[Oe List ...] 12/01/11, Spong: What Do Christian Symbols Mean in a Land Where Christianity is No Longer Practiced?

[Ellie Stock]

     HOMEPAGE        MY PROFILE        ESSAY ARCHIVE       MESSAGE BOARDS       CALENDAR









What Do Christian Symbols Mean in a Land Where Christianity is No Longer Practiced?
Italy is a Roman Catholic country!  That was stated time after time as we journeyed through Florence, Tuscany and the Cinque Terre.  The signs of this faith tradition were everywhere.  The major tourist attractions in Italy, ranging from the Vatican to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, to the storied museums of the land in which the artistic creations of the Christian past are on display, all serve to make this Catholic history visible.  Every Italian city is home to many churches, to stories of miracles emanating from a bygone era, to multiple shrines and to statues of religious heroes of the past.  The influence of Catholicism obviously finds constant expression in Italian culture.  The powerful mother of the Italian family, the “Mama Mia,” is undergirded by the image of the Virgin who is universally present. The suffering of the people, especially of those mothers who lost sons in the almost endless warfare throughout history between Italian cities or regions, is reflected in portraits of the Virgin at the cross cradling the limp body of her deceased son, Jesus.  The “hot blood” of the Italian psyche is reflected in the images of the wrathful father God and in the sensuous appeal of Mary Magdalene.
The great festivals and holidays of Italy all have Christian content, not only the universal ones like Christmas and Easter, but also the more favored local ones like the Flower Festival of St. Zita on April 27 in the city of Lucca, which commemorates one whose body, so the legend says, has been miraculously preserved from decay, so she is displayed in her final resting place, visible behind glass and serving as a tourist attraction not unlike Scotland’s Loch Ness monster.
Underneath these overwhelming, religious facades, however, is a vast and pervasive emptiness.  The external forms of religion reflecting the Catholic faith no longer seem filled with religious content.  The city of Lucca in Tuscany illustrates this reality.  Lucca, a small city of less than 100,000 people, has eighty-seven churches dotting its landscape with their steeples punctuating the skyline.  Sixty-seven of these churches, however, have been officially deconsecrated and turned over to secular purposes.  Of the twenty that remain, attendance is very low with only a few of the pews occupied on any given Sunday.  The myths of miracles continue to be passed on, but with the glimmer of make believe, a vain attempt to capture the magic of their religious past.  No one, save for some of the elderly and uneducated, still ascribes any reality to the details.  They remain as cultural artifacts of a time that is no more.
In the Middle Ages almost the entire purpose of life was to prepare the faithful for the life to come.  It was focused on penance; pilgrimages and the spiritual discipline of mortification, combined with prescribed acts of kindness and generosity were thought to assure one of the bliss of heaven.  Guilt was the omnipresent reality in that system that motivated all behavior.  Today, life is centered in the present. The search for pleasure now has long since replaced the yearning for bliss later. Wine is the beverage of choice and it is drunk in great quantities at dinner and is anticipated as fully as is the food.  Clearly it gladdens the hearts of the Italian citizenry.  Lots of homes have small vineyards from which their own wine is made.  They cannot imagine alcohol control as a function of government.  Few ever associated wine with the sacrament of the Eucharist.  They would understand those words culturally, but they would never employ them.
Biblical ignorance is also rampant throughout the land.  The Catholic Church never put a premium on Bible Study and the last two hundred years of critical biblical study has not made a significant impact on either the Catholic hierarchy or the priesthood. It has certainly not permeated the minds of the average person.  If one were to tell an Italian audience that none of Jesus’ disciples wrote the gospels or that the miracles were far more symbolic than historical, they simply would not listen.  Jesus was born in Bethlehem one Italian told me, totally unaware that the stories of the miraculous birth of Jesus, which includes moving his birth from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the city of David, did not enter the Christian tradition until the 9th decade of the Christian era.  The artifacts of their Christian past are simply like pieces of antique furniture, honored by, but not used in a typical household.
The people are proud of their artistic treasures.  Michelangelo’s masterpiece, the statue of King David as a youth, was adopted as symbolic of an insight into modernity by the people of Florence, but none of them could tell me why a Jewish king, who reigned about 3,000 years ago, was chosen to be a symbol of a new age.  Yet this gigantic, nude statue carved and chiseled with incredible skill and talent, draws millions of viewers a year.  The non-biblical aspects of what they assume to be biblical portraits are astonishing. As I noted last week there were numbers of paintings of Jesus and John the Baptist, playing together as children under the careful watch of Mary and Elizabeth, found in every museum.  Yet there is not a shred of evidence in the Bible of any association between Jesus and John the Baptist in childhood.  Most of the tradition that has grown up around this theme reflects only an earlier story of the relationship between Esau and Jacob in Genesis.  In both narratives, the elder must decrease and the younger increase.
