Book Review

Reaching beyond the easily said

The Contagion of Jesus: doing theology as if it mattered

St Augustine says that God is younger than us all. Sebastian Moore, a monk of Downside, shares something of God's eternal youthfulness. This is a wonderful, vigorous and insightful collection of essays by someone now, unbelievably, 90 years old. It could have had as a title a line from one of his poems, "Awake original hilarity". He feels himself to be at the start of understanding: "I am beginning, perhaps still only beginning, to confront my own demons, my acceptance and celebration of my own imperfect bodily self, my own weaknesses and sensitivities, knowing that Jesus has been there before me and encourages and challenges me to become continually who I really am."

In the first part of the book, Dom Sebastian explores fundamental theological issues: the Trinity, Jesus the scapegoat, the Resurrection and the Eucharist, theology and culture, and Mary. The second part is more practical, suggesting how we are to live these doctrines, and is often marked by his discovery of the practice of "focusing", which enables him to live more comfortably in his own body and thus "come to live more comfortably in the body of Christ". I am trying to practise focusing as I write this review, struggling with irritation at the ghastly noise of a man blowing leaves around in the garden, but I am not yet advanced enough for it to have worked very well.

His exploration of the Trinity stresses that it is only from within, sharing the life of the Holy Spirit, that we can even glimpse the meaning of what we confess. "I can only understand the eternal having a Son in so far as the Spirit makes me a son." So the doctrine of the Trinity is not a game with celestial numbers, but "our own obscure interconnectedness brought infinitely into the light". My only slight quibble is with Moore's claim that the whole Western tradition has failed to understand this, and thus has seen the Church as an organisation rather than the fruit of the Spirit. Thomas Aquinas had a profound sense that our understanding of the Trinity was through a sharing of the life of the Triune God - knowledge as participation - and hardly ever treats the Church as an organisation.

Moore acknowledges that his understanding of Jesus as a scapegoat is deeply indebted to René Girard and James Alison, but he brings to it his own sensitivity as to how violence is at work in our lives in the most subtle ways and of our need to be liberated from fear. Jesus' death and resurrection breaks the "reign of death" and so frees us into a mutual love without rivalry.

For me, the best part of this book is its exploration of desire and sexuality. He writes with a liberating honesty, born of self-knowledge. "It is in the laboratory of myself that I have investigated a self-hatred that fears, and desires above all to be loved, a desire that is love trying to happen and that is restless till it loves and, loving, is enveloped by the beloved." Desire, and especially sexual desire, is fundamental to our humanity and our search for God; but often the Church has been afraid of desire and has sought to control it and suppress it, fearful of its power, instead of liberating it for its ultimate aspiration, God. The Church works in terms of a narrow understanding of sex as about producing babies, which is why homosexuality is simply seen as deviance, and is not recognised as offering a love in which God may also be found.

For Moore the chasm between the Church's official teaching about sex and what most of our fellow Catholics live and believe is deeply threatening. It is not enough for the laity just to get on with their lives and ignore the Church's teaching because he takes the Church very seriously as the place of our encounter with God: "The Church is our only contact with the uncreated energy that alone can save us from the triviality of life today with its endless media hype." He insists that he is not rejecting the Church's teaching. "What I am doing is crying out: ‘Let's think again.'" The Hasidic rabbis said that those who are truly members of the Jewish community have every freedom to say what they like, even to God. And this is Sebastian's right as someone who is so profoundly Catholic.

Again, I wonder whether he does not too easily look for people to blame. St Augustine is the main culprit here, desexualising desire and casting a "long phallic shadow" over Western Christian thought. Peter Brown, the greatest Augustinian scholar, warns us against demonising Augustine's views on sex. Augustine had a profound awareness of the potential beauty of sex and of its great goodness, and of its place in human flourishing. Unlike his contemporaries he did not see Adam and Eve as angelic figures, but capable of a rich sexual relationship. Augustine's passionate African oratory gives hostages to fortune which obscure this sometimes. Moore is also too hard on Vatican officials who appear as slightly cartoon figures. He is not yet entirely free, like the rest of us, of looking for scapegoats.

It would be worth buying the book just for Moore's treatment of Mary. His exploration of the Annunciation as "the naked consent of the heart to the unknown" roots it in prayer and deep attentiveness to God. It is here, above all, that we are aware that he writes as a monk and a contemplative. Mary is an invitation to women to be liberated from the roles within which Western culture has until recently confined them: "The lens for the recovery of a Marian understanding of life as a flourishing rather than a conquest is woman's quest for her own subjectivity, her own denied initiative." But Mary speaks to us all: "For me it is the acceptance of the woman in myself."

This book communicates the remarkable vitality, the contagious enthusiasm, the honesty and humanity of Sebastian Moore. Reading it is like spending time with a friend who shares his laughter, puzzlement and hope. He pushes us deeper into the exploration of the mystery. Sometimes I was a little unsure what he was saying, but Stephen McCarthy, the editor of the book, has offered short explanatory introductions to each essay or sermon, placing them in the context of the evolution of Moore's thought. Still, one senses that even he is sometimes a little lost. This is not because Moore is a confused thinker who is unable to explain himself clearly, but because he reaches beyond what can be said easily. He asks why it is that one needs to be loved by those whom one loves: "I wanted to explain to my class why this is, and I never could, except in terms too easily understood."

This is why his writing overflows naturally and spontaneously into poetry. In these poems we have perhaps the deepest disclosures of the faith that keeps Moore so young. I look forward to the collection which will, I pray, celebrate his hundredth birthday.

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