Friday, April 29, 2005
WHO IS GOD ?
Fr. Ron Rolheiser attempts to answer that question in an article published in "Tidings", Southern California's Catholic weekly paper. The article is titled "Finding God in comunity."
"God," Fr. Rolheiser writes, "is not, first of all, a formula, a dogma, a creedal statement or a metaphysics that demands our assent. God is a flow of living relationships, a trinity, a family of life that we can enter, taste, breathe within and let flow through us. ...God is community, family, parish, friendship, hospitality and whoever abides in these abides in God and God abides in him or her."
God, then, is the community of man. One gets the impression that Fr. Rolheiser doesn't look at God as totally "other." Rather God and man are inseparable in his theology.
"God," he says "is Someone and Something that we live within and which can flow through our veins." God, apparently then, is us. Or at least "God is a flow of relationships to be experienced in community, family, parish, friendship and hospitality. When we live inside of these relationships, God lives inside of us and we live inside of God."
Fr. Rolheiser has the charism of hospitality mastered.
"God is more domestic than monastic...It means, too, that in coming to know God, the dinner table is more important than the theology classroom, the practice of grateful hospitality is more important than the practice of right dogma." Why is "right dogme" so inconvenient for Fr. Rolheiser?
That is where antinomianism leads--into making it up to suit yourself. Will substituting the hospitality gospel for the Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John get us to heaven? According to Fr. Rolheiser:
"Such a concept [as the hospitality gospel] blurs all simple distinctions between 'religious' and 'purely secular' experience....God is inside of community, we should be there, too, if we wish to go to heaven. Simply put, we can't go to hell, if we stick close to family, community and parish."
That is the heart of the Charismatic Renewal. It becomes one big social event. Party time at the Catholics'. Even Mass turns into party time. The hospitality gospel is the best excuse for celebration going. All of those contemplative nuns before the Blessed Sacrament are simply missing the boat. All of those desert monks have failed to get the picture. The Catholic God is about good times and happy faces. Forget the cross. Break out the chips.
Prior to Vatican II there were no "charisms." There was grace. There were the seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost--wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord. In the entire 603 pages of the Catechism of the Council of Trent not one "charism" is to be found. Not a single reference to hospitality within them.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
