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Those who… The rules

The pastor who is not there. A friend of ours, and we won’t say where, sent us a letter a pastor sent to the faithful of his parish, and out of charity we won’t say which parish (but don’t kid yourselves; it’s nearer than we’d have expected). It was for Lent. It starts off, “The second star on the right/ this is the way/ then straight on until the morning/ then you’ll find the road yourself/ it leads to the island that’s not there.” Then comes the development, “We would all like a world dominated by saints, or rather by masters of life who light up the journey…. We would all like to have tranquil, frank relationships; in a word, to live on an island that’s not there. We realize, instead, that this is only a dream or, rather, a hope.” Solution: “Despite everything we have the duty to have trust in ourselves and in others; we cannot stop searching for the island that isn’t there…. Together we could bring it to life and therefore live in a world where all is directed to love…. What is important is to believe in what we would like there to be.”

Hello Baby: Bible magazine. Laurie Whaley is American. She dreamed up Revolve, a periodical that presents the Bible in the format of a girls’ magazine. She explained to the New York Times Magazine, “Young girls don’t read the Bible any more, it’s got no meaning for them. The only thing they read are the fashion mags. God is not necessarily against fashion, so we put the Bible in that format. I’m sorry the Church made the Bible so complicated for people.”

Get yourself some regulations. We don’t have only clericalism of rules; there is the power of regulation, too. For example, you can think everything about the European Constitution and the opposite of everything. What is inconceivable–or, rather, is conceivable only in a logic of statism–about freedom “kindly granted” to the citizens is a mountain of regulations, 253 pages of them with 69,044 words (the American Constitution is only 15 pages long…). At the root of it is the idea that there is no “I,” no man, no people, capable of thinking and acting for the common good, and that life in society is born of stipulations and sub-sections, modern, secular versions of ritual ablutions and magic mantras.

World Without an “I”
“From a Church without the world, a world without an ‘I.’ This is the fourth ‘without’ in which we group our reflections of our present-day situation.

If the Church is without the world, this world tends to be without an ‘I.’ In other words, it is an alienation. This world has alienation as its characteristic and outcome, whether foreseen or not, whether wanted or not; it is normally wanted by the power, by those who have the cultural power in a given moment.

Thus, synthetically, the world ends up being the ambit of existence defined by power and its laws. Whereas the world is the ambit where Christ brings about, in time, the redemption of man and of history. In the rationalist dissolution or antithesis, the world is reduced to the ambit of existence defined by power and its laws, which become instruments of violence.

The extreme consequence of an existence defined by power and its laws is the loss of freedom, the ignoring or the abolition of freedom, an abolition not proclaimed theoretically, but practiced in fact: and since freedom, however you define it, is the face of the human ‘I,’ it’s really a question of the loss of the human person. In fact, it is called alienation” (cf.   The Miracle of a Change, pp. 36-38).