A revised version of an article first published in ‘The Way’, October 1985, pp. 282-293. An abbreviated version, entitled ‘Conscious Formation and Conscious-raising in the Parish’, appeared as chapter two of my book, From A Parish Base: Essays in Moral and Pastoral Theology (DLT, London, 1999).
I used to be puzzled by the French having only one word, ‘conscience’ to cover our two English concepts, ‘conscience’ and ‘consciousness’. Now I can see more point to their running the two together. I am becoming more and more convinced that ‘consciousness’ catches the fullest flavour of what we really mean by conscience.
Genuine spirituality recognizes a close link between our deepest desires and the will of God. This is to be expected when we accept that ‘the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us’ (Rom 5:5). If we can really get in touch with our deepest selves, we are at the contact point between ourselves and the Spirit of God. This is what GS means when it speaks of conscience as ‘the most secret core and sanctuary of a person where we are alone with God, whose voice echoes in our depths’ (no. 16).
A legalist approach to conscience is de-personalizing. It takes away our individual input into any decision we make; but, even worse, it leaves no room for the Holy Spirit to touch us as persons. The ‘will of God’ is objectified in laws, principles and the directives of Church authorities. And even the laws and principles lose their soul by being removed from the sphere of ongoing questioning, searching and probing. God’s will becomes equated with an objective law, whereas it should be the driving force and inspiration in our decision-making process. As St Thomas puts it so beautifully, ‘The New Law in its essence is the gift of the Holy Spirit’ (Summa Theologiae, I-II, 106:1).
In a legalist approach to God’s will, we can feel safe as long as we are doing what authority tells us to do. A deeper understanding of God’s will means that if we are listening to the Spirit in the depths of our being, we will constantly be disturbed out of our comfortable security.
Whether true or not, legalism is certainly what many older Catholics believe was taught to them and it is what many still believe and live by today. What authority says, goes. Obedience is the important attitude. Our conscience is clear if we do what the Church says. And conversely, we feel guilty if, for whatever reason, we have not fulfilled the objective requirements of one of the Church’s laws. For instance, it is disturbing how many Catholics still feel a need for absolution if they have missed Mass on Sunday, even if they were quite ill at the time. This is nothing less than an extreme oppression of conscience. A person who operates on this level has a seriously immature conscience.
There can be no liberation from this oppression until a person comes to believe that our Christian God is a loving God and that there is nothing God wants more deeply than our personal and communal good and happiness. Once we see God in that light we are able to see that sin has no other meaning than what is person-injuring. God is affected by sin only because human persons are precious to him and the last thing he wants is for persons to be harmed. To paraphrase St Thomas, we offend God only to the extent that we harm ourselves and others (cf. Contra Gentiles, III, no. 122).
It follows from all this that we only come to understand what is sinful by gradually discovering what ways of acting are against the true good of human persons. What is good and evil does not flow from some arbitrary ‘will of God’. It flows from the very nature of the human person in community. Therefore, if we want to use the phrase ‘law of God’ or ‘God’s will’, we must remember that we are not referring to divine edicts handed down from on high. Rather we are talking about a growing awareness among humankind as to what really serves the good of human persons and what contradicts that good. Developing this awareness is a momentous task shared by all men and women down through the ages. Each period of history has to face the fresh questions raised by changes in culture, new breakthroughs in human understanding, and a whole variety of scientific and technological developments.
In facing these questions, the Church has no hotline to God. God’s will does not arrive from heaven in diplomatic bags carried by some angelic courier. The Church has to join in the common search, confident that its belief in the human person as loved by God in Jesus, will give it something precious and unique to offer in this human quest for truth in personal and communal living.
Following the urging of GS, the Church has to engage in a dialogue with the world; and that is a dialogue from within. The Church does not look in on the modern world from the outside. The men and women who make up the Church today belong to the modem world, they share the same hopes and fears, sorrows and joys.
Dialogue involves listening and speaking. As Church we must listen to and be up-to-date with the best of scientific knowledge and the most recent technological developments. We must also listen to our own instincts through which we can plug into the common-sense of humankind. We must listen to other people of good will – and obviously ‘good will’ is not the exclusive preserve of Catholics or Christians. We must listen to our catholic and Christian tradition.
