While tackling a mountain of paperwork, I listened online to Encounter, a program on Radio National which broadcast a lecture to a Brisbane audience by the Oxford-based Dominican friar, Timothy Radcliffe. Here are some excerpts I rather liked on the Christian understanding of love, beauty and conversation. When speaking on the apparent tension between the need for “dialogue” and “conversion” – ie. As Christians, should we engaged in dialogue with Muslims, or are we required to try to convert them? – Radcliffe tells us the word for 'homily' comes from a Greek word which means 'to converse', 'to talk', to listen as well as to speak. And the word 'conversation' is actually linked to the word 'conversion'. In a true conversation, everybody is converted in some way, a way that we leave open to God’s grace. I have posted some other sections I liked below, they are ordered in sequence according to my own preference and taste.
Click on the link below to read the full transcript or listen online.
“I think the revitalisation of Christianity has nearly always gone with a new sense of beauty. In the Middle Ages you have the invention of Gregorian chant, Gothic architecture, that goes with the whole revival of Christianity - new vigour. After the Reformation you get the baroque, incredibly vital, actually I can't abide it but there we are. Then in the 19th century faced with the Industrial Revolution, urban waste, you get Methodism and its new hymns, new songs for a new time. And I think if we're going to revive Christianity and its going to flourish, we need a new beauty. People are nervous of doctrines because they think wrongly its doctrinaire. They're nervous of morality because they think its moralistic, but beauty touches everybody. Why is this? Why particularly, I think ,music? Why does music oxygenate the tree, the leaves? Because music is the most wordless and the most bodily. Music reaches beyond our words, for what has St Paul said 'The heart has not conceived, nor is the eye seen.' In music you touch what is beyond any conception. A ballet dancer once danced a beautiful dance and somebody said to her, 'That's lovely, tell me what it meant.' And she said, 'If I could tell you I wouldn't have bothered to dance it.'
…You see, traditionally from St Paul to Thomas Aquinas, to the end of the Middle Ages, morality was not about what you are allowed to do or forbidden to do, morality was about who you become, virtue ethics - which are making a big return at the moment - virtue ethics were about becoming someone, someone whose happiness and freedom was in God. When I left the country, we were still in the full scandal of the MPs' expenses, and one MP after another was saying, 'I didn't do anything wrong, I didn't break the rules.' My friends, what an infantile view of morality - 'I didn't break the rules.'
… In the Christian vision becoming a moral person is growing in the virtues, so that you become someone who is courageous, who is just, who's temperate, who's prudent, who does what is right because it springs from who you are, as someone who is honourable. We've lost any conception that people - that it is an inherent part of our dignity to be honourable regardless of whether anybody ever catches us out. Of course we do need rules but only to form us to be free, only to form us to be mature and adult. The Chief Rabbi said to me recently, I checked this out with him, very interesting, he said, 'You know that in the Hebrew Bible' - their Torah, our Old Testament, 'there is in Hebrew no word which means to obey? The word simply doesn't exist in our sense of an external constraint. There are words which mean 'to listen', 'to respond'. The Ten Commandments is a very recent description, the Ten Commandments in the Hebrew its the ten words which God addresses to us in friendship.'
…The virtues of Aquinas offer a pilgrimage, a way to become somebody whose delight, whose happiness, and whose freedom is in God. They prepare us for the journey, the pilgrimage, and it doesn't matter what you've done, it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter what mess you have got into because any of us can get into messes, wherever you are the virtues can strengthen you for the journey, the journey home.”
