In March 2007 under the auspices of Liverpool Hope University and with the help of a group of moral theologians, parishioners and friends, Gerard Mannion, assisted by Philomena Cullen, organised a three-day ‘Festschrift Tribute and Celebration’ for me. The whole thing was kept secret from me with the result that I had no inkling of it until Gerard and Philomena told me in the course of a meal twenty-four hours beforehand. Gerard mentioned all the participants he had invited and that there would be a simultaneous Eucharist on the Saturday evening, followed by an Irish Ceilidh in the school with refreshments provided by the parishioners. I felt totally overwhelmed by what he was saying. But there was more to come. When Chris Lappine, who acted as my chauffeur for the weekend, showed me the full programme, I found that my name featured in the titles of most of the talks and presentations on the Friday and the whole of Sunday morning was to be a long series of tributes to me! I was also told that Liverpool Hope University were going to award me with an Honorary Doctorate and that Gerard Mannion, Julie Clague and Bernard Hoose were editing a Festschrift in my honour, Moral Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Continuum, London, 2008). I was completely thrown by the prospect of being the centre of attention over three whole days. What follows is part of a little piece I wrote afterwards in which I attempt to reflect on the whole experience and try to make sense of the grace-filled experience it turned out to be for everyone.
Following this reflection I am also including my response to the Award of my Honorary Degree in Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. Both themes are related.
As soon as my eyes were opened to what lay in store for me, I knew I had no choice but to throw myself into enjoying every minute of it. What a gift I was being given – a lovely coming together of so many people who were precious to me and who had all influenced my life so much! As with any celebration, it was something we were all invited to enjoy together. To have refused to enjoy it would have been churlish of me. And the whole atmosphere was so positive that the enjoyment was shared by everyone. It was a real celebration from beginning to end. In fact, I found it to be a profoundly grace-filled experience.
There is something deep in me and in all of us that longs to be loved and enjoys being loved. That is a profoundly God-like dimension of all of us. God loves to be loved. In fact, the very inner life of God is about loving and being loved. God is a communion of love. We are made in God’s image. God has loved each and all of us into existence and invited us to love each other as he has loved us. That is surely why all of us long to be loved and enjoy being loved.
However, I know there is also something deep in me which resists being loved, a kind of inner voice which tells me that I am not really lovable. It cuts me a-sunder from other people – and ‘sunder’ is the root of the word ‘sin’. This resistance to being loved separates us from each other – and so from God – and ultimately from our true selves. That is why it is truly something demonic. It is a refusal of communion.
I felt the urge of that demonic impulse in me from time to time over the weekend. When people kept saying something like, ‘You are loved by a lot of people’ or ‘How wonderful that so many people think so highly of you’, my demon kept trying to pop up to stop me appreciating and being grateful for such love.
That prompted a different train of thought in me. In Baptism we are given the family name of the Trinity, the communion of love within God. This namegiving does not separate us (sunder us) from those not baptised. Rather it opens our eyes to who we are – and who they are too. It reveals that, precisely as human beings, we are called to be ‘communion people’. Enda McDonagh put that beautifully in his amazing and inspiring talk when he spoke of God as the host, inviting us all as guests to share in the delights of the Garden of life, but also to be hosts to our fellow guests. That rang a bell with something I say at the baptism of a baby. After focussing on the baby as a unique image of God, I always go on to say that the baptismal promises remind us that the fashioning and shaping of this unique image of God is largely the work of human hands – principally its parents and family, but also including all who will have a positive influence on the child as it grows and journeys through life.
I suddenly became aware that what I was experiencing during our celebration was the amazing reality of this relational and interdependent dimension of who I am (and who we all are) as human persons, images of the communion of love within the Godhead. The gathering was representative of all the people who had played a role in shaping me into the person I have become. I am sure people were able to see where my moral theology had come from as they listened to many of my former colleagues describe the situations we had shared and how we had helped each other respond to the new challenges we faced.
