It is absurd to attempt to put God into a straitjacket

This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane
Over the last week or so the airwaves have been filled with strong words on sermons, church and sin.

People deciding who’ll go to hell and why they might be heading in that direction. Even some people were earmarked for the journey to everlasting fire.

Derek Scally wrote in his column in The Irish Times about how our church debate was making the news in Berlin. He argued how the story reminded many of us of our own past. It’s easy today to get up and walk out of a church, not so 30 or 40 years ago. Scally recalls how when researching his book, ‘The Best Catholics in the World’ he spoke to a man about the Tuam babies. The man told him that the fathers of the Tuam babies came from ‘local respectable families, but you’ll never get them to talk’.

I often look back at the theology I tried to learn. Has any of it stood to me? Yes, I well remember and indeed often quote how a lecturer once told us that it is close to impossible to say anything about God. I like that. And it so happens he was one of the kindest of people, a gentleman.

On the other hand and at the other end of the spectrum I remember in sixth class in primary school a teacher telling us about hell, the fire that was there and the large clock that never stopped. His story was terrifying and terrified this 12-year-old boy, indeed so much so that I can still see him there in the classroom giving us a graphic detailed account about hell.

Maybe hell is happening right in front of our eyes as we continue to destroy our planet.

Anyone who tries to pigeon hole God and resurrection needs to be treated with the greatest of suspicion. It’s unwise to create our own image of God. In World War II on the buckle of every German soldier’s belt was written: ‘God is with us’.

At the end of his life the Dominican saint and doctor of the church Thomas Aquinas said that everything he had written in all his theological works was but straw.

It’s important not to lose sense of the mystery of God. Trying to put God into a straitjacket  is simply absurd, it’s the stuff of fairytales.

I’m chaplain in a hospital. It has been a life enhancing experience. I cherish the people with whom I work.

I’m inclined to say I know next to nothing about God. What do I know about myself? All I do is listen, chat and even laugh with those I meet every day in my work. I meet the loveliest of people, some who are very sick. In my six years in the hospital I have seldom if ever heard an angry or cross word. I want to keep it like that.

 

I recently discovered that there are 86 billion neurons in the brain. They are information messengers. They use electrical impulses and chemical signals to transmit information between different areas of the brain, and between the brain and the rest of the nervous system. How did they happen to come about? 

Even if I’ve lost a handful or more a long the way. Anything we say about anything surely has to be nuanced. And that certainly includes our words about God.