RISKING THE GREAT LANDING
Centennial of the Foreign Missions Society of Québec, a question of risks: risking joy, risking the planetary fraternity, risking the great landing…
RISKING THE GREAT LANDING
Our missionary arch has been crossing the waters of
the Earth for a hundred years. Every day, a Dove brings us on its wings fresh
news from all those peoples who, after
welcoming us with open arms, have over the years come to be part of us.
The Dove tells us that Peace wants to be born in such
and such a country, while in another one it wants to die, that here Justice
hangs on over the abysses while over there it is always being trampled. How is
that one morning, Beauty wakes up all in bloom and in the evening, it goes to
bed in tears. It talks to us about life with its small victories and its great
misfortunes. It laughs for the joys but sheds tears for the new dramas that are
happening. Sometimes creeps into us like a worm the feeling of having worked
for nothing…But always the wind pushes us further.
Lately, the dove, all bewildered, comes to us with the
scoop that the great waters of the planet, far from going down, do not stop
rising, and that frightening cataclysms are taking place all over the world. It
assures us that the Earth is capsizing.
And now comes the bouquet! After one hundred years of
glorious services, our old missionary ark is moaning its last groans. Its hull is taking water on all sides. Its
crew is well beyond the age of piloting, and our dear Dove that, until now, has been so useful in
keeping us in touch with earthly realities is simply kicking the bucket…Our old
arch may hang on, still nothing
indicates that it will save us.
However, whether we like it or not, the wind blows
more and more strongly and tells us at full volume that time has come to run the
great risk of getting off the arch of our loves. Time has come of leaving
behind us our precious navigation
charts, our compasses, our dictionaries of truths and beliefs cast in stone. Time
has come to take leave of our habits,
our certitudes and our securities and to dive with the faith of the old Abraham
into the NEWNESS OF A DIFFRENT WORLD THAT IS COMING AHAEAD STRAIGHT TOWARDS US.
That world is not a craze, it is very real. And,
although we may have excellent reasons to be wary of it, THE-ONE-WHO-IS surely
blesses it with as much love as he blessed in the past the wicked Nineveh for
which the brave Jonah felt such horror, that he ran to hide from it into the
last pit of the Earth.
We the elders, let us rest assured, since we have done
a good job just by doing what we had to do. Let us sing our Nunc dimittis in
peace and let us abandon ourselves in the great rest that we have so much
deserved. Yet, following the example of old Simeon and of that good old lady Anne,
let us salute what is coming to us.
What is coming towards us is not a big thing. It’s
almost nothing. And it is as disconcerting as a very poor child who is worth a
little more than two turtledoves…Yet this child will grow up in the exploited,
oppressed and refugee sub-world of the
planet. There he will forge for himself a wisdom greater than that of Solomon. Nothing
will resist his wisdom. Soon with him
will come serious upheavals in our most revered dogmas as well as in our ways
of being church and in our ways of doing the mission.
His wisdom will teach us, among other things, that
there never was and never will be another God than the God-Love. ("Love"
means here: pure grace, pure gratuitousness, pure gift). Since he is God, he
does not dwell in the heavens. He does not live in temples either, nor in any
other place; on the contrary, it is the universe which dwells in him. The only
abode he can have is that of love. Through love we are rooted in him, and
through love he lives in us.
Storms, atrocities, cosmic catastrophes can do nothing
against this reality. In fact, what often seems to us like absurdity, violence
and chaos exists only on a very thin line on the surface of things. True
Reality is below and above all of these perceptions, however learned and
objective they may be. Much more, it goes beyond them infinitely.
In the light of God-Love, the myth of original sin -
and the great theory of redemption that follows from it - crumbles to dust. The
God-Love never demanded that a beloved divine Son, equal to himself, become
human in order to offer to his Father the sacrifice of infinite value of his own
blood in order to repair the infinite offense of the original sin. That is pure
fiction and could have been invented only by priests obsessed with sacrifices,
those who, day and night, in the Temple, dedicated themselves to immolating
victims to the Almighty in the ever-uncertain hope of appeasing his
uncontrollable anger.
For the man of Nazareth who will have grown up for two
thousand years to emerge today in a world which has also grown, it will be
useless to have recourse to intermediaries to gain access to God. For God has
always been fully present to all humans and to each of them, as he is,
moreover, to the entire creation. His "doors", "arms" and
"heart" are open day and night to the entire universe. No need to
knock to enter.
Everyone of good will who embraces the great project
of universal Brotherhood will be part of what will always be "the
church". This, however, will no longer be constituted as an absolute
monarchy and will no longer behave as "owner" and exclusive depositary
of God's truth. It will no longer be directed by dignitaries "apart"
and placed above the ordinary people, and women in that church will be
recognized as worthy as men to exercise the essential services to the
community.
In the breath of the Man of Nazareth, (that is to say
in his spirit and his way of thinking),
there will be no more missionary sending off aimed at "converting" others.
Only the people who adhere in depth to the great project of the universal Brotherhood
and who are eager to contribute to extending it in the world, will be sent on
mission in order to go and live this fraternity personally with estranged human
groups on the planet, mainly the less privileged ones.
In short, with him, everything will start anew from nothing as in
all the new beginnings. It will be the end of our last idols.
Younger people will be less affected by these
upheavals because, fortunately, their roots in the past are not very deep. Will
they do better than their elders? Yes,
because there is something new in
them. Something new which comes to them from THE-ONE-WHO-IS who, in his time,
will make it spring from their own depths.
Finally, young and old, men and women, all of us, we
are going to prepare ourselves mentally, psychologically and spiritually to
take the olympic plunge into this changing world, before the giant waterfalls
which are very near swallow all
at once our ark and all that will still remain in it.
Eloy Roy
Translated from the French by Jacques Bourdages
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