One God for Many Nations
Recently, the discussions on who's got what God right left many among us without any energy to go on talking through the differences. The culture started to turn unreasonably polarized. The Bishops kept calling for political Catholicism, while they appeared to be withdrawing the public's attention from their own shortcomings and sins.
In spite of the venomous opposition against the political neutrality that President Obama had tried to maintain at the insistence of the religious right for defining good against evil in terms of fundamentalist Christians and the Other (always the elitist argument...) to control the discourses, the people have unanimously chosen to opt for freedom from religion when discussing serious politics. People and their differences is what constitutes a nation, not the hateful language that seeks to dominate minds and political choices through concerted speech of alienation and hate for those who are different, think differently, choose differently and live differently.
Among those new forms of Catholicism which are integrative of those who in other times would have not belonged to the mainstream, are women priests, gay priests, and other theologically destitute members of the human family.
Boy! The real challenge seems to be, how to allow Catholicity to turn really Catholic in its original intention of inclusion of all the diversities it dominated.
"I say, if one knows anything in God and affixes any name to it,
that is not God.
God is above names and above nature.
We read of a good man who was praying to God
and wanted to give Him names.
Then a brother said, 'Be silent, you dishonour God!'
We can find no name that we could give to God,
but we are permitted the names the saints called Him by,
whose hearts were consecrated by God
and flooded with His divine light.
And here we should learn, firstly, how to pray to God.
We should say: 'Lord, in the same names
which thou hast thus consecrated in the hearts of thy saints
and flooded with thy light, we pray to thee and extol thee.'
Secondly, we should learn not to give God any name
with the idea that we had thereby sufficiently honoured and magnified Him:
for God is above names and ineffable."
