Synodality and reimagining God

By Fr Donald Chambers

It’s a widely accepted sociological principle that ideas profoundly influence behaviour. Our idea of God, for example, is inherited from our families, societies, churches, and personal experiences and subsequently impacts our emotions, thoughts, and behaviours.

Due to the diverse nature of the Church, the synodal journey is complex and challenging because participants bring their unique understanding of God to the table of discernment, and it shapes the quality of our participation in the discernment journey.

The testimony of a Catholic about his catechetical journey illustrates how the idea of God shapes behaviour. He remembers his Sunday School experience as heavily intellectual. It focused on imparting the doctrine and dogma of the Catholic faith and Christian morality through devotional prayers and activities, liturgical celebrations, and the mandatory corporal works of mercy.

Sunday School was likened to his weekday school with a sacramental graduation and certificate.

As an adult, he realised that the catechetical space was devoid of developing an intimate relationship with God with whom he could pray spontaneously and silently, freely approach his emotions, sexual desires, vulnerabilities, and weaknesses, and learn how God intimately relates with him as an emotionally struggling adolescent.

Consequently, he became religiously rigid because he imagined God as a judge who scrutinised his moral life. The idea of God as a judge was further reinforced by Church members who were like moral policemen and women who gossiped and criticised persons who were perceived to be morally at the back of the class.

Let us imagine a youngster with a similar idea of God entering a priestly formation programme with a predominantly rigid intellectual formation in philosophy and theology.

Upon ordination, this priest is thrust into an institutional/hierarchical Church where he perceives that to climb the hierarchical ladder, he needs to behave appropriately by cleverly concealing human weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

I think this formation and idea of God becomes the fertile ground for clericalism.

Suppose this kind of intellectual catechetical journey is widespread; we can understand some resistance to the synodal journey. A heavily intellectual catechesis devoid of a personal experience of Jesus Christ gives birth to an attitude, disposition, and behaviour that believes there is only one right way.

It cannot prepare persons to discern Christ’s presence in the confusion, chaos, surprises, and diversity of life, and how to discern God’s journeying and surprising presence. This is a Saul model of formation – highly intellectual, less experiential.

Through a relational experience of encounter with the Risen Jesus and conversion, Paul was prepared to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ and participate in the first Council of Jerusalem.

Paul’s testimony in Galatians chapter 1:11–24 bears witness to his previous intellectual formation devoid of the formation of the heart, and resulting in very little tolerance for diversity, creativity or inclusion.

“For you heard of my former way of life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it and progressed in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my race since I was, even more, a zealot for my ancestral traditions” (13–14).

Saul’s rigid Pharisaic formation shaped his idea of a rigid God and, in turn, his rigid and exclusive behaviour.

His encounter with Jesus Christ and subsequent conversion prepared him for ministry among the Gentiles. It contributed to the synodal growth of the Early Church because his image of God was transformed and, in turn, his behaviour.  Paul encountered a merciful God in the Risen Christ both on the road and within the Christian community, which inspired him to reimagine his idea of God, who is merciful, compassionate and inclusive.

Paul writes, “But when God . . . called me through his grace . . . I did not immediately consult flesh and blood. . . rather, I went into Arabia. . .”

During his extended silent moments in Arabia, Paul’s reimagination of God grew. Consequently, his reimagination of God gave birth to his courageous, consultative and inclusive behaviour at the Council of Jerusalem and mission among the Gentiles.

He writes, “Then after fourteen years I again went up to Jerusalem… and I presented to them the gospel that I preach to the Gentiles…”

The Church’s synodal journey hinges on a profound reimagination of God. The reimagination of God rooted in our Caribbean context occurs in the catechetical spaces of the Church, family, and school.

The facilitators of these formation spaces are challenged to reshape their catechetical ministry to introduce candidates to a personal and intimate encounter with Jesus Christ, who shapes disciples’ behaviour.

In the end, the long-term fruitfulness of the synodal growth of the Church resides fundamentally in the fertile ground of catechesis – the source of our re-imagination of God.

Fr Donald Chambers of the Archdiocese of Kingston, Jamaica is the General Secretary of the Antilles Episcopal Conference.