The Stations of the Cross, painted and hanging as portraits on the walls of churches, tell the story of Jesus’ passion with little regard for the facts related in the biblical narratives.  So the people enjoy the art, ask no questions about it and generally ignore its meaning.
What do empty religious symbols mean?  What power sustains them?  Why do these symbols remain so prevalent when the faith that gave them meaning has so little residual power? That was the issue that intrigued me.  While I was in Italy, I saw only one person wearing a cross.  So rare was this experience that I inquired if she would be willing to tell me what that simple act meant to her.  It was an intrusive question, but she responded without taking offence.  “I’ve always liked the symbol, she said, but I don’t like the things it traditionally stands for – suffering, pain and death.  It says to me that one human life lived out his destiny by giving his life away – so for me it is a sign of radical freedom,” an interesting non-religious response.
That response, however, helped me to answer my own questions about the continued impact of Catholic forms in a nation and a culture that has largely abandoned Christianity’s content.  Certainly the Italian people are not obedient to the rules of their church.  The birth rate in Italy, 1.2 children per family, is the lowest in all of Europe.  Does anyone really believe that this startling rate is achieved without birth control or legal abortion?
Churches are closing, worshippers at those that remain open are few and the number of priests is in free fall.  The tourist guides wink knowingly when they relate the miracle stories connected with the various shrines.  The Pope is treated like a piece of furniture or a maiden aunt.  No one is unkind, but no one pays attention to anything he says.  “He is not popular,” one Italian told me.  “Why is that?” I inquired.  “Because he’s German,” came the answer. “The Germans are blunt, they say what they think and don’t care who likes it.  Previous Popes knew how to make everyone think the Pope agreed with them.”
When the substance of Christianity is largely absent from Italy’s life, but the ancient forms of Christianity are everywhere there is bound to be confusion.  One can, however, move beyond the forms of the past without moving beyond the substance to which those forms were originally but pointers.  If we identify the forms with the substance then when the forms die the substance also dies.  That is where institutional Christianity is in Italy, indeed in Europe and increasingly in the United States.  Yet most people still seek in some way meaning, ultimacy and God, but so often it is the dead forms of the past that force our search to remain inside the increasingly empty symbols of yesterday.
Traditional Christianity is clearly dying in Italy – perhaps it has already died.  The human experience, however, which traditional Christianity once interpreted, is as real today as ever. Our task is to find new forms through which our eternal yearnings can find expression.  That is never achieved by reviving the past.   It comes by embracing the future, walking courageously into it and in the process redefining the meaning of being human.  To accomplish this Christians must begin by freeing ourselves of binding creeds and dated liturgies.  We need to cast aside pious ignorance, the fear of science and of new insights.  We probe the dimensions of our humanity, identifying those things that lift us beyond our limits and those that force us to live behind defensive barriers.  We look at the freedom and the wholeness of Christ and seek those same qualities in ourselves without worrying about what will become of our traditional and familiar symbols. People living today might not recognize what the Christianity of the 22nd century evolves into being, but we must nonetheless be about this journey.
Perhaps the secularity of Italy gives the Italians a head start, while we in America still have to push aside the thin, lingering religious veneer.  We still see at political rallies in America a hard and harsh presence called “the religious vote,” which suggests that those without health care insurance be allowed to die; boos a gay soldier, who has served courageously, when he seeks equality under the law, and tries to define the religion of a presidential candidate as a “cult.”  The Bible is still quoted to defend popular prejudices.  Christian liturgies remain pre-Copernican and Christian theology pre-Darwinian, while we search for meaningful answers to such perennial questions as: Who am I?  What is my purpose, my destiny?  Who is my neighbor?  When we begin to ask those questions in honesty with no preconceived religious answers, the time will have arrived for the Christian faith to be born to new dimensions of truth. I yearn and work for that day with confidence that it will arrive.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.




