A time to show the way

Contrary to reports of empty churches and a society that appears to be losing its faith, the current revival of an interest in religion has never been greater as people listen afresh

Two years ago I was invited to participate in a public debate commemorating 250 years of the founding of the Royal Society of Arts. Before me there were four short speeches by people most eminent in their fields - a scientist, a humanist, an astronomer and, to celebrate progress in business, the chief executive of Starbucks! When my turn came I, too, spoke of the benefits that had been achieved in science and technology, but then went on to say something else. What an extraordinary thing that the questions which the Enlightenment had sought to answer had now come back to haunt our world. We are all Green now, because we realise that we are stewards of this earth and cannot ravage it because it was given to us. Progress has enabled us to provide enough food for all, and yet a quarter of the world is starving, while another quarter lives in super-abundance. We are able to probe the processes of life and experiment in cloning and other forms of genetic engineering. But who is to decide what is a human being - or is this just an irrelevance? What astonished me was how eager people were to hear another voice, another approach, that seemed to indicate the deepest quest of the human heart for meaning and for hope. Our society seems to be losing its faith in no faith. What is in decline, properly speaking, is the certainty of uncertainty. In Britain, people are less and less wedded to an avowedly agnostic or atheist position. Young people in particular would increasingly define themselves as "spiritual" but not "religious". They are interested in faith, and are believers in some sort of God. Many practise a kind of prayer or meditation, which is principally experiential.

We should be cautious about describing this as a religious revival, but it would be safe to describe it as a revival of the religious sense, or at least as a revival of an interest in religion. In Europe, the young now seek out courses in religion and spirituality in a way that has not been seen in my lifetime. There is a growing popularity of retreats and meditation. All of this affirms the place of the soul: a belief in the infinite value of human love. There are the beginnings of a search for transcendence, by which I mean a recognition of the possibility that life is much more than we can physically see, touch or hear.

It is quite clear to me that you cannot separate religion and life; nor can you suppress people's yearning for joy and hope. Nearly 30 years ago I chose as my episcopal motto those very words: Gaudium et Spes - Joy and Hope. Those words are in fact the beginning of the Second Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.

"The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and the hopes, the griefs and anxieties of Christ. Indeed nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts."

Right from the start, that document asks us to refuse any attempt to divorce our spiritual life from day-to-day encounters with men and women and their joys and hopes, their griefs and anxieties. Occasionally in the history of Christian belief people have thought that "real" religion or "real" spiritual life is confined to those occasions when we, as it were, leave the world behind. Genuine spiritual ecstasy is probably quite rare, I suspect, but the saint is someone who can't wait to get back to spreading the Good News. To do that effectively we have to be fully committed to our culture; we need to be able to converse with all our brothers and sisters, those who share our faith and those who don't, even those who don't want to. We should commit ourselves to improving this world rather than despising it. We are not outside or above our culture. We are part of it and it is the context for our Christian life.

One of the biggest challenges facing us, the contemporary Church, is to find the language and the contexts in which people can listen anew to what we have to offer. That challenge is formidable, and may be simply described in the form of a question: how do we offer what is truly life-saving but not easy to a society in which the values of consumer comfort and consumer choice are all-pervasive? Consumerism has the power to make Christian teaching unintelligible not so much in theory as in practice. There seems no room in it for our teaching on sacrifice or the redemptive value of suffering which opens our hearts to God and each other. I am reminded of a marvellous document published by Pope John XXIII in 1961 which has a lot to say about a Christian attitude to our culture and to our world - the encyclical letter Mater et Magistra. This is how he spoke of the Church:

Mother and Teacher of all nations - such is the Catholic Church in the mind of her Founder, Jesus Christ, to hold the world in an embrace of love ... To her was entrusted the twofold task of giving life to her children and of teaching them and guiding them - both as individuals and as nations - with maternal care.

I find that a very bold but encouraging image of the Church. As a bishop I have always felt particularly responsible for making sure that is how people experience the Catholic Church, not only as the teacher of dogmas but also, perhaps even more, as a loving mother who loves me, and who, because she loves me, wants me to go the right way through life - that is the kind of teacher the Church is, and can be, and I have been so grateful for it in my own life.

Christianity looks beyond this world, but our hearts and minds are firmly rooted in the concerns of all our fellow men and women. Just as we do not look down on God's created universe, we are in no position to sneer in a cynical way at our culture. This is the image the Church is surely meant to portray in her teaching and in her actions. In all of this I feel the Church has a great deal to offer and the challenge is: will we be brave enough to make the most of what we have, and which our society is so desperately in need of receiving?

I think there are three experiences that could help people on their journey to finding God in and through our Catholic life - the experiences of family, silence and contemplation.

A special family

I was luckier than I realised as I grew up; my parents were convinced believers who passed on to me a series of values that introduced me to a larger family, the Catholic Church. But what I now realise was important is that it was personal, it was sustained, and it was a positive experience. Many will come "past the church door", so to speak, and may feel curious or even inwardly recognise that here they may find what they need, but the welcome they receive needs to be personal, sustained and positive. People should not have the impression that the faith of the Church is a private thing.

