of self and the joy of entrusting yourself into the arms of the Beloved. “ O Lord, you have seduced me, and I have let myself be seduced; you have overpowered me; you were the stronger!... I would say to myself, ‘I will not think about him, I will not speak in his name any more’, but then there seemed to be a fire burning in my heart... the effort to restrain it wearied me, I could not do it” (Jer 20, 7-9). Jeremiah wrestled mightily with God but there came a moment when he knew he had to give in. D. Some consequences. Believers are those who try every day to begin to believe. Faith is to be lived as a continuous conversion to God. Non-believers are perhaps people who try anew everyday to believe, but fail; “who struggle with an upright conscience, who have sought but not found, and who feel all the pain of God’s absence: will they not be true companions of those who believe? Dialogue between believers and non-believers can thus be understood as an exercise of reciprocal respect and a witness to religious freedom.” The Bishop insists “we say ‘no’ to a lazy, static, habit-worn faith made of comfortable intolerance, which defends itself by condemning others because it does not know how to live the suffering of love... There is also a ‘no’ to every superficial atheism, to every ideological denial of God and of the holy mystery; as well as a ‘yes’ to the unceasing search for the hidden Face... the Love which opens itself to embrace our searching hearts. “ Perhaps the real difference is not between believers and non-believers, but between those who think and those who do not; between men and women who have the courage to go on trying to believe, hope and love and those others who have given up the struggle.” Bishop Forte concludes: “Our ability, as persons, as society and as church to serve the quality of life and the dignity of every human being, depends on our answers to these questions.” ? Archbishop Forte, bishop of Chieti-Vasto, is regarded as the leading theologian in Italy

