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Review of Listening Together: Meditations on Synodality
Review by Dr Duncan MacLaren KCSG
The former Master of the Dominican Order, Timothy Radcliffe OP, has become a sort of National Treasure to the many thousands who have read his books on faith and spirituality or who have had the pleasure of listening to his witty but faith-filled homilies or talks. Among his admirers he counts Pope Francis who invited him, along with Italian Benedictine nun, Mother Maria Ignazia Angelini, to give reflections on the scriptural texts at the three retreat days at the beginning of the first assembly of the Synod on Synodality in October 2023 as well as meditations which preceded the sessions of the Synod itself.
These talks have been brought together in one small volume along with a post-Synodal reflection, GO!, and an appendix on Accountabilty and Co-responsibility in the Government of the Church based on a paper Timothy wrote in April 2022. They all make remarkable reading for anyone interested in how the Holy Spirit is blowing in the synodal process for the good of the Church and the world.
Fr Timothy is an expert in using vividly his vast reading knowledge and his experience in the field to capture our imaginations and make us think more deeply of our Christian faith and vocation. Especially as Master, he had often to avoid bullets as he visited his Dominican brothers and sisters who stayed to accompany the people in some of the world’s most dangerous places in order to “witness to our hope in the Lord who grants meaning to every human life”.
The conferences and meditations consist of a candid laying down of some of the divisions and fears in the Church over the process. Timothy reminds us that Aquinas taught that courage is refusing to be enslaved by fear and that our hope is eucharistic, a hope beyond all division. Timothy writes that we will garner great gifts if we dare to listen to people we disagree with. Hope will lead us to renew the Church, not sow division, so long as we keep our hearts and minds open to each other in the Synod, the syn-hodos, the Greek for ‘travelling together’ as a movement.
Timothy urges us to renew the Church as our common home, echoing Laudato Si’, so that we can speak to a world that is suffering from a crisis of homelessness, bringing to mind the 350 million people on the move from their own countries because of poverty, war and oppression as well as those whom the Church has alienated. “To love”, Timothy says, “is to come home to someone”.
He points to those who fear for Catholic identity, forgetting that the Church is a sign and sacrament of the unity of all humanity in Christ, according to Lumen Gentium. He stresses that one aspect of that identity that must be shed is clericalism (which can also be a lay disease, I would add). It is also a major cause of that greatest sin against friendship, sexual abuse. The author of a book called I Call You Friends, Fr Timothy stresses that people who even disagree with one another at the Synod and beyond must be not just polite but listen and end up being friends. As the Synod report states, “Listening is a prerequisite in walking together in search of God’s will”.
In answer to the oft-stated fear of the new in the Church, Fr Timothy’s answer is that “the new is always an unexpected renewal of the old. This is why any opposition between tradition and progress is utterly alien to Catholicism”.
This book is an immensely enjoyable and hope-inducing read by one of the grand Masters of spirituality alive today about the “greatest exercise of listening in the history of humanity” and casts light on some of the possible obstacles to renewal as well as problems within the Synod itself and how to overcome those barriers. It also states what the Synod is not - a knee-jerk reaction to ‘hot’ issues such as the ordination of women but the start of a deep listening process which results in honest conversations about the issues of suffering or alienated humanity. We see the glimmerings of how the Church can succour and talk to vulnerable human beings in a way that reflects God’s grace which has the power to transform all things. Highly recommended.
Dr Duncan MacLaren, formerly Director of SCIAF, Secretary General of Caritas Internationalis and Adjunct Professor at the Australian Catholic University, is a Co-Founder and current Convenor of the Glasgow Lay Dominicans and a past member
of the International Dominican Justice and Peace Commission.
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Questioning God
Review by Dr Duncan MacLaren KCSG
Englishman Timothy Radcliffe is the much-loved and respected former Master of the Dominican Order and Łukasz Popko is a Polish Dominican friar and teaches Old Testament at the École Biblique, the French Biblical and Archaeological School in Jerusalem. The book is called Questioning God because the authors chose eighteen Biblical conversations to shed light on what they mean for humanity. They turned out to be centred on questions, starting with Genesis where God asks Adam ‘Where are you?’. The authors write that “Questions, more than commandments, ignite a personal encounter” and their hope is, in grappling with these questions from Scripture using Łukasz’s scholarly translations which follow more closely the original Greek or Hebrew, not to solve intellectual riddles but to use them to open us up to a deeper relationship with God and Jesus and to “educate us in the art of friendship, which often leads into the happy silence of companionship”.
The exchange took place during the Covid pandemic and so Timothy and Łukasz usually exchanged emails since they couldn’t meet up. Their words illustrate the deep respect they have for one another, even when they disagree over an interpretation, a result of the deep friendship they share within the Order.
I particularly enjoyed the questions from the Old Testament which illustrate that these ancient sacred texts are so much more than a collection of law, history, prophecy and myth. Filtered through the fine minds of two Dominicans, the texts reveal more about our very early struggle to be truly human - a task which we continue to this day.
Just to give readers a taster, the two friars discuss the translation by Łukasz of Genesis 18:1-16 where Abraham meets three strangers who turn out to be the Triune God and ask where his wife, Sarah, is to tell her that she will bear a son in a year’s time. Timothy Radcliffe then tells us that they chose this text because it shows us “the blessings of welcoming strangers” - a very contemporary topic. Timothy, in addition of reminding us of Matthew 25:35, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me”, mentions how
St John Chrysostom (c. 347-407), an Early Church Father and Archbishop of Constantinople, tells us that every parish should have its xenon, a place of welcome for the stranger. Given the many millions of people on the move in our world today for humanitarian, persecutory or economic reasons, we are being asked in Scripture, as well as by our Pope, where our xenon is and what we are doing for the strangers. Timothy concludes, “So we should reach out to the stranger with the best of our words, the richest of our poetry, the most beautuful music, for the stranger brings blessings beyond our imagining”.
This marvellous book of conversations could be used as an entry into discernment by parishes or groups or even indidivuals to know whether we in our lives and actions are following the way of God and Jesus - or are we kidding ourselves? Highly recommended.
Dr Duncan MacLaren has been a member of the Glasgow Lay Dominicans for four decades and was a member of the International Dominican Justice and Peace Commission. He often took Timothy Radcliffe out for pizza when they both lived in Rome and had many interesting conversations about God and humanity overlooking the Tiber.