Welcome to the Second Session of our Synodal Journey
Reflections on Fr. Timothy Radcliffe’s Synod Retreat Meditations by Albert and Barbara Gelpi
Meditation I: Searching in the Dark
In preparation for the Synod on Synodality, which opened in Rome on October 3rd, Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, OP, theologian and former Master of the Dominicans, led the participants in a retreat, as he had done before the synodal sessions last October. This time he begins by recalling that the first synodal session had focused on learning to listen not with fixed and automatic responses in mind but hearing with openness what is being said: “Listening to God and to our brothers and sisters is the discipline of holiness.” This October’s meetings now have the task of bringing that “profound listening” to the crucial challenge of learning “how to be a missionary synodal Church. . .in our crucified world.” To address the issues and responses in that effort, Fr. Radcliffe structured his meditations for the retreatants around four episodes in John’s Gospel narrative of the Resurrection: “Searching in the Dark,” “The Locked Room,” “The Stranger on the Beach,” and “Breakfast with the Lord.”
“Searching in the Dark”: for the Resurrection begins in the darkness of the tomb, with three of the baffled disciples—Mary Magdalene, John, and Peter— approaching the darkness with their urgent needs and questions. Fr. Radcliffe points out how the gospel narrative turns on many questions searching for answers. For “the Resurrection bursts into our lives not as a bald statement of fact but in searching questions,” because “the Resurrection is not Jesus’ beginning again after a brief irruption, but a new way of being alive”: a new life, a new mode of living beyond death. How, then, can we meet the challenge, how can we begin to learn that new life and live it? Not, Fr. Radcliffe insists to the synodal participants and to all of us searching people, by giving the same fixed answers and traditional responses which will only leave us “the same sort of Church.” We must learn to live the questions so that we can live into the answers. That challenging and even painful but essential process will reveal and create “a renewed way to be Church” so that we can “live the Risen life together more profoundly.”
The meditation then follows Mary Magdalene, John and Peter as they come to the darkened tomb with different needs and questions, representing “three forms of searching the darkness of the tomb and finding the light of resurrected life.”
Meditation 2: The Locked Room
Sixty-five years ago, in 1959, Pope John XXIII began the process that called the Second Vatican Council into being by saying famously, “I want to open the windows of the Church so that we can see out and people can see in.” Fr. Timothy does not quote that sentence directly. Nevertheless, it undergirds a dominant theme in this meditation on the risen Lord’s evening appearance to the disciples in the dark enclosure of the upper room.
Fr. Timothy interprets Jesus’s words to his frightened disciples, “Peace be with you,” and “Receive the Holy Spirit” as broadly, historically, an injunction “to lead the flock out of the tiny sheepfolds into the fresh air of the Holy Spirit” so that we all become “alive in God.” Vatican II and the synodality movement both have this deeply spiritual goal. So as part of the process of “living the questions” that he describes in the first meditation, questions “which invite us to live the Risen life together more profoundly,” Fr. Timothy asks: what are the fears “that may prevent us from being alive to God and so preachers of the gospel of abundant life”? He focuses on two: fear of being hurt and a fear born of “furious love of the Church” that can make us “narrow minded.”
As answer to the first—to the silencing that comes from the fear of having one’s ego wounded, one’s sense of self diminished—Fr. Timothy responds that “being alive in God means being unafraid of wounds.” That is to say that the Spirit of God brings peace, the peace that is Jesus’s opening gift to the disciples, and with peace, calm of mind and heart.
Fr. Timothy uses two ends of the spectrum of opinion to be found among those attending the Synod to describe the fears aroused (paradoxically) by a passionate love of the Church: those, on the one hand, who fear that the Church will be harmed by “destructive reforms” and those who fear that the Church “will not be the wide-open home” for which they long. In response he reminds us that “Perfect love drives out fear.”
But how does one prepare one’s soul to receive the Spirit’s grace of perfect love? Carol Gilligan’s may be a voice, that in concert with Fr. Timothy’s, leads to an answer. After decades spent in listening, Gilligan writes: “[R]adical listening begins with asking a real question—something you don’t know and want to know. It hinges on replacing judgment with curiosity” (In a Human Voice, p. 32). A curiosity born of the Spirit’s love will cast out fear. A further statement of Gilligan’s shows us, nonetheless, why the process may take decades and decades: “Like asking real questions, replacing judgment with curiosity is harder than it sounds.”