Exactly 20 years ago, a team in the Vatican considered the reasons why people say they are attracted to "sects". These included: a quest for belonging, a search for answers, a search for wholeness, a search for cultural identity, a need to be recognised and feel special, a search for transcendence, need of spiritual guidance, need of vision, participation and involvement, and a series of extraordinary recruitment techniques that appeal to people at the level of their perceived needs. I find it strange and sad that people need to go elsewhere for any of those things. That means we, as a Church, have treasures we are not using. As the Vatican's reflection on New Age stressed, "The simplest, the most obvious and the most urgent measure to be taken, which might also be the most effective, would be to make the most of the riches of the Christian spiritual heritage."

I often try to put myself into the mind of a person who is wondering about stepping into a church either for the first time or after a very long time away; I wonder if the people inside would make me feel welcome and at ease, or whether there would be any welcome at all. Whether it is a casual visitor or a serious seeker, people need to feel part of the family or they will certainly not stay. And when they stay, they must continue to feel welcome, or it will all seem like a sham, a trick to get them to join our club! That is hard, as Jesus knew, which is why he told the parable about the 99 good sheep the shepherd knew he didn't have to worry about, and the one about the son who felt ignored by his father, and particularly offended when his brother came home from wasting his life.

Silence

In 2005, and again this year, the BBC set up an encounter between typical modern "spiritual searchers" and a very traditional expression of religion. The first set of programmes was called The Monastery. This year four young women joined the community of Poor Clares in Arundel for a similar series of programmes entitled The Convent.

The biggest shock for the young men and women taking part in these programmes was their introduction to the world of silence - not any old silence, but contemplative silence. "Listen, my son" are the first words of the Rule of St Benedict, and this was the first thing the monks and nuns tried to impress on their visitors. It was not easy for these young men and women at the beginning, but over the weeks they did, in fact, learn to listen more deeply.

Unless you are one of those people who go on retreat frequently, or a totally anti-social being, your world, like my world, will be just like the one which those young people in The Monastery and The Convent left for 40 days. But most of us have had a chance, perhaps many times, to enter that silent world where contemplative Religious have almost carved out a presence and marked not only space but also time with what I can only call holiness.

Lived silence can give us space to look at the world around us, at our culture, and see what is really there. It can be a real effort to detach ourselves from our busy schedules but we know how important it is; so if we think of how to bring people closer to believing and belonging we have to recognise that we, the Church, need to guide and accompany them on their journey.

Contemplation

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith produced a document on meditation several years ago. It keeps coming back to an essential point. Meditative techniques can do all sorts of things, usually good things, to our psychological, mental and bodily state, but unless there is an encounter with the living God, these techniques, worthy and effective as they are, are "not yet prayer". I mention this to underline what I already said about silence that is not simply absence of noise but a way to contemplation. Anyone can sit quietly, but religious silence is a search tool that is even better than Google!

It seems to me that people want us not just to speak about spiritual things but to show them where the source of their thirst can be quenched. They want us not merely to tell them about Christ, but in some sense to show him to them. But that could never work unless, as Pope John Paul II emphasised, "we ourselves had not first contemplated his face".

If Christianity is the meeting-place of earth and heaven, Jesus is the meeting-place of human and divine life. And I think the best spiritual nourishment is to meet people whose lives have been touched and deeply affected by contemplating Jesus. Nothing can replace that and people will know if what we are offering is second-hand or the real thing.

Last year the Archbishop of Prague, Cardinal Vlk, came to visit me and shared something of his experience during the Communist occupation of his country. He was persecuted as a priest by the authorities and was eventually thrown out of his parish. He was told by the authorities that he couldn't practise as a priest and had to make his own way in the world. He became a window cleaner and worked for 10 years in the city of Prague.

One day he was cleaning windows in one of Prague's busy streets and he could hear German tourists below him window shopping and wondering what they were going to buy. And, he said, he began to think to himself, "No one knows who you are. No one knows you are a priest. No one cares about the Gospel that you preach." And then he went on to say, very beautifully, "It struck me very deeply - this voice within, ‘On the Cross, God is present but hidden', and if Jesus could live and die in this way then so could I." Several years later the Berlin Wall fell, and shortly after that he was made Archbishop.

As we Christians face our modern world we should not be in any way discouraged. If we are like trout that always swim against the stream, well - that is our natural habitat. We live in our world but are not of it. The whole history of the Church is one of death and resurrection and we have to trust that the Lord will bring about a new outpouring of his holy spirit among his people in our countries.

I remember some time ago a young man saying to me with great enthusiasm, "What we need, Bishop, is a new Franciscan revolution!" I replied, "I totally agree - why don't you start it!"

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor is the Archbishop of Westminster. This is an abridged version of his lecture "Belief and Being in a Faithless World", to be delivered tomorrow, 27 August, in Sydney, Australia.