The other day I listened to an online discussion among three prominent public intellectuals. They were lamenting the current destruction of what they considered the positive aspects of Christendom. In their initial academic pursuits, they each had been attracted to the foundational principles of what we could call secular humanism as the substrate that could provide what was needed to produce a moral and ethical society. Now they weren’t so sure, in that the ideas rooted in that substrate were not producing the fruit that they had hoped for but a crop of poisonous ideologies that were hollowing out Christendom.
It was like they were talking Biblically. The seed that they had planted in their lives had sprung up and produced an impressive growth initially but ended up producing substandard fruit. Their conversation struck me like the “debriefing” conversation that Adam and Eve might have had after their episode in the garden. The fruit offered to them by the serpent had been “pleasing to the eye” but after sampling it they discovered it was poisonous and now they were in a real pickle!
The seed that those intellectuals had planted could only drive its roots down as far as the aquifers of the philosophical and the political and sink no deeper. Their question was, where to you find seed that can drive its roots into a deeper reality and produce good fruit.
In thinking about this question in the context of Easter; the political and philosophical powers of the day assumed that they were just crucifying some Galilean troublemaker, but little did they realise that when they planted that cross on Golgotha, they were also planting the tiny seed of pure love, which can sink its roots into the deepest of all aquifers where the living waters flow. That tiny seed of pure love is like the mustard seed, in Luke chapter 13, where even though it is the smallest and most inconspicuous of all seeds it eventually grows into the largest of all plants and becomes a tree that the birds come to and nest in its branches. (A description of Christendom).
Our resident theologian, Dr. David Deane has written a book on Catholic moral theology called “The Tyranny of the Banal” where he points our that if society’s ethics are rooted in only the philosophical and the political then whatever fruit is produced will be substandard. For anyone who is quenched by the deepest of all aquifers where Christ provides us his living water we need to be aware that our ethical statements, for example on abortion or Medical Assistance In Dying, will come across as if we are strangers from a strange land who are speaking in a foreign tongue. It was interesting to see that those online thinkers were starting to enter into that strange land and so were getting dangerously close to having a “come to Jesus” moment.
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