THE crisis of the age is not that we cannot believe in the God of our forefathers, but that we cannot feel about God as they did.
The crisis is in the area of sensibility, said Father Michael Paul Gallagher SJ, quoting the poet T.S. Eliot at the weekend.
A lecturer at the Gregorian University in Rome, and a native of Collooney, Co Sligo, he was giving the keynote address at a seminar to launch the West of Ireland Pastoral Theological Association. It took place at St Nathy's College, Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon.
Speaking on the theme of cultural change and the impact this was having on the search for meaning and values, he said the real battle today was not in the area of ideas, "but on that of disposition and images, where faith lies".
"It is," he said, "on the level of images that cultural battles are fought."
Referring to the Seamus Heaney poem In Ille Tempore (At That Time) he traced the journey of the contemporary middle aged Catholic Irish sensibility from tradition, community and security through to doubt, isolation and uncertainty, "without symbols, without clarity".
He referred to comments by Heaney on how in the 1970s, like many of his generation, he felt the need to secularise his life. Now, he (Heaney) had said he was "returning to mystery through the gateway of the spiritual". That pathway was "something of the curve of our sensibility over recent decades", Father Gallagher said. "The real difficulty today is not hostility [to belief] but in the lifestyle we buy into and in which faith becomes unreal," he said.
Reactions to this "cultural desolation" were generally of three sorts. There was the tense adversary", who declared it "sick", blamed it for all ills of the faith, and "closed the doors, to grow within".
There was the "innocent friend" who adopted a passive pose, as of an "it's the way things are", "it doesn't really matter" type. And there was the "discerner/creator of culture", who moved "from disgust (at what was perceived) to generosity".
The latter involved "a change in seeing things, a moving from desolation to consolation". It involved a change in "discernment", which was "not about content in the mind, but about an attitude".
Father Gallagher proposed a "pastoral circle" for believers, involving four moves, as a means of addressing current cultural change. First this involved "listening to human realities". That exercise was followed by questioning these realities.
