OPENING ADDRESS TO THE DUBLIN AND GLENDALOUGH DIOCESAN FORUM
BY THE BISHOP OF CORK, THE RIGHT REVEREND PAUL COLTON
24 NOVEMBER 2001

Dr Pat Barker and I have been given about 10 minutes each to provoke you and to set you on a cathartic change-inducing course as the pilgrim people of God in Dublin and Glendalough. And, since pilgrimage it indeed is, there can only be movement, change and wilderness ahead. But that should not worry or upset us, for as the children of Israel discovered, the wilderness is the very place where God is.

I can hope to do no more, however, than shake together an aperitif of catalysing enzymes which will spur you onwards and perhaps energise you as the metabolism of your day together gains momentum.

Let me start at the centre of all things - Cork - and a secondary school prize-giving a few weeks ago. I sat on the platform looking at the faithful people of the diocese - proud parents with achieving young people - gathered together where involvement in agriculture is six times the national average - a traditional Church of Ireland backbone constituency, you might say. Between them and me was the table of prizes, and as my eye scanned curiously the choices of the various prize-winners, I couldn't help but notice the number of bundles which included a book of self-help; a book of therapy; wisdom spirituality even: The Little Book of Hope; the Book of Dreams; the Little Book of the Wisdom of his Holiness the Dalai Lama…….and such like.

"There we are!" I hear you say in vindication. "There's a hunger out there for spiritual things. All we have to do is move in and preach the Gospel." Such a now clichéd response, while partially accurate, would be naïve. Rather, I take the laden table in front of me as a signal of the fundamental change in the manner of believing in Ireland today.

Like it or not, modern believing for many people, and most certainly for many in that age group, has become a pick 'n mix lucky bag - a plurality of stories, a conundrum of cultures - resulting in a self-definition which articulates itself in ways like this: "Spiritual with no organised faith", or in a Christianity, which has found ways of transcending traditional parameters of believing, and most certainly when it suits, moves on, perhaps even heavenwards, by leap-frogging the Church.

Faced with such a reality we can react in a number of ways:

• We can close our eyes and stuff our fingers in our ears and hope the dilemma will go away.
• We can try to reincarnate the past. The cry goes up "Bring back Church going twice on Sunday" or "Bring back the Synod exams" and all will be as it was before.
• We can baton down the hatches, stay as we are, protect what we've got and keep a steady course - to where we're not sure, but we'll keep the course steady at all costs. This is the "If it ain't broke don't fix it" or "it will see me out my time" model.
• We can run the risk of going into the wilderness with God and discovering there who we are and what he wants us to become; discovering our story afresh; learning sympathetically about our new surroundings; and realising that we have very different fellow travellers journeying in the same wilderness with us.

The 1986 winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival was a movie called The Mission starring 'West Cork's own' Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro.

The movie is about Jesuit priests, inspired by the martyrdom of one of their cumber and who set off in the rainforest of South to establish a mission in a very different culture and a landscape utterly foreign to them. We see the struggle; the determination; the cost; the variety of strategies; and their empathy with the new Indian culture they encounter. They meet conflict in almost every form: the terrain; slave-traders, the self-serving interests of governments; and a Church motivated by unworthy politics.

Captain Mendoza, one of the slave traders, who in a fit of passion and rage, kills his brother, ends up accepting the challenge of the Priest to do his penance by going with them to The Mission above the waterfalls. As part of his penance he drags in a net all the trappings of his former life - his military armour, the tools of his slave trading, and his sword. Through rivers, up cliffs and muddy slopes he drags this symbolic bundle until days later they climb the final cliff, and the only thing stopping him getting over the final ledge is the ensnared bundle. A little Indian child alerts everyone to his plight; one of the Indians recognises him as the evil slave trader and rushes to put a dagger to his neck; but the Indian leader steps in with mercy and grace, and instead of death, the bundle, with all his baggage, is cut free and falls into the waters below - a moment of gracious redemption, and the hard-hearted slave trader collapses in tears of relief and joy.

In this story, friends, I see incarnation and I see redemption - the Gospel hope that we are called to bring to the world.

And I ask myself - what full nets are we dragging behind us? What baggage is holding us back - whether as individuals or as an Institution?

