There are different names to describe this Something Else: the Sacred, the Ultimate, the Transcendent, the Other, and, in a marvelous burst of German existentialist redundancy, the Totally Other.  But whatever we call that phenomenon which flits across our preoccupied, mundane consciousness, religion is that kind of human activity which attempts to relate our life to the Something Else which may be at work in the universe.  The most basic of religious questions–maybe the only one that really matters–is whether we can accept the claim to graciousness and loving care which the Something Else seems to be making in our occasional encounter with it.

There have been some extraordinarily powerful and intense experiences of the Something Else down through human history.  From these special events come the great religious traditions, which attempt to share these very special experiences with those who "were not there." A wandering collection of desert nomads became aware of their common peoplehood at the foot of a mountain, and in that awareness experienced the graciousness of the God who, on his own initiative, entered into a covenant with them that constituted them a people.  The rest of Jewish religious history consists of efforts to keep alive the memory of the Sinai experience so that those who were not there could encounter the love and goodness of the gracious Lord of Sinai.

Similarly, a group of Galilean peasants, fishermen, and tradesmen developed an extraordinary relationship with a very special kind of popular preacher.  Much to their sorrow, he did not establish the temporal kingdom everyone expected.  He was arrested and executed by the soldiers of the occupying power.  But to their complete astonishment, his followers did experience him as supremely alive after he died.  In the power of that Easter experience of the risen Lord they came to understand, as they never had done previously, what he was talking about when he preached.  They perceived him as a special messenger of God who preached, more strongly than anyone ever had before, the great intensity and intimacy of the Something Else's love for humankind.  Indeed, they saw that the Something Else–God–was present in Jesus in a unique and special way so that he was God's son in a way others were not.

They saw that life did matter, that God did love his creatures, that death was not the end, and that with the coming of Jesus a new era in human history had begun.  Humankind was getting a second chance, a fresh new start.  Filled with enthusiasm and excitement over this experience –which ran contrary to the fears and insecurities of their own personalities–they immediately went forth to share the Good News of their experience with the rest of humankind.

Thus came Christianity.

It rose out Of the Easter experience of the apostles: Jesus who had been crucified was still alive.  He was the "Christ," the chosen one of God.  And it was about the "Christ experience" that the apostles began to preach. They wanted others to share in their experience and to see that God, by protecting his beloved son from death, had validated, confirmed, reinforced, ratified the Good News which Jesus had preached.
         
Note well two things about the early preaching of the followers of Jesus, for these two things tell us much about religion, specifically the religion that emerged from the Christ experience.

First of all, their preaching was not aimed at winning converts. They did not use elaborate or sophisticated arguments. (Although there were traces of such arguments even in their early preaching.   Humans are philosophical animals, and their need to ask philosophical questions can never be long denied.) Rather they tried to share their  experience with others.  They wanted their listeners to experience the risen Jesus the way they had.  If they could communicate the Christ experience, that was enough.  So they used pictures, stories, and images more than they used arguments.  They tried to appeal to the Something Else experiences of their audiences so that they could show how their Christ experience validated and confirmed and enormously enriched all the experiences of hope and joy and love and celebration that everyone has.  Like all religious preachers, the apostles quickly learned that you must call out of the recesses of emotional memory the experiences of others in order for them to be able to share in your experience.  You do not argue as much as you tell stories, draw pictures, stir up images so that you can touch the depths of the religious creativity which is at work constantly–if often only peripherally–in the consciousness of others.

Secondly, the apostles were not teaching speculative or theoretical knowledge.  They were not interested in teaching metaphysical, scientific, or historical knowledge of the sort that people would later treat of in learned dissertations.  Their concerns were preeminently practical.  They wanted people to change their lives by experiencing the risen Jesus, the one who had already transformed the lives of the apostles themselves.  And this transformation was not primarily an intellectual or speculative matter at all–though since it was a thoroughly human event, the intellect was by no means absent.  The Easter experience, the Christ event, showed humans how to live because it explained to them what life means and of what the Something Else is which underpins life.

All religious knowledge, then, is practical before it becomes speculative.  In time it becomes the basis for that elaborate and complex religious reflection called theology.  Theological activity begins very early, however; necessarily, because as humans we must reflect and speculate at every step.  Religious knowledge is practical, but not because it ordinarily provides a detailed program for human living; such programs evolve only with time, and not infrequently stray far from the insight of the original religious experience.  It is practical because it illuminates the most basic and dense agonies that torment human life; it speaks to us of good and evil, life and death, love and hate, hope and tragedy.  If one can cope with those terrible uncertainties, the problems of daily life begin to fall into place; but if the chaos implicit in those uncertainties cannot be held in check, we live our daily lives poised perilously close to the brink of absurdity and despair.  Religion is practical because it tells us how to live.  It tells us how to live by explaining what our life means.