In my closing words on Sunday morning, I read out a short passage from my friend and moral theologian colleague, Peter Harvey:
I am either one with all creation, linked indivisibly with everyone and everything else, or I am nothing but illusion. It is not that I exist only in relationship, it is that I am relationship from the beginning. At no point can I stand outside the web, for there is nowhere to stand (The Morals of Jesus, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1991, p. 61).
It dawned on me that the love (‘God saw that it was good’) I was experiencing was all within the one web of relationships of love to which we all belong – brought out in the ‘one body of Christ’ image and even more widely in the ‘cosmic Christ’ image.
Everyone had remarked on the warmness of the atmosphere throughout the whole conference and celebration. Although a few had jokingly described it as a ‘Kevin-fest’, it struck me that it was much more a ‘We-fest’, a celebration of the communion of love of which we are all part, a kind of foretaste and glimpse of the joy promised us in the Kingdom. We experienced this ‘joyful communion’ very tangibly in a whole variety of ways throughout the weekend, not least in the beautiful simultaneous shared Eucharist and in the Ceilidh immediately after, all prepared with such care and commitment by the parish community. What a striking interpenetration between both parts of that unforgettable evening, a dazzling homily in the Eucharist by Fr Charlie Curran and some magnificent and hilarious words of appreciation by Keith Austin, the Anglican Reader, along with the communion-building energy of music and movement and, of course, sharing as guests (and co-hosts) at the Lord’s table both in Church and at the fabulous banquet prepared and hosted by parishioners and the school. The School Head, Win Douglas, played a God-like role in enabling this truly ‘educational’ experience to take place. An extra-special gift for me was the wonderful turnout of my own family and the hilarious This is Your Life presentation by my nephew, Steve.
I believe that what we were experiencing together was the Spirit of loving communion breathing in and through us (‘inspiring us’). The inspired word was: ‘Enjoy the wonder of each other. In doing so you will appreciate just how lovable you all are and you will drive away the demon which tries to cut you asunder from each other.’ That is why a ‘We-fest’ is the only appropriate to describe the whole weekend.
The more I’ve thought about the weekend, the more I feel that it has helped me confront another demon, another inclination trying to ‘sunder’ me. It is the demon which tempts me, and all of us, to feel pride in the gifts people are praising in us. If we are all members of one body, all interlocking strands in the one web Peter Harvey refers to, the gifts of each of us are given for the service of the whole.
I may have been stupid enough not to cotton on to what was happening. I hope I am wise enough to recognise that we could have had an alternative event highlighting the weaknesses of Kevin Kelly as a moral theologian, his shadow side as a Christian and his failings as a priest and pastor. But that is another story. I am happy to leave God, the co-author of all our stories, to cope with that part of my story – and all our stories.
On Sunday evening, the eight remaining moral theologians gathered in the presbytery with me and one of the parishioners, Chris Lappine, for a home-delivery pizza meal. Our conversation included a rich flow of memories of the celebration. However, the joy of the evening was marred by a telephone call informing us that it seemed certain that sometime in the next few weeks the CDF would issue a condemnation of what Jon Sobrino had written about the person of Christ. Jon is a Latin American theologian who lives with painful but glorious memories. He was a member of the Jesuit community in El Salvador who were all murdered, along with their housekeeper and her daughter, because of the stand they were taking to defend the poor in their country from massive injustice. They are truly worthy of being venerated as martyrs. Jon was away on a lecture tour when their martyrdom took place. He now interprets faithfulness to the Gospel of Christ as demanding that he continue their mission and keep their memory alive.
A better use of the teaching authority of the CDF would be to arrange a Festschrift in honour of Jon Sobrino (and his martyr companions) and call together a group of theologians and biblical scholars who have explored the theme of justice in the bible, tradition and the Church’s teaching and practice, and including Christians who have committed themselves to the struggle for justice in the world. Women should obviously be given their rightful place at such a meeting. Hopefully, the gathering would be ecumenical, even interfaith. I suspect such a meeting would more truly honour Christ and be a more credible witness of discipleship than what the CDF seem to have in mind.