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Now the significant fact to which I wish to draw attention was expressed
towards the end of the 1950s by the Jesuit Jean Danielou. He wrote:
The Constantinian phase in Christian history is coming to an end. ...The
flight into the desert was a revolutionary innovation, dating from the fourth
century when St. Antony inaugurated the age of monks, the withdrawal of the
Contemplatives from a world in which Christianity was compromised into the
solitudes where they might keep alive the faith of the martyrs. That age
is passing ---- St. Antony is coming back from his desert.
St. Antony is coming back from his desert. A quarter of a century after
Danielou wrote those words, we can recognize their prophetic insight. Today the
contemplatives are coming back from the desert to the cities, and the desert
life of prayer and struggle is being sought in the urban wasteland. Here men and
women find themselves pushed to the margins of social life, here they experience
hunger, weakness, danger, the need for support and nourishment.
I have suggested that the Constantinian era is at an end, and that the inner
city experience exposes to our vision the truth that the Church is once again a
minority group within a pagan society. The recognition of that truth must lead
us to a re-evaluation of much of our theology and pastoral assumptions. But
recognition depends upon vision, and calls for a reflective, contemplative,
listening posture. Without that posture, the city can crush us, confuses us,
overwhelm us with messages and signals which we cannot fathom. Hence the urgent
pastoral nee for inner city contemplatives. I am not suggesting anything
very grand or rarified: simply that the Church in the urban areas needs recover
its ability to see: to see God at work in the back streets and among the
poor and lowly; to see and to resist evil; to see and to unmask illusion and
falsehood; to see more clearly our own way forward. Radical action can only
begin with radical contemplation. The desert is the place of discernment, and
discernment comes from attention to the skies and to the neglected voices of the
streets. A Church which is obsessively concerned with caring is a Church which
has lost the ability to see. One could say of such churches, as R.H. Tawney once
said of the Fabians: "They tidy the room, but open no windows in the
soul."
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