Some thoughts from Br Mac

Br Mac is a retired Christian Brother living near Dublin although he has spent most of his life in India. He writes often to his friends, thank you Michael Furtado for sending this to us:

LIFE AGAIN 216

I’ve probably said it before, but it bears repeating: the opposite to love is fear. Not hate. And look, don’t get trapped by religious noises. You have no doubt experienced love. Any love – LGBTQIA+, or Nature, or your pet dog, cat, squirrel, canary – that powerful attraction and fun and joy you have in that context: that, that, that is the meaning of life. ‘Meaning’ means, this is the road that makes living worthwhile.

For me a guy in that road was named Jesus. His bravery overwhelms me still, and because I believe in life after death then I believe Jesus is still alive, though in some sort of different medium than the flesh and blood he once had. Only recently I read that most guys who were crucified (Roman Emperors loved it) went insane from the pain before death ended it all. Everybody knew that of course – public executions were public entertainments.

Don’t be alarmed, I’m not trying to convert you. I’m just clarifying why I love this particular guy. The bad news is that it became a religion – he never meant that to happen – and then that became partly a power game, and partly a movement towards greater holiness, whatever that meant. Before his time there was Judaism and Buddhism and Hinduism, after his time there was, is, all those plus Mahommedanism (Islam) and Christianity, each with its strengths and weaknesses. I think they are all terrific up to a point, but they all have that ‘point’, and Christianity is emphatically at it right now, at least in my opinion.

Our Pope is a great guy. But I’m less enthusiastic about the guys behind him. Too much emphasis on externals, on signs of authority, on power. That wasn’t Jesus’s idea at all. Here am I, a Christian Brother, and will be so till I die, but not the same as when I began as such those sixty-plus years ago. Quite a number of us, old men all, are in the same boat. Life has become more meaningful for us, more deeply rooted in what Jesus was really about, but attracting fewer and fewer young men to its ranks. It has, in Ireland and other countries, gone out of fashion.

Fashion? The educated world in general has, I think, come to realise that life is essentially about helping one another cope with the difficulties and enjoy the pleasant parts. Prayer and religious structures do have their role, but only ‘role’. Isolation because you see ‘meaning’ differently than I do must not become an alienating factor. No more than the language we each speak, or the colour of our skin or the food we prefer or all those funny differences that idiots point at to make one group seem superior / inferior to another.

In my beloved India I had close friends where there were a variety of religions. That was sane, it was terrific. But how terrible then to return to other countries where one religion was somehow superior to another for weird reasons of belief!

Ok, time to wind up. What I have tried to underline in this essay is, the most important feature of your life, of my life, of all sane life, is that we do our best for everyone around us who needs whatever help we can. A factor in that may well be religious, but it must never become a barrier. Life is not about Heaven or Gehenna or Sheol or ‘exterior darkness’. It’s about love. Love is the thing that helps, more than even money, sex, or power. Certainly more than religion.

Yeah, it’s often really hard work. So hard, people often fracture it. We need all the help we can get to deal with it, to make love characteristic of our normal responses to people. Some of that help can come through prayer, and I know it does for me: this Jesus chap seems to nurse me through the hostile bits! But I keep chatting with him, and I suggest you find someone in your own pantheon of now-dead contacts in whom you trust to help you along. They don’t have to be famous. Only that you like them a lot – and have reason to believe they like you.

But – you just said, they’re dead!?

Where dead means in a different way of life, be not afraid. They live. As we all will.

Best of loving. God bless. Br Mac / Brendan