Real sharing in dialogue also involves speaking. Some of that speaking can be checking out whether we have listened correctly. The opening paragraphs of GS are virtually the Church saying to the world, ‘This is what I hear you saying: have I got you right?’ Some speaking involves moving the dialogue on a stage further. And some speaking expresses our judgments or decisions. This kind of speaking is very crucial, especially in matters of urgency where decisions need to be made and acted upon.
Urgent and pressing decisions face our modern world. Therefore, our dialogue has to come to practical conclusions. Judgments have to be made. They must be the best we can do at the time but very often they can only be provisional, open to further refinement and perhaps even revision. To be practical they need to be definite but that does not mean they have to be definitive. A moral theologian whom I respect highly once said that he would love to read an encyclical letter which began ‘I may be wrong but …!’ We need to have the courage of our convictions. An open mind does not mean a blank mind devoid of any convictions. But we do need to see ourselves involved in an ongoing search for truth. That does not mean jettisoning the truth as we currently see it but it might mean re-examining and re-thinking that truth so that we can appreciate its richness even more fully in the light of where we stand today in the ongoing story of human culture and civilization. The whole of Gaudium et Spes is written in this spirit but nowhere is it more clearly expressed than in no. 44 of that Constitution. After speaking about this whole process of dialogue, it then states: ‘In this way, revealed truth can always be more deeply penetrated, better understood, and set forth to greater advantage.’
This dialogue process in the Church’s involvement in the search for truth throws light on how the individual Christian moves towards a conscience-decision. I use the phrase ‘conscience-decision’ deliberately. Conscience is not some inner voice telling me what I should do, a kind of hotline to God. Neither is it a negative alarm signal which goes off when I am about to do something wrong. Put very simply, conscience is myself deciding what I should do if I am to respond fully to God in this situation facing me. And responding fully to God implies responding fully to life and to my own deepest level of being.
If we view conscience in this way, it is clear why our understanding of what is meant by ‘the will of God’ is so important and why we need to be freed from voluntaristic and de-personalizing interpretations of God’s will. In a sense we create God’s will; or better, God’s will takes shape through our decisions. We are not puppets with the whole of our lives and everything we do already preprogrammed by God, the puppet-master. As each major decision looms before us in life, God’s will is not already determined and filed away in some kind of divine computer programme. Discovering God’s will is not a matter of discovering what God has already decided that we should do. Rather, discovering God’s will lies in ourselves deciding what is the most loving and responsible thing for us to do. We discover God’s will by actually bringing it into being.
I have always been fond of Charles de Foucauld’s prayer of abandonment. Not so long ago I was thrilled to discover just how similar that prayer is to the famous ‘Take, Lord, and receive’ act of self-offering in the Fourth Week of St Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises. For many years, God forgive me, I had tended to interpret abandonment to God’s will in a kind of fatalistic sense, God’s will came to me mainly from the outside in the events of life and in the directives and instructions of my bishop and other legitimate authorities. I did not naturally link abandonment to God’s will with what my deepest self really wanted to do.
Bit by bit I came to realize that it was meaningless to say to the Lord ‘I offer you my mind and will’ and then not use these precious faculties. That was not giving God my mind and will at all; it was simply ceasing to use them. That path leads to fatalism or grooms us to becoming victims of totalitarianism. So it gradually dawned on me that abandonment to God’s will was very closely linked with having the faith and courage to respond actively, not passively, to the situations in life. It meant being prepared to make decisions myself and accepting responsibility for my own decisions.
Naturally I am not suggesting that at every moment of the day we are always engaged in important conscience-decisions. Most of the time we are living out of decisions previously made and any intermediate decisions are not of such major import. Sadly, sometimes we are living without any sense of direction at all and so we experience much of what we are doing as pointless i.e. lacking point or direction.