Seven deadly sins – a Gandhi series by Sandra Winton True religion leads us never to violence, often to self-sacrifice, always to compassion: such was Gandhi’s teaching in word and action Worship without Sacrifice As I write this, news has just broken that a suicide bomber has destroyed himself after killing the Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto. As has become sadly familiar, this young man left his house that day with the intention of murdering someone, then blowing up himself and, indiscriminately, any number of others. Motivated by political or ideological beliefs, perhaps fired by seeing poverty, suffering, repression and powerlessness, a young man like this is also likely to have been driven by religion. His religion tells him he is a martyr, a saint. He is sacrificing his life. By way of contrast, earlier this year I saw the film Amazing Grace. It depicted the struggle of another young man, William Wilberforce, and his largely Quaker supporters to achieve the abolition of slavery in Britain and its empire. William sacrificed standing, reputation, health when, year after year, he stood before parliament to be jeered at, ridiculed and mocked as he re-presented his bill. Like the young man depicted above, he also was sustained and inspired by religion. From where we sit, it seems easy to see one of these young men as tragically misguided and the other as a hero and prophet. But it would be simplistic to attribute the difference to Islam on the one hand and Christianity on the other. There are Muslims who are devoted to peace, as there were Christians who vehemently supported slavery as being part of the divine plan. Whatever its expression, worship or religion (and I will use the two terms interchangeably as both appear in versions of Gandhi’s sins) has enormous potential for good and for evil. It can be a source of life – or death. This is the meaning of a ‘deadly sin’ in the Christian tradition, a sin which is a root sin, one which leads on to other sins. When Gandhi named worship without sacrifice as a deadly sin he was, I believe, acknowledging that religion by itself, no matter how devotedly adhered to, is not the final arbiter of human conduct. “As soon as we lose the moral basis,” he said, “we cease to be religious. There is no such thing as religion overriding morality. Man [sic] for instance cannot be untruthful, cruel and incontinent and claim to have God on his side.” His words sit well with the life of Jesus who healed on the Sabbath, forgave sinners and placed compassion above law. For both Jesus and Gandhi the regulations of religion and the rules of religious leaders are insufficient guides to human behaviour. After all, the witch hunts of the Middle Ages, the Crusades, and the bombers flying over Dresden and Hiroshima were blessed by certain religious authorities, as are the terrorists, suicide bombers and invading armies of today. Religion can be serving of personal, political and ideological interests just as much as commerce and politics can be. Gandhi himself said, “Millions have taken the name of God and in His [sic] name have committed nameless atrocities.” Compassion, not self-flagellation To say that worship or religion requires sacrifice to keep it honest is not the same thing as calling for the kind of self-denial that for a period of history governed much Christian living especially in the English speaking world, including New Zealand. When my Scottish Presbyterian ancestors built their main church hall in Dunedin with a sloping floor to discourage any possible temptation to dance, they were life-denying in a way that makes little sense today. When my Catholic forbears told young people that they were committing a mortal sin to ‘entertain’ even a sexual thought or desire they were walking in the same territory. Young people of today will find it hard to believe that this was ever seriously taught and practised. Modern spirituality seeks God in the joys and beauties of life as much as in its sorrows and sufferings. It is right to do so. The sacrifice that Gandhi considered essential to ensure the truth of worship, or “worship in truth” as Jesus put it, was not a dour denial of human pleasure but a pursuit of goals that required sacrifice for their attainment. For Gandhi, no less than for Jesus, true worship always involved compassionate action for human beings. When we go beyond our prejudices of age, race, language and religion, then the suffering of any human being will move us and impel us. The battered child in New Zealand no less than the starving child in Africa; the victims of war, Muslim, Christian Hindu or of any faith; those who suffer from injustice, poverty, fear and powerlessness will matter to us. We may not be able to attend to all these needs but those that touch our hearts will call us to action.	On October 6, 2002, three American Dominican Sisters aged in their 50s and 60s left their homes knowing that that day they would be in prison. They had spent years of their lives studying the meaning and impact of the United States’ nuclear build-up and its policies of war. They were impelled by the injustice of the staggering sums spent on military weapons, in light of the desperate poverty within the United States and beyond it. They had previous convictions because of their protest actions. On an early autumn morning, wearing white chemical suits labelled Citizens Weapons Inspection Team they broke through the fence around a military installation to protest for peace and nuclear disarmament. They sang religious songs, prayed for peace, and symbolically poured their own blood onto the metal cover of an underground nuclear missile silo. “We wanted to shed our own blood rather than see others’ blood poured out for war,” said one of them, Sr Carol Gilbert. “If you follow Jesus, he gave his blood for all of us on the cross. As Christians we are called to sacrifice ourselves for others.” Gandhi and non-violence As a root virtue of Christian life, worship or giving one’s life over to God can be the source of the highest virtue, as I believe it was with these Sisters. It can also be a source of cruelty, murder and the deepest injustice. What guides do we have? Gandhi taught compassion for the least, justice for the many, restraint with regards to possessions, non-violence as a principle of action, means that are as just as the ends they seek. These guides will not tell us at once if an action is right or not; nothing frees us from the inevitable struggle to sift through shades of grey. They will not give us certainty; many circumstances of life do not allow it. But they would have stopped the suicide bomber. And they inevitably involve sacrifice. They cannot be practised without it. That is why Gandhi led a very ascetical life himself and taught his followers to do the same. A school pupil who refuses to participate in bullying, physical or verbal, knows he will sacrifice popularity with some. A parent who holds in her anger and does not hit her child must exercise self-control. The business person who asks how his investment choices and business decisions will affect workers and the ecology of the planet may sacrifice some wealth. The politician who acts with conscience may lose votes. The scientist who asks how her research will affect human lives may not pursue certain lines of investigation. There are people who make these choices. A lesson in humility There was a particular verse of a Hindu scripture, the Ishopanishad, that held great meaning and comfort for Gandhi. It said to him that “all there is in this universe, great or small, including the tiniest atom, is pervaded by God”. If I were to become more fully aware of this truth I would care about my actions in so far as they affect not only others in the world but the created world itself. A belief that human beings are at the centre of the universe, free to use it in any way they wish, for their own profit, pleasure and satisfaction, is a part of the deadliness of religious sin; it is the antithesis of worship. Inspired by a false interpretation of the Biblical creation story that sees humans as masters of all, this belief is leading us rapidly into destruction of the planet’s water, its potential to feed its children and its very air. Were it not for greed for oil, how much war and suffering might have been averted in recent years? True worship reminds humans that we are not the ultimate gods of all. We are here to serve life, that of humanity and the whole created world. All of us and our church communities are invited to this highest way of life. This is a fully religious calling. It involves outer action and inner transformation. It requires both sacrifice and hope. I finish with Gandhi’s words: Let me explain what I mean by religion. It is not the Hindu religion which I certainly prize above all other religions, but the religion which transcends Hinduism, which changes one’s very nature, which binds one indissoluble to the truths within and which ever purifies. It is the permanent element in human nature which counts no cost too great in order to find full expression and which leaves the soul utterly restless until it has found itself, known its Maker and appreciated the true correspondence between the Maker and itself. Possible questions for discussion: • What are some ways in which you see religion used to support self-interest, internationally and personally? • How would you like to see religious leaders encouraging governments and people to pursue a more just and peaceful world? What might they risk in the process? • Can you think of situations in everyday life where you might be called to act on principle and where this might involve some cost or sacrifice for you? • What do you imagine it would be like to be called up to fight in a war you did not believe was right? What do you think you would feel and do?

Freedom and belief

The real divide today, says Archbishop Bruno Forte, is not between those who believe in God and those who don’t. It is between those who seek for a purpose in life and those who have given up.

Seven deadly sins – a Gandhi series by Sandra Winton

True religion leads us never to violence, often to self-sacrifice, always to compassion: such was Gandhi’s teaching in word and action

Worship without Sacrifice

The real divide today, says Archbishop Bruno Forte,
is not between those who believe in God
and those who don’t.
It is between those who seek for a purpose in life
and those who have given up.

True religion leads us never to violence, often to self-sacrifice, always to compassion:
such was Gandhi’s teaching in word and action