THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL

The Local and the Global

            Across the vast expanse of time and history the great Jubilee confronts us with the brevity of individual lives, the little space we have for deciding what we want for ourselves and for others. Every priest and trainee priest is interested here in terms of the best use of time that he has for making a difference. Alertness and perception are imperative in this endeavour, instead of waiting for the wind of fortune to blow at our backs. Measured  against those thousands of years of history and of the unlived days of the future, the duration of our lives may seem pitifully short. But Christ’s life was also short  -  and shorter still his public ministry.  Yet despite having lived in an era that could not boast of TV and Email, he dominates two thousand years of history.  Why is this ?  The secret lies in his ability to convey to the men and women of all ages the integrity of his message that truly sustains, transforms and elevates. And no matter how much his name was abused to justify futile expeditions and evil wars, nothing could obliterate his one simple truth, that we are loved by God who personally invests himself in his creation and that we must love one another for him.

            The task of today’s priest is continuous with this secret, or call it “mystery”, in the criss-crossing of cultures and that awesome phenomenon called globalization with which he must engage if his reading of the signs of the times is correct.  In the 1970s and 1980s we were increasingly occupied with the notions of culture and inculturation, realising how different local cultures were from one another and how that affects the Church and the practice of theology. But concomitant with the resurgence and revaluing of cultures long suppressed by colonialism and imperialism has been the phenomenon of increased global interdependence and cultural interlacing, giving rise to something akin to a global culture in art and theology. How much this is to be resisted and how much domesticated will be the dialectic, hopefully fruitful, in which the bishops, priests and proactive lay persons must engage if they desire to keep the sustaining mystery of Christ within the world process. The dialectic of the local and the global, the particular in the ensemble, is a basic hermeneutic of the Christian mystery today.

Freedom and Theology

When one sees more deeply into Christ, is one looking into a mirror merely reflecting one's own deepest feelings? The answer must be that the Church has the mission of determining what is only the projection of subjective feelings and what is an authentic response to Christ as revealed. Yet it would be preposterous to imagine that all these profound changes occured simply by the acquiring of deeper insights into Christ. Human beings do not reach moral conclusions in a vacuum, apart from the whole web of language, custom and social structure surrounding them. A society composed entirely of free human beings was unknown in the Mediterranean world of the first centuries; a society where the state did not support religion was equally unknown. Only as social structures changed did moral mutation become possible, even if change in social structures, as it might reasonably be argued, was owed at least in part to the perception that structures fostering liberty were more congruent with deeper insights into Christ.