All this points to the importance of a traditional catholic practice which is often misunderstood and in its mistaken form becomes oppressive rather than liberating. I refer to the ‘examination of conscience’. That has often been presented as a looking back over the day to see in what ways we have sinned. A truer version of it, and one more in keeping with its Ignatian inspiration, would see it as a time for deepening awareness in the busy and humdrum turmoil of daily life – almost an examination of consciousness. It is not a time when we make momentous new conscience decisions. It is more a time for sharpening our awareness of how the ordinary happenings of our day can have a deeper layer to them. They are not pointless. They fit into (or contradict) the purpose of our life as we have determined it to be through our deeper conscience-decisions. We encounter God in our everyday life.
Conscience understood in this way is light-years away from conscience reduced to guilt-feelings. The latter is an impoverishment of conscience and fails to take God’s commitment to this life seriously. It breeds an attitude which I can only call ‘irresponsibility towards life’. It fails to see how much this life matters in the eyes of God. It almost reduces our present life to being a kind of waiting-room for eternity, a supporting feature before the main film. The emphasis is on my personal immunity from guilt, my integrity. As long as my conscience is clear, I do not need to worry.
This life matters enormously to God. And above all, how human persons are treated is of paramount importance to God. Strangely enough, God seems well able to cope with guilt especially when it is good, healthy guilt arising from very real evil perpetrated and acknowledged. The acceptance of guilt is a major stepping-stone to forgiveness and real forgiveness is a deep experience of love. ‘Her sins, her many sins, must have been forgiven her, or she would not have shown such great love’ (Lk 7:47).
It is not guilt that poses a problem to God but blindness, It was the blindness of his people that caused Jesus to weep over Jerusalem. It was the blindness of the Pharisees that infuriated Jesus and caused him to use such strong language in an attempt to break down their resistance.
The problem with a guilt-centred conscience is that it focuses on itself and is blind to the real needs of other people and God’s world. By being turned in on itself it becomes purely individualistic. Gaudium et Spes challenged Christians to leave that kind of conscience behind them.
Profound and rapid changes make it particularly urgent that no-one, ignoring the trend of events or drugged by laziness, content himself with a merely individualistic morality … Let everyone consider it his sacred obligation to count social necessities among the primary duties of modern men, and to pay heed to them (no. 30).
If God really loves people and wants them to love and respect each other, it matters enormously to God how we treat each other and how we manage the world that we share as our communal home. God is not an impartial and uninvolved judge passing guilty or not-guilty verdicts on people. God is a committed and deeply involved lover to whom the dignity and happiness of each of us is of crucial importance.
A lover is a very vulnerable person since he or she suffers in and through the sufferings of the beloved. In freely creating humankind out of love, God has made himself completely vulnerable. Sometimes we speak of God as the unmoved mover, the changeless one. Though these expressions have a core of truth in them, we can so easily misunderstand and misinterpret them. They can give the impression that God is not really affected by what happens on earth and invulnerable to the sufferings of humankind. The stoic philosophers called this ‘apathy’ (painlessness, non-suffering). For them it was a state of perfection. For people today it is totally unattractive and inhuman.
A greater distortion of the God of the Bible and the God of Jesus could hardly be imagined. The Bible is full of feeling words applied to God – love, jealousy, anger, longing, desire and wrath, to name but a few. To apply the word ‘apathy’ to the God of the Old Testament could hardly be wider of the mark.
The same is true of Jesus – only more so. Jesus hanging on the cross gives the lie to any notion of God being invulnerable. The crucifixion could be called the vulnerability of God.
At the heart of Christian revelation lies the mystery of God’s sharing his pain with us. By that I do not mean God inflicting his pain on us. I simply mean God letting us know how much he loves us by actually letting us know how much he suffers because of us. In his mysterious decision to love us into existence God has made himself totally vulnerable. This is what the figure of Jesus on the cross is saying to us.
The cross is the symbol of the pain of God. But the voice of the pain of God in every age – and therefore in our own age also – is the voice of the poor, the oppressed, the weak, the sick, those who are pushed to the margins of society. That is what the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:29-37) is saying to us. We hear the call of God in the cry of the person in need. It is the same message we find in the tableau of the Last Judgment in Matthew 25:31-46.