In this catechism I intend to take a dozen of the images, pictures, and stories which have traditionally been used to communicate the apostles' Easter experience of the risen Jesus, and show that light can be shed on the basic dilemmas of our existence if we permit ourselves to share the Christ experience the first Christians had.

It will be argued that this is a revolutionary and perhaps dangerous new approach to catechetics.  It is not.  On the contrary, it is a return to the form of religious instruction that has been characteristic of most of Catholic history.  The technique of this catechism may be a striking departure from the catechetics–conciliar or even post-conciliar–that we have come to take for granted; but those catechetical approaches most of us remember from childhood years were very untraditional–however useful they may have been in that time and in those circumstances.

Religious knowledge and religious teaching are both experiential and practical.  One need only read the New Testament to confirm that truth.  But our catechisms for the last century or so have been abstract, theoretical, speculative.  They have addressed themselves to complex metaphysical, scientific, historical, and ethical issues which go far beyond that religious knowledge which stirs up in us an experience of the Other and tells us what human life means.

In principle one cannot object to abstract religious speculation as long as the basic practical and experiential aspect of religious knowledge is given primary emphasis; but the catechisms and the religious education they represent have got so bogged down in speculative discussion that they produce, not a reexperience of the Easter joy but, if anything, the experience of Peter, James, and John falling asleep in the Garden of Olives.

How many times, for example, we have heard someone say: "Do you still believe in the divinity of Jesus?" or "I can no longer accept the divinity of Jesus." or "My big problem with Christianity is that I'm not sure whether Jesus was God."

Note what has happened.  A truth of faith has become an intellectual matter that is either the subject of an examination to determine whether one is orthodox, a barrier which must be surmounted before one can join the Christian community, or a doubt about which one can endlessly agonize.

That is not, I would submit, what religion is all about.  The proper question is not "What do we have to believe?" but rather "What light is shed on the uncertainties and agonies of human existence by the experience-producing pictures, stories, and images of our faith?"

I do not wish to suggest that it is pointless to worry over the metaphysical problem of how humanity and divinity are combined in, a special way in Jesus.  Christians have philosophized over that question since the beginning–without ever coming up with a completely satisfactory answer, be it noted.  But I would contend that the basic religious question about Jesus is not "How is he different from the rest of us?" but "Can I live in the gloriously joyous world view which Jesus came to share with us and which Christianity claims to have validated in the experience of the Easter event?"

Such a question does not represent a watering down of faith.  It does not try (as did Bishop Robinson in his Honest to God) to make religion palatable to modern scientific empiricism by eliminating all wonder and mystery.  On the contrary, it is much easier to make an intellectual assent to the special presence of the deity in Jesus than it is to accept the world view that Jesus represents in such a way that it transforms our life.

This "new" approach to catechetics is not easy to sell.  Many Catholics were raised in an environment where metaphysical, abstract, and speculative questions were the most important ones.  They are reluctant to give them up or to postpone considering them until they understand the Christian vision from the inside.  Since one can understand a vision from the inside only by living it, the insistence that intellectualizing must come before instead of after commitment precludes the possibility of commitment–which actually seems to suit many people just fine.

However, the preaching of the apostles, as well as the whole of human religious history, shows that one can reflect on religious experience only after internalizing the experience itself.  Catechetics, which we thought to be traditional, put the cart before the horse.

And under those circumstances, oddly enough, the cart didn't move at all.

This catechism, then, assumes that reflection and speculation will come after one has experienced the Christian vision from the inside, after one has permitted the truths of the Christian faith to illumine and direct one's life.  But there is a major difference between contemporary humans and their predecessors of apostolic times, who were convinced by the story (or the picture or the image).  It did not have to be analyzed or interpreted in any great detail to provide acceptable answers to the great questions which plague human life.  We live in a far more analytic age.  We ask not merely what life means but what the stories which purport to explain life mean.  Before, during, and after we share in the great experiences which formed our religious tradition, we must have explicit interpretations of the meaning of those experiences.  We must take them apart, analyze them, "unpack" them so that we can examine every detail of their meaning.

Hence this is a catechism of interpretation.  Its goal is not to argue, not to persuade, not to provide abstract and speculative theories, but rather to explain how the central truths of the Christian tradition purport to explain the human condition for those who permit them to do so.  There is more speculation and theory in it than in the New Testament, because we are a far more theoretical people than our predecessors, and our interpretations need to be much more detailed than theirs.  But we are still plagued with the same questions about the meaning of human life that plagued them.  We must, if we are to be Christians, experience the responses to those questions which the Christ event elicited from them.