We cannot deny our history, cut off our tradition or discard our institutional framework, but we have got to have the courage to let go of those aspects of it which inhibit our journey. As the ever gregarious Ann Robinson - the highest paid person in British television would say on her love it or hate it quiz show The Weakest Link "What is holding you back? What is stopping you from moving ahead? It's time to vote off the weakest link!"

Let me give you two examples:

First, something we've talked about a lot but never really fully delivered on and to explain, I go back to that Prize-Giving at that school in Cork. The guest speaker that day, referring to his own days in business - very successful ones - mentioned that it's people who make a company. In spite of all the clichés we've used over the years about the Church as people, we in the Church of Ireland have not yet manifested that fundamental theological maxim in our strategies. It reminded me of something which RTE's well-known economist- George Lee - said on a programme "If businesses are to survive in this radically new era, management are going to have to move away from optimising capital to optimising people." I believe that this fundamental holds true for us: our today and tomorrow depends on how we will optimise people

• putting them at the centre
• equipping and nurturing them for their pilgrimage
• resourcing them in ministry - clerical and lay alike. We've got to give people the resources they need to do the work of the Gospel. Far too many of us at many levels of Church life are being asked to make bricks without straw and to make omelettes without breaking eggs.

And second, our approach to and understanding of the world around - our worldview has, I believe, to change too. For too long we've seen ourselves as besieged in a hostile world. Our goal is to build a strong city - a fortress church. Like children playing a game of chasing we want to pull as many as possible into the safe haven of our den.

But in a new world, the walls of that fortress have to come down and like an ever changing organism with its ever-altering and moving edges, as well as its stable cell core, we need to open up, become flexible and be unafraid of our encounter with the other human cultures and sub-cultures around us.

Last week I was making a visit to one of the building projects in the Diocese. The foreman was showing me around - original timber joists were being spliced and repaired in this social housing complex. I was chatting to the man who was cutting timber for new joists. A younger worker on the site came over and said "I just want to say 'hello' too". I asked him if he was also working with the timber. "No!" he said, "they make me do anything and everything". I said "That's exactly like my job - you'd find me here one day; in a school another; a hospital another; at my desk another and sometimes they even make me get to my knees!" They laughed. And the foreman pointed to the twenty-something I was chatting to and said "One thing's for sure - you'll never get him to his knees." The guy I was chatting to reached for his mobile phone. We went quiet and watched as he pulled it off his belt; took off the leather cover, slimed in cement and mud. Tucked preciously inside the cover beside his mobile phone was a Padre Pio prayer card- worn and used. We got talking about Padre Pio and I told him how we'd had to stay with us an Italian artist - Antonio Ciccone - who as a shepherd boy in rural Italy knew Padre Pio and went on to paint him and his region. The young worker finished by looking at the eavesdropping and stunned foreman and said "Make no assumptions".

We do make too many assumptions - and one of them is not always that the ground out there is good ground.

And it's that familiar rural picture that I want to finish with: the parable of the sower. It's one of the biblical images that has driven our work. As workers in the world, we are like that sower chucking the seed - broadcasting it and spreading it - and hoping by God's grace it will take seed somewhere.

Have our minds become terrified by the idea that the path is arid and scorched? Are we rendered inert by our sense of the menace of the thorns? Do we feel helpless because we think the rocky ground is hostile? Instead, I believe, that in all sorts of surprising places - even places - be they cultures and ideas, ways of life and believing, encounters or dialogues - of which the Church has traditionally been wary; where it has even previously frowned on going; and where it has been afraid to go; even in such places my friends I believe we make the surprising discovery that most of the ground is good ground. And we may have lost sight of the fact, that sometimes because of us; and other times in spite of us, it is already "…yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold." (Mark 4.8b)

And he said, "Let anyone with ears to hear listen!" (Mark 4.9)

That's what today's about.

-ENDS-

With the compliments of the Diocesan Communications Officer 29/11/01

THE CHURCH OF IRELAND
DIOCESES OF DUBLIN & GLENDALOUGH
DIOCESAN COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER VALERIE JONES
TEL: 01-4935 405/087-2356 472 (H) 01-4946 202 FAX: 01-4944 720
E-mail:dco@dublin.anglican.org