This is a slightly odd
book and I struggled with the first half, but just at the point of
abandonment suddenly a new connection was made and it seemed to open
up and begin to really resonant with me.
Gallagher has selected
10 “Religious Explorers”, a personal, indeed eccentric even,
grouping of individuals – but they would certainly make for a
lively dinner party...
This is a (post) modern
Catholic list, the earliest explorer is JH Newman, the most recent
Pope Benedict XVI, and so while that title is “Faith Maps”
plural, I would suggest the gathering is actually constituted to
argue for a “Faith Map” singular – it is the commonality not
the diversity of these “Explorers” that we are encouraged to
dwell upon.
In my view a good book
is a book that sends you off in search of others, and this one has
done that. One of the “eccentric” aspects is the inclusion of
Flannery O'Connor, a writer of fiction not theology, and I am now
mid-way through reading a complete collection of her short stories,
(I will leave comment on her till I have finished that collection).
The other eccentricity
is that most, but not all, the chapters are in two parts, first a
standard synopsis of the writer thought, the second a monologue
written in “their voice”. The question is how one is meant to
orientate oneself to these imagined monologues, they perhaps help to
make some of the more abstract thoughts of the writers be
re-communicated in more accessible form, but fundamentally any
suggestion that they offer authentic expression the writers thought
is difficult. There are interesting, but undeniably it is Gallagher
who is speaking in these monologues.
The essence of this
“Faith Map” is that there is something more that the rational
that is essential to faith. It is a critique of the failure of
engagement with Modernity by Christianity, it is a great weakness of
Christianity today that it is overly informed by a “Modern” mind
set.
Last weekend I was at a
Two:23 event where Ian Mobsby was speaking and giving an over view of
his particular take on Fresh Expressions. Gallagher's “Faith Map”
is I think very close to Mobsby's, and in particular Gallagher's
account of Benedict XVI's thought seemed to mirror Mobsby very
closely even if I am not sure either Mobsby or Benedict would be
entirely comfortable to find themselves such close bed fellows
(titter ye not!).
To quote from p 142
“And Pope Benedict went on to make an imaginative proposal: “I
think that today too the Church should open a sort of 'Courtyard of
the Gentiles' in which people might in some way latch on to God,
within knowing him and before gaining access to his mystery”.” It
would seem that Moot, the community Mobsby helps to lead, is a sort
of Courtyard of the Gentiles.
The message is that is
not faith or the Gospel that get in people's way, but “the Church”,
both its reality and their imagined construct of it. We need to
communicated the distinction between the two and allow people a route
through (or around) the church and into faith.
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