The voice of the pain of God in our world today is still the voice of the poor, the oppressed, those who are discriminated against, those who are pushed to the edges of our society, those who are always at the back of the queue, The Vatican Council gives voice to the cry of some of these when it denounces all forms of discrimination ‘whether based on sex, race, colour, social condition, language or religion’. The voice of the pain of God can be heard at a global level-but the same voice is also to be heard in our neighbourhood, on our street, at work with us – or, more probably, not at work with us. In fact, the more we become sensitive to it, the more it becomes a deafening chorus, so much so that we can feel overwhelmed by it.
But we do not and must not hear it alone. As a family, whether in the Church or in society, we must listen to it together. And if we hear it in that context of our shared strength in the Church or in society, then far from overwhelming us, this cry of pain can become a challenge and an invitation.
Being a cry for a fully more human life, it is God’s voice calling us into his future, inviting us to take up the challenge to continue creating a more human world. Becoming attuned to this voice is a vital factor in the formation of conscience. ‘Consciousness-raising’ is a very apt description of this process. If the listening process involved in this is really operative in us, then we are talking of an activity which can also be described as prayer.
There is always the temptation to close our cars to that cry of pain. To the extent that we are not sharers in that pain, to the extent that we want to keep our distance from it and not be disturbed by it, to that extent we want to stay where we are. And we try to justify ‘where we are’ by describing it as order, standing over against disruption, disturbance, any change that can let that pain infiltrate into our tidy corner of the world.
But to opt for order in that sense is really to love what is dead. It is like a death wish. It is to deny that human history is alive and that an essential part of its life is this cry for increasing emancipation. To be deaf to that cry is to be deaf to the voice of the living God. Through this cry God is calling us constantly into a more human future.
Of course, we need to be aware that what happens in reality is that often the cry of pain comes to us disguised as an outburst of anger, or resentment, or rebellion. Our natural reaction as individuals, and especially as a Church or as society, is to respond in the same language – anger for anger, rejection for rejection and so on – or else it is to try to muffle the cry by means of directing attention elsewhere or by tackling the superficial symptoms which are only the tip of the iceberg. We will never receive the gift of sharing another’s pain unless we approach the other in love with a real desire to listen and a total absence of judgment and condemnation. A perfectionist, moralistic, over-demanding Church will find it difficult to share the pain of the weak and ‘sinful’ because such a Church will not give them that sense of security and trust which is needed for them really to reveal their pain.
One often hears an appeal today for the Church to give firm moral teaching on something or other. ‘Why doesn’t the Church take a clear stand on the issue?’ people say. To my mind, there are far more people looking to the Church, not for clear moral principles, but for compassion and understanding and the assurance that they are not alone in their pain and in their suffering and that there are grounds for real hope for them.
Jesus went to the heart of the matter, he went down to the roots. That is because he was so concerned. If we are to share his concern, his outraged anger, we must not rest satisfied with living on the surface. We too must try to go to the roots of the evils causing pain in our society today.
In revising and abbreviating this article for the present volume, I cannot resist adding a completely new final section. I feel it flows naturally from the final section of this article.
In September 2004 I had the privilege of being present at a meeting of Medical Missionary of Mary Sisters in Nairobi. It was a gathering of all their sisters from across the world who had been serving people (mainly women and children) who were living with HIV/AIDS. The meeting was an opportunity to share their experience at the end of ten years working in this ministry. It was also an occasion when they could draw inspiration together from their common faith in a God of love, despite the horrendous sufferings they encountered in their heroic ministry. What follows is the account in my diary of the opening service which began their meeting.
We began our conference with a beautiful liturgy prepared and led by Kay Lawlor. It was on the theme of ‘The Tears of God’. She had placed two tables in the middle of the room covered with very colourful African cloths. On each table were two glass bowls, two jugs of water and two floating candles. The big altar on the platform behind was also covered by a beautiful African cloth, a photo of their foundress, Mother Mary Martin, and some tasteful flower arrangements as well as a globe of the world.
The opening call to prayer read:
We come to gather the tears of the women and children of the world, the tears witnessed and wiped by our Sisters throughout the world, the tears of God; to bring to our minds, hearts, prayer and discussions the pain of our world and the Compassion of God.