Meditation 3: The Stranger on the Beach
Reminding the synodal participants that “every one of these Resurrection appearances began in the dark,” Fr. Timothy asks the question for this third meditation: “What is the night which envelops these disciples who have gone fishing?” Indeed, why have they gone fishing, reverting to their old way of life? In John’s Gospel they haven’t yet seen the risen Lord. Perhaps they don’t know what else to do; perhaps they are disappointed, dispirited and uncertain about what has happened and what is to come. Their empty nets after a long night’s fishing seem the symbol and confirmation of their own uneasy emptiness. When they encounter a stranger on the beach who asks if they have something to eat, “they all answer together No. . . .The word is as empty as they are.” They don’t know the stranger “because they had never really seen him before.” The beloved disciple is the first to recognize the stranger as the Lord and Savior: “the mystery of love incarnate.”
Whatever negative doubts and hesitations we bring to this Synod, Fr. Timothy tells the participants, “like the disciples, we are here to learn from each other what is the meaning of this odd word ‘love,’” so that each of us, like the beloved disciple, can come to see the stranger as the Lord. Recognition is the turning point, the point of conversion, and recognition calls up response and action. Jesus tells the fishermen to change the way in which they have been fishing. We too in this gathering, Fr. Timothy warns, must learn to “cast the net on the other side of the boat even if some of us think that there will be no catch.” We must trust that “Divine providence will bless this Synod abundantly” so that, like the disciples, we will conclude with our nets full to bursting.
The large mission and high calling of this Synod, then, is not only to “overcome the poisonous opposition between traditionalists and progressives,” not just “to negotiate compromises or bash opponents,” but to haul in a net filled with “the diverse cultures gathered in this Assembly,” challenging each other’s prejudices and summoning each other to “a deeper understanding of love.” A strong and sturdy net that can hold all the fish “consists of empty holes linked together by ropes. Spaces and bonds.” For the renewed Church to be such a net, it must encompass and sustain many cultures bound and held by a shared love and faith, within which each culture “retains its own identity but is open to the other.”
Meditation 4: Breakfast Conversation
This final meditation follows the preceding one by setting the scene on the same beach, where some of the great catch of fish are being grilled for breakfast. Jesus and Peter speak together for the first time since Peter’s three denials of his Lord. Jesus makes no allusion at all to that betrayal: he simply grants Peter the chance to make amends by asking him three times, “Do you love me?” In his touching discourse about this conversation, which Fr Timothy calls “perhaps the most subtle and delicate in the Bible,” he notes first that Jesus’ use of the present tense reminds us all—but particularly those about to start the next day’s deliberations in the Synod—that the time to create a new beginning is the present.
Jesus trusted his betrayer with a huge responsibility, but Fr Timothy poses the question, “Will we dare to trust each other despite some failures? The Synod depends on it.” Modelling the fearlessness he pleads for, he then alludes to Fiducia Supplicans, a declaration of Catholic doctrine published in December 2023, that allows Catholic priests to bless couples, including same-sex couples, who, according to Church teaching, are not married. To those who feel distress, anger, and distrust over this declaration, Fr Timothy asks that they risk trust, even in the face of hurt.
Early in the talk, when describing the need for quick action and a new beginning, Fr Timothy quotes the progressive Cardinal Carlo Martini, Archbishop of Milan, who on his deathbed in August 2012, said, “Christianity is only at the beginning.” Now, as a close to this section of the talk, with its focus on trust as the basis for future action, he quotes a poem by Teilhard de Chardin, geologist and paleontologist who measures time by millennia. Teilhard’s words serve as a bookend to Cardinal Martini’s. He begins, “Above all, trust in the slow work of God,” and ends by noting that “it is the law of all progress / that it is made by passing through some stages of instability-- / and that it may take a very long time.”
In the second, longer portion of the meditation, Fr Timothy addresses himself very particularly to the clergy, to those who, like Peter, must feed God’s sheep: to the demands and difficulties of that task, and to the need for transparency, accountability, and humility in fulfilling it.
At one point Fr Timothy turns the expected hierarchical ordering on its head, when he says: “the role of shepherds is to be self-effacing and honor the authority of everyone under their care.” That word “authority” enters also into his summarizing statement, question, challenge, and exhortation to the Synod members that concludes the meditation:
“So in this Synod may we discern each other’s authority and defer to it. What new ministries are needed for the Church to recognise their authority and commission them to exercise it? The gospel sheds light on so many [e.g. Mary Magdalene, the Beloved Disciple, Peter] who acted with authority in that time. May we do so today. For today is the only day we have. Carpe Diem!”
