God Sister Teresa
‘Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,’ wrote John Keats in Lamia.
Replace philosophy with theology and I would guiltily be tempted to agree. It is not an appealing subject to me: my heart sinks when I look at all the books in our library that I should have read and haven’t.
Many are by the late Karl Rahner, a German Jesuit, and one of the most influential Roman Catholic theologians of the 20th century. His works include 23 volumes, drily entitled Theological Investigations. Their difficult contents occupy over a yard of shelf space. But this daunting intellectual is sympathetically on record as being delighted to be taken to the best ice-cream parlour in Berlin.
Far more importantly, he preached regularly at Sunday Mass in the churches local to the German universities where he taught. Some of these sermons appear in The Great Church Year and Biblical Homilies. They offer, to any ordinary person who is prepared to pay attention, a depth of scholarship and understanding of the Christian life that would normally
be available only to specialised academics. He never talks down to his congregation and yet every word is comprehensible. I can only be grateful that there are people who are so fascinating and encouraging about scripture and doctrine.
We have, in this country, a scholar with the same ability. The joy is that he is alive, well and still lecturing and writing.
Last year Dr Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, published Luminaries: Twenty Lives that Illuminate the Christian Way. It consists of lectures and sermons dealing with Christian – and, in two cases, Jewish – men and women whose lives cannot fail to inspire.
The book (all too short) starts with
St Paul, who is shown as surprisingly approachable. It ends with Bishop Óscar Romero, shot in the back while saying Mass because of his condemnation of the El Salvador government.
St Alban follows on from St Paul chronologically; he is Britain’s first martyr. Having exchanged clothes with a priest to whom he had given shelter, Alban replaced him so that it was he (Alban) who was executed by the Romans for being a Christian. Dr Williams suggests, ‘If Alban had been recognised as the patron saint of this country, perhaps it would have been a way of reminding our society of the terrible dangers of misunderstanding loyalty and solidarity, and of the immense, exhilarating and rather terrifying gift of being invited to open our lives, our hearts, our homes and our economies to strangers.
‘But God, with his well-known sense of irony, has in fact given us a national patron in St George, who happens to have been what we now would call a Palestinian Arab.’