So far I have called the means by which this experience is communicated "stories, images, and pictures" or "truths of the faith." The first series is awkward and the second phrase can easily be taken in an abstract and theoretical sense (though it need not be so understood).  Two better words, which come from the same Latin and Greek word, are "symbol" and "mystery." By "symbol" I do not mean only a symbol; I mean a story that tells us what human life means.  By "mystery" I do not mean something that is hard to cope with because it is obscure and baffling; I mean something that is hard to cope with because it is so bright and dazzling.  To say that the resurrection of Jesus is a symbol does not mean that Jesus did not really rise from the dead; it means rather that his resurrection is a story (and in therewith and Christian religions, since they are historical, almost all the meaning-giving stories must be based on historical fact).  It tells us something very important about the meaning of human life; it tells us that we will all survive death–a fact far more astonishing than the survival of one man who died.

The Greek word from which "symbol" and "mystery" come can also be translated as "secret." St. Paul is frequently translated as speaking of the great "secret" hidden from the ages and revealed in the Lord Jesus.

One can then speak of truth of faith, mystery of faith, symbol of faith, secret of faith, or even revelation of faith.  The reader may choose.  I use "mystery" because many readers will find it very hard to wrestle themselves free from the "only a symbol" meaning; for the same reasons will use the word "reveals" instead of "symbolizes."

This catechism is deliberately short.  Many readers are frightened off by a long catechism.  I believe that one ought to be able to interpret the principal mysteries of Christianity and describe what they reveal to us in a relatively brief number of words–not too many more than in the Gospel stories themselves.  Hence I am making no attempt to be comprehensive, to cover all the doctrines which must be believed under pain of mortal sin.  The reader will note that I say nothing on the much controverted subject of papal infallibility.  The reason for this omission is not that I reject the doctrine but that, despite all the controversy which has raged around it during the last hundred years, it is not at the absolute dead center of the Catholic tradition.  The Church was able to survive without its explicit formulation for eighteen centuries, and while infallibility may be important, it is not nearly as important as resurrection.  To put the matter differently, the doctrine of infallibility may rekindle the Easter experience and the Christ event for some people, but its potential for doing so is limited, I think.  It may be a mystery, but it is not one of the great mysteries, and hence can safely be left to other and longer volumes.

I have tried, however, to include all the great mysteries, the core revelatory images of the Christian tradition.  To say the same thing from another  direction, I have tried to ask the basic questions of human life to see what light Christianity can throw on the frightening, uncertainties which  plague our temporal and fragile existence.  I shall follow the order of the old catechism more or less, because there is no reason not to; but in the  catechetical approach on which this book is based, there is no necessary logical order.  We do not progress down a direct path of logically  arranged truths; rather we circle around the same poignant question: What, if anything, does my life mean?  I examine that question in the light of  the Christ event as it is reflected in the great mysteries of the Catholic Christian heritage. 

There will necessarily be overlapping among the chapters.  A perfect diamond reflects and refracts intensified light from its facets as one inspects it  from different angles; it is not revealed in all its richness from only one perspective.  Yet no matter what way one turns the precious stone, it is still  the same diamond.  Thus it is with the mysteries of the Christ event; it is one encounter with God viewed from many different angles.

Religion, as I have defined it, is action-oriented; the religious experience impels humankind to act, and only later to reflect on the sudden burst of  illuminating insight.  The apostles encountered the risen Lord in the Easter experience and then went forth to preach.  Only in time did they begin  to seek out categories to explain and articulate what had happened in that encounter.  These categories were simple at first and then became more subtle and complex.  But religion is not a system of ethics.  Religion responds to the basic and ultimate anxieties of human life, and by so doing paints a broad picture of how the good man lives.  Most religious traditions adopt ethical systems, developed either by their own members or out of their pagan heritage.  Ethical systems fill in the details, sometimes at the cost of obscuring the broad picture.  There is an extremely powerful and comprehensive ethical demand in the Christ event: we must love and serve others as God loves and serves us.  He who is caught up in the joy of Easter must bear that joy to others by his loving and happy care of them.

However useful and necessary ethical systems may be, and however much they run the risk of turning the spirit of the law into its letter, they are not the same as religion.  A systematic ethics may be derived from religious insight, although the various attempts to do so during the last two thousand years have not always been successful.  The point is that these systems are derivative and no substitute either for the ethical demand which is at the core of the original Christ event or for a decision to respond to that demand.  Hence in the present volume there will be rather little about systematic moral obligations–though these are by no means unimportant.  Christianity is not an ethical system but a response to the Christ event, a response which reorders our life both toward the Something Else and toward all the "someone elses" with whom we share the planet.

The reader who seeks reassurance in this catechism from the rote repetition of the answers he learned mechanically as a child will be disappointed.  He should not conclude that the book is lacking in orthodoxy.  I intend to deny nothing; I seek, rather, to interpret some of the core truths of faith.  My approach may be useful to some and not useful to others.  Those who do not find it useful would save great strain on their blood pressure if they simply discarded it now instead of writing a letter of condemnation to the Congregation of the Clergy in Rome.

Those who find it useful may conclude that despite the imperfections which mark any tentative beginning, this catechism points the way back to the religious education of the past and forward to the religious education of the future.

This page will be updated whenever I become aware of errors. Please, send me any "scannos" or typos you find.