New Book Now Available!
RE-CLAIMING THE BIBLE FOR A NON-RELIGIOUS WORLD

John Shelby Spong presents Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, a book designed to take readers into the contemporary academic debate about the Bible. 

A definitive voice for progressive Christianity, Spong frees readers from a literal view of the Bible. He demonstrates that it is possible to be both a deeply committed Christian and an informed twenty-first-century citizen.

Spong’s journey into the heart of the Bible is his attempt to call his readers into their own journeys into the mystery of God.


Order your copy now on amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com!








Question & Answer
Ian, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
Let me say that you are such an inspiration to me!  Your courage to disintegrate the veneer and debris which surrounds God, Jesus and the Gospel has been rockin’ my world!  I love it!  Thank you!
I’m wondering if you are familiar with Eckhart Tolle.  You both come from divergent perspectives, but I see a lot of similarities.  Just wondered if you could offer a word or two concerning how you feel about the teachings.  Thanks!
Answer:
Dear Ian,
Thank you for your comments. Yes, I am familiar with the work of Eckhart Tolle and find it edifying, if not terribly original.  Tolle has captured, I believe, the essence of Christianity in a modern image.  Much of his thought is based on the writings of Meister Eckhart, whose name he has actually co-opted, who lived in the 13th and 14th century, so it is not particularly new.  He has, however, given Meister Eckhart’s thoughts a modern twist and that is a major contribution.
Meister Eckhart succeeded Thomas Aquinas in his chair of theology when Aquinas died.  His appointment represented a major transition in thought and the church of his time was not ready to hear his far more radical message.  Meister Eckhart, a true mystic, was put on trial for heresy, but he died before he was found guilty, thereby saving the church from one more embarrassing moment.
Thanks for writing.
~John Shelby Spong




New Book Now Available!
RE-CLAIMING THE BIBLE FOR A NON-RELIGIOUS WORLD

John Shelby Spong presents Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, a book designed to take readers into the contemporary academic debate about the Bible. 

A definitive voice for progressive Christianity, Spong frees readers from a literal view of the Bible. He demonstrates that it is possible to be both a deeply committed Christian and an informed twenty-first-century citizen.

Spong’s journey into the heart of the Bible is his attempt to call his readers into their own journeys into the mystery of God.


Order your copy now on amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com!








Announcements
















Read what Bishop Spong has to say about A Joyful Path Progressive Christian Spiritual Curriculum for Young Hearts and Minds: "The great need in the Christian church is for a Sunday school curriculum for children that does not equate faith with having a pre-modern mind. The Center for Progressive Christianity has produced just that. Teachers can now teach children in Sunday school without crossing their fingers. I endorse it wholeheartedly." 

Subcribers, please remember that your subscription is automatically renewed. You can unsubscribe at any time. You just need to login to access your profile page and cancel your account. Also, please note that the name on the bill will now be listed as "SPONGNEWS" or "SPONGNEWSLETTER" rather than "water front media" or "wfm" as The Center for Progressive Christianity (aka ProgressiveChristianity.org) is now the publisher and manager of this newsletter. We hope you enjoy the new website and newsletter layout!





Login to be able to comment directly on the website. Join in the discussion! 

Interested in staying informed of the latest updates to ProgressiveChristianity.org? Click here to sign up for our free monthly e-Bulletin, which has articles, reviews, books, events, and more. 

Look for us on Facebook. 

You can also follow Bishop Spong on Twitter. 

Thank you for taking this journey with us! 

Any questions or concerns, please contact us at support at johnshelbyspong.com or 253-303-0354. 


















forward to a friend  




Copyright © 2011 The Center for Progressive Christianity, All rights reserved. 
You are receiving this email because you have a membership at our website. 
Our mailing address is: 
The Center for Progressive Christianity
4916 Pt Fosdick Dr, NW
#148
Gig Harbor, WA 98335

Add us to your address book













 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/oe_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20111201/21e921c0/attachment-0001.html>