And another thing...

My wife tells me I often pause during conversation, even during sentences, for an unnervingly long period. Perhaps never so long as eleven months, however! I did promise at the end of my last post (16 April 2017) that I might not be blogging very much but nearly a whole year is perhaps an exaggeration. Is there anybody there? said the blogger, knocking at the moonlight screen.

Several years ago I published a long extract from Georges Bernanos on the topic of the differences between Martin Luther and St Francis. The burden of the extract was all about how one reacts to corruption in the Church and how one kind of reaction - the obvious kind - threatens to lead us down the same path as Luther. Luther had a point about Church corruption; not that that was his only preoccupation. But his answer to it was a damaging as St Francis's was beneficial. St Francis's response was not to go around the place scourging the evil doers. It was, to paraphrase Bernanos, to return to the fountains of sanctity.

Bernanos could afford to be wild in his rhetoric. He didn't have a Church to run. The Franciscans were split in the early years - not to say more recently - by the competing interpretations of just how far one can take the demands of evangelical poverty: fountains of sanctity then or sources of dispute? I suppose what Bernanos might have said to those arguing for the utter necessity of competent administration is that it can only ever be one small element in what is the wider, deeper and more challenging vocation of being called to follow the Lord.

But I digress. I only wanted to say that I decided out of the blue this morning to start blogging again. Anyone who has read me over the years will know what I think of the Church's current administration. Indeed, my strap line beneath the blog's title refers to it. But if I come back here now, it is only in the spirit of Bernanos's St Francis. I said some time ago we are living in a post-dubia Church. Indeed, we still are. But why should it also belong to the dubia-refusers?

One of the many insights of French cultural anthropologist René Girard - among some silly things - is that if we allow our actions to be shaped by reaction to our aggressors, we unconsciously risk imitating them. Much better, therefore, to adopt the St Francis's agenda. Dip into the sources of sanctity and share them with others. As I come back to blogging, I would much rather adopt that strategy than any other.

The waves crashing around us have sunk many a small ship in the last couple of years. The going has been hard. The questions many and complex.  Not a few people have taken as their gospel point of reference the story of Jesus asleep in the boat in a storm while the apostles, hardened fishermen though some of them are, get increasingly desperate. It is the Lord himself who tells us not to be afraid, although I have to say my feeling is less fear and more like nausea.

Still, the solutions are now what they have always been. Love, duty, joy .. and no panicking. Easier said than done.

Still, for what it's worth, 'Ahoy there, shipmates.' I'm back, at least for a while.