After that one of the sisters read Lk 23:27-30,
And there followed Jesus a great multitude of the people, and of women who bewailed and lamented him. But Jesus turning to them said, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, “Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never gave suck”.’
The sisters were then invited to go to the jug and water corresponding to their zone and pour water from the jug into the bowls – representing the tears of women and children – and the tears of God. Quiet music was played in the background. Then a sister went up to each table and poured the two bowls of tears together into one bowl. These were then brought up to the altar and all poured together into one big bowl – beside the globe. The four floating candles were lit and floated in the one big bowl.
After this all the sisters said together the very powerful words of their Mission Statement as Medical Missionaries of Mary:
As Medical Missionaries of Mary
in a world deeply and violently divided,
we are women on fire
with the healing love of God.
Engaging our own pain and vulnerability,
we go to peoples of different cultures,
where human needs are greatest.
Our belief in the inter-relatedness of God’s creation
urges us to embrace holistic healing
and to work for reconciliation, justice and peace.
Then we all listened to a most haunting song, The Tears of God, taken from Carey Landry’s CD, I will not forget you, vol 2.
I saw a woman with her children, standing near the shelter door,
Hoping there would be a room,
A bed for one night more.
Then I saw a million people, poor and homeless ‘round the world,
And I thought I saw a tear fall upon each one.
I thought I saw the tears of God.
I thought I saw the tears of God.
I thought I saw the tears of God.
Falling like the rain.
I heard a young child crying,
And when I turned to comfort her,
I saw a look upon her face, a hollow frightened stare.
Then I saw a million children,
Cold and hungry ‘round the world
And I thought I saw a tear fall upon each one.
I thought I saw the tears of God.
I thought I saw the tears of God.
I thought I saw the tears of God.
Falling like the rain.
Nation fighting nation;
Hatreds settled with a gun;
Neighbour fighting neighbour;
Father against son.
Who will dry the tears of God?
Who will dry the tears of God?
Who will dry the tears of God
And help to heal the pain?
Blessed are the ones who suffer persecution for justice’ sake.
Blessed are the sorrowing: they shall be consoled.
Blessed are the poor in spirit:
They shall know the reign of God.
Blessed are the pure of heart: they shall see their God.
Shall we dry the tears of God?
Shall we dry the tears of God?
Shall we dry the tears of God?
And help to heal the pain?
Shall we dry the tears of God?
And help to heal the pain?
I found this liturgy utterly powerful and deeply moving. It moved us all to tears.
With our finite minds, we cannot grasp the full meaning of what this care of God really means. But in the person of Jesus it comes to us translated into the human language of love. The love of Jesus embodies the truth that God really cares about us.
God’s care extends to all – to every man, woman and child; and the proof of that lies precisely in his avowed love for those who in human terms are regarded as unlovable – the poor, the oppressed, the outcasts. God’s so-called ‘preferential love’ for them is in fact the verification of his love for everyone.
And the genuineness of God’s love is seen in the pain of God over the pain of those whom he loves – the sympathy of God (suffering with – diametrically opposed to ‘apathy’) incarnate in the person of Jesus and most clearly seen on the cross.
Paradoxically it is this pain of God, this outraged anger, which is the source of our confidence as Christians. If God shares our pain, there is no need for us to worry about the final outcome? This comes through very strongly in Paul’s tremendous shout of trust and confidence at the end of chapter eight of Romans.
As Christians, we are empowered by sharing the outraged anger of God’s love. More than that, if we believe that God’s spirit is active in the depths of every man and woman, then in truth everyone is offered the gift of being empowered by the outraged anger of God’s love. Surely we can say that this lies at the root of all human restlessness about what is wrong and out of gear and inhuman in our world. Pope Paul said something similar in 1971 when he wrote: ‘Beneath an outward appearance of indifference, in the heart of every man there is a will to live in brotherhood and a thirst for justice and peace which is to be expanded’ (Octogesima Adveniens, 1971). In 2008 Benedict XVI opened his major social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, with a very similar message.