Preacher, be a teacher

The Church?s media image is at rock bottom. What better time for Christians to teach the riches of their tradition? A Benedictine monk explains

I was leading a retreat recently in Quebec, a province where much of the population once had a deeply ingrained Catholic identity. In what seemed to be a blink of an eye, that identity evaporated, leaving behind it a religious and spiritual vacuum which countless other ways of finding truth and meaning rushed in to fill. There, as in most Western countries, the image of the Church in the world, at least in the world created by the media, is abysmal ? as I realised when during the retreat a young professional man came to see me.

He had discovered the contemplative dimension of Christian faith through the practice of meditation in the Christian tradition. Meditation had reawakened some deep, unasked-for sense of identity within him, a sense of Jesus as his teacher, of Christ as his Way. He spoke sincerely, probing his own experience rather than merely looking for answers.

I recognised his search for a new connection with his Christian roots. I encounter it regularly in people of his age and background who have grown up without personal Christian training and who have never related as individuals to the Church. Unlike the previous generation, there is in them no residue of guilt, because there has never been a broken loyalty. But they begin to suspect that it is in Christ and even in the Church that their spiritual home is hidden. This often leads to a very modern religious dilemma. They have found spiritual experience, teachers, and community outside Christianity ? often in Buddhism, which they see as a personal religion and practical wisdom without dogma. Yet an irrepressible attraction towards Christ and the Christian tradition asserts itself in spite of themselves; the experience is rather like falling in love with someone you hardly know and perhaps never even really liked.

As the young man rose to leave, he told me that on the first evening of the retreat he had been surprised to meet a colleague and friend from work, a man about his own age. They both worked in television. After the fancy-seeing-you-here routine they began to discuss the routes that had led them to the same place, and to remark on the oddness of not knowing that the other was heading in the same direction. Then, as they prepared to go to the first conference, his colleague looked sheepish but anxious. Would he mind please not telling anyone else at work that he had met him there? Surprising as this was to him, he realised that he, too, did not want anyone at work to know where he had been ? on a Christian retreat! The self-questioning this led him to may have been the meaning of the retreat for him.

And it led me to think about the image of the Church. The media acknowledge Christianity and other religions, but only in so far as they serve the media?s interests. Among these, survival and profit rank high; entertainment, sensationalism and the prurient exposure of private lives are often the means. Christians hit the headlines when they fail, make fools of themselves or stumble into a juicy controversy, or when church leaders shoot themselves and the rest of us in the foot with dictatorial directives from their ecclesiastical stratosphere that any reasonable person living in the real world sees as foolish, uncompassionate, repressive, or just plain crazy. The Church, like any other public body or individual, has to learn to live with almost permanent misrepresentation.

But it is as hard to fight the media as to court them. I recently gave an interview to a national magazine in Brazil about the work of the World Community for Christian Meditation in teaching the Christian contemplative tradition. The reporter, an ex-Christian seeking her roots, seemed intelligent and interested. She took part in some of the Christian meditation groups and saw for herself how deeply Christian it was for those following this path. But when the article appeared the editorial spin was ?Zen Catholicism: Christians are lifting meditation techniques from other religions?.

Yet soon after, I received a letter from someone who had read the article. He remarked how obviously misrepresentative and superficial the article was. But he said he had felt from the first paragraph there was something real behind the spin. He had made contact with a Christian meditation group and was gratefully amazed for what he was now learning.

You may not be able to trust the media to report you accurately but sometimes, despite themselves, they can do good.

It is different, though, for the clergy. The media?s relentless image of the clergy has beaten down morale among priests to an all-time low. Much of this dejection arises from the suffering we go through when we feel misunderstood, ridiculed and rejected; depression or hypersensitivity are natural responses.

But this dejection can also help us to a clearer discovery of our true purpose and mission, to a kind of spiritual liberation from public opinion. Is it not better to change the way Christians perceive themselves rather than trying to change the way others see them? And is this not a good place to start, at the bottom of the popularity ratings?

Now is the opportunity for Christians to shed the popular perception of them as preachers. Preaching is not a medium of communication that is much liked or effective today. There was a time when thousands would gather in the open air to hear a famous preacher; today everyone wants to be heard, and attention spans are decreasing. Telling people what it is good for them to hear, without giving them a chance to express their view or even ask questions, is about the worst attempt to communicate imaginable in our culture. Sunday congregations somehow put up with it ? though generally on sufferance. The image of preacher, however, is so ingrained in the concept of the Christian minister that most public statements or utterances are characterised ? and self-defeated ? by it. No doubt this is why the Church?s attempts to sound repentant when it apologises for its sins are so unsuccessful. Preachers find it more difficult than teachers to admit to their mistakes.

The alternative to preaching is teaching. His contemporaries called Jesus teacher more often than any other title; he was listened to, even if not always understood. Preaching tells people what to do or to believe; teachers like Jesus help people understand the truth from where they are ? which is why he taught in parables. Today, when the concept of authority itself has been so transformed, people resent being told what to do, especially on the basis of a revelation they do not understand. So help people experientially to understand what this revelation is. Show them how richly it has been witnessed to in a tradition that ? even if they reject it ? has still formed them culturally. Communication, engagement, understanding: these will follow.

And what should we be teaching, if not the immense riches of the Christian spiritual tradition? People today are seeking to mature their faith with something deeper than classes on the Catechism or the Church?s social or sexual teaching. The Church has more to teach than ecclesiology; there is no shortage of experience of the faith, nor of people trained to teach it, nor of resources and places. Every parish or religious community could be drawn into a continuing diocesan programme which would transform the self-understanding of the Church. It would show that the Church is not a club we belong to or merely a hierarchical structure allowing limited collaboration. The Church is a learning body, a spiritual school where, as in any true teaching environment, everyone learns from each other.

The Christian Meditation Centre in London is currently piloting a one-year programme on these lines to show how this could be done on a wider scale in any diocese. ?The Roots of Christian Mysticism?, which began in January, brings together each week a group of 30 people, mostly young professionals, from a variety of backgrounds and degrees of affiliation to the Church. The course began with the Gospels and is proceeding week by week, exploring a different teacher within the Christian contemplative tradition presented by an expert in the field, beginning with the Fathers and proceeding chronologically, ending with the major modern spiritual teachers. The approach is informed but not narrowly academic. There is a practicum as well. Each class begins with a period of meditation as soon as people arrive at the centre straight from work. Each term there is a retreat day at the Benedictine Centre for Spirituality at Cockfosters to help integrate this discovery of the tradition and the readings into daily life.

The course is a new way of communicating the essence of the Gospel. From its inception, small groups rather than mass organisation or mass media have always been the best seedbed of the Gospel. If the Church could see itself, living through such groups, as truly mater magistra ? a teaching mother ? and less as a punitive, rule-making father it might well change some of the headlines and challenge the obsession of the media with the Church?s human shortcomings. But even if it failed to do that, it would begin to change the way Christians and those seeking the meaning of Christian identity today see the nature and purpose of the Church. The media and politics, after all, are properly concerned with changing public opinion. Religion has a different and less headline-driven agenda: to change consciousness and, therefore, lives.