Where’s the fire, where’s the flame?” “

“The Catholic Church. Old or young? Dead or alive? Interesting or irritating?” These are the provocative questions that open the editorial of the December number of the French review of contemporary culture “Etudes”. Françoise Le Corre , deputy editor, focuses his reflections on the superfluity of “images, sociological surveys, inquiries, enthusiasms and reservations, questions and answers” offered by the media that “rushed to the sick-bed of the Church on the occasion of the jubilee of John Paul II and the beatification of Mother Teresa”. They are images and words “that astonish the faith and make it suffer”. Questions, observes Le Corre, that “miss their target, remaining exterior like something that skates aimlessly around an issue, without being able to aim at its real centre”; they express “the difficulty of spelling out what it is that really constitutes the heart of the Church”. Life itself. “Can one express the taste of God? His essence? What’s to be done if the Gospel itself has become rigidified in too many repetitions, stereotypes and caricatures?”, asks the journalist, convinced that “to enable people to experience something of the faith we would need to go beyond images, appeal to all the senses, to what life is itself: “breathe” and “discover that one does not see anything when one believes one can see”. But we would also need to “experience what it means to say ‘touch’ and ‘be touched’, suffer and cause suffering, love and fall out of love. Because faith means life, it means the possibility of living”. It means the “mysterious recognition that all this is given to us, that we are not ourselves the masters of it”. How can we speak of “what belongs to silence and secrecy, to our deepest intimacy and what we call God?” Where’s the flame? “We would like other words, other images, other questions”, continues Le Corre, for “the words increasingly get stuck in our throat”. Once upon a time, Le Corre recalls, “the Church prayed and sang: ‘Let us not leave the flame to die, let us not leave the fire to die…’. But today, whose job is it to say where the flame is, or where the fire is?” In Le Corre’s view, “in all these images our Church is contradictory, at times disappointing, but at the same time she is in the intimacy of hearts and communities: in the old and the new, inseparable in our history; she is in our diversity, in her internal conflicts; in the questions that assail her”. She “is in her wonder and her fears. In her daring and in her failures”. She cannot be epitomised in “any of her manifestations” because she “is not made for herself but for the world, not as we would like it to be, but as it really is”. And so “the flame that sets the heart on fire” fluctuates “between the two opposites that seem to separate the abyss” and it is impossible to say, “it’s there!” Young and free from all fear. Contrary to what one often hears people saying, explains the journalist, “what the various religions propose is not ‘basically the same thing’, even if they all make us contemplate the experience of the night and of the mystic fire”. It is in the Gospel that “we find an extraordinary and overwhelming message” and “burn with the desire to enable others to know it”; the word of Christians, however, “shall always be as inadequate as it is necessary”. Weak and inadequate “to people’s expectations, abysmally far from the One it would like to serve”, but this “is not only a sign of the times, it has always happened”; it is “a kind of original weakness and nakedness”. “Perhaps – concludes Le Corre – it is just to this point of poverty that Christmas invites us to conform. For at this point the old Church to which we owe so much is infinitely young. Astonishing, unexpected, on the point of being born. Free, like the flame that dances, and released from all fear”. ———————————————————————————————————– Sir Europa (English) N.ro assoluto : 1255 N.ro relativo : 85 Data pubblicazione : 11/12/2003