In The Tempest Tossed Church, author and critic Gerard Windsor explores his appropriation of Catholic faith. Its title is drawn from a sombre 19th century hymn whose tone is embodied in the line, 'Save us from peril and from woe'. Its fearfulness is echoed in much reflection on the state of the Church today. But not in Windsor's book.
It is exploratory, teasing out for a general audience what being Catholic means to him today. The exploratory quality differentiates it from authoritative expositions of Catholic faith, the rebuttal of external or internal enemies and exercises in self-justification, reminiscence, criticism, lament or celebration. Although it contains elements of all these genres it is imprisoned in none.
Explorers are judged by how much territory they cover, how attentive an eye they have and how many aspects of the terrain they reveal. Windsor passes all these tests. He teases out the complex strands of the lived experience of being Catholic at different times and in different contexts of his life, displaying the symbolic force of the images, practices and language that have shaped Catholic life.
He attends to the intellectual challenges of Catholic belief, such as the reasons why someone may believe in God in the face of widespread disbelief and massive evil and suffering. He also gives full weight to the dissuasive power of corruption in the Catholic Church, revealed most recently in the horrifying child sexual abuse and its cover up by Catholic officials.
In his explorations his distinctive gift lies in his deep respect for words in what they both can and cannot say, and for the breadth of the religious and literary culture in which they are rooted. This gift echoes the central importance in Catholic tradition of the belief that the Word became flesh, which directs believers to seek God in the relationships and encounters of everyday life.
"As in other tight knit communities tribalism faded with affluence and equal opportunity, a growing cultural emphasis on individual choice and the spread of an ideology that valued people as economic competitors."
It implies that in everything we see and do is greater and deeper than we can measure or analyse. As a result words must be qualified as shallow or deep as well as accurate or inaccurate. By these criteria Windsor calls out both Catholic and anti-Catholic propaganda.
The compass bearings in the book are found in the vignettes that introduce each topic. With his gift for fixing people in a few words or images, Windsor describes people who seem initially familiar but prove surprising. As in playwright Alan Bennett's monologues, the predictably humdrum turns out to have unexpected depth and poignancy.
When we respond to a book that ranges so far, we could easily cavil at points where we suspect he has momentarily left the path. That might make for good conversation or bad debate.
This intuition — that there is more to reality than can be measured and analysed, and that it is critical for us to find good words and the right tone to commend this intuition — forms the bridge to all religious belief and ritual, and so specifically to Catholicism. Without this intuition faith is sterile.
Windsor shows that in the Australian Catholic Church this was once done through strong communal ties in which ritual, devotions, scriptural and historical literacy all supported words in which to catch the 'something more and deeper' and to embody it as a community in daily living.
That world has gone forever, and with it the bridge over which disengaged Catholics might return to their church as a viable resting place. As in other tight knit communities tribalism faded with affluence and equal opportunity, a growing cultural emphasis on individual choice and the spread of an ideology that valued people as economic competitors. In all these cultural strands the real is confined to the individual and tangible, and words that might reach out to something more are ripped away. Poetry and religious literacy became niche markets in the educational curriculum.
For young people religious belief has become a choice, associated with a generous social ethic, but not bound to it within a cohesive religious and intellectual culture. That makes it a minority choice.
The Tempest Tossed Church will invite some Catholics to ask how they should visualise and plan for the future of the church. Its exploration suggests that they should not see themselves as developers. They will be small scale gardeners who preserve for a more human time the craft and wisdom of preparing soil, seeding, nurturing and pruning in their seasons.
The Catholic challenge will be to shape pockets in which religiously literate and radical communities are formed around the symbols of faith. Its contribution to a more humane society will be made by joining other small groups in keeping alive the sense of 'something more' and by passing on the craft of finding the words, symbols and silences that catch it.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.