All posts tagged Timothy Radcliffe
I'm not always wearing my full habit...
Who are we religious? How do we fit into the fabric and the structure of the Church? We often think of ourselves in terms of the hierarchy. Are we lay or are we clerical, or somewhere halfway between the two? Or we may answer by placing ourselves over against the hierarchy, as the prophetic individuals shaking our fists at ‘the institutional Church.’ But that is the wrong sort of map. I think that it is rather as if one were to look for the Rockies on a map that gave [only] the boundaries of the states of America. Are they in Colorado or are they in Wyoming? Why cannot we see the mountains?
Timothy Radcliffe, OP, in the address “Religious Vocations: Leaving Behind the Usual Signs of Identity,” published in Sing a New Song: The Christian Hope
I am quite taken by this idea of looking for religious on the wrong sort of map. The Episcopal Church is finding a similar struggle — and not just because 80% of our membership has no idea that we have religious in the Anglican Communion. Who are religious? Where do we fit in? Or do we belong at the margins? Despite our vow of obedience, is it the role of religious to be the civilly disobedient, the holy troublemakers, the court jesters of the Church?
The deepest truth of our human nature is not that we are greedy and selfish but that we hunger and thirst for God, and in God we will find each other.
I get the impression of a culture in which we loose off words at each other with little thought as to their consequences, like children who play at cowboys and Indians without realizing that the guns they use are real. It is as if we have forgotten that speaking is a moral act, demanding the deepest responsibility.
Timothy Radcliffe, OP, in the speech Jurassic Park and the Last Supper, delivered in June 1994 and published in the book Sing a New Song: The Christian Vocation
(emphasis mine)
Talking To Strangers by Timothy Radcliffe, OP
This is a wonderful address about living in a place where there are conflicting ideas. Near the end, Br. Timothy describes a method of discourse that sure would be a lot healthier for us.
When I was a young Dominican student we still sometimes practiced a version of the medieval disputatio. This was a form of debating central to the life of the thirteenth century university, and it embodies a vision of what a university should be about. It does not seem to have been practiced often by the Inquisition, but it represents an ideal which has something to offer us. In the disputatio the aim was not so much to demonstrate that your opponent was utterly and in every way wrong, and to be derided and dismissed as a fool. Instead you had to show the limited sense in which he was right. If someone were to assert that “Yale Department of Religious Studies is better than the Theology Faculty of Oxford,” I might reply in making a distinction: “That Yale is better as far as sociological analysis I accept; that it is better in every way I deny.” The aim was, through disagreement and mutual criticism, to arrive at a common truth, that was able to accommodate what was true in each position.
Perhaps even in universities we have been seduced by a competitive form of debate, which is as blind and violent as the struggle of the species to survive in the Darwinian jungle, or as senseless as the struggle for mastery between Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola. But we are called to be a place of counter-culture, of a different way of relating, through which one believes that one may learn something from those with whom one disagrees. This requires of us compassion and vulnerability. Iris Murdock said that when we disagree with someone else, we must ask of what they are afraid. How can we enter their perception of things, and rescue what is right and true from what is wrong and misguided?
Undercover Nun laughed out loud when she first came across this piece, because the first line is so very Dominican: Whenever I set off on a trip, the hardest decision is as to what books to take with me. It’s TRUE! :-D
