Sing a New Song to the Lord

I had cause today to think about the many changes which have taken place in church and society over the past 60 years. For those of us who identify as Catholic Christians, the 1960s brought in a great era of change, inspired as it were, by the proceedings of the Second Vatican Council. When Pope John XXIII opened the Council in 1962, he stated in his opening address: ‘For the substance of the ancient deposit of faith is one thing, but the way in which it is presented is another.’ The Council had inspired a ‘spirit of renewal,’ resulting in a cultural change in Church life and practice. Historian John O’Malley notes the change in focus of the Catholic Church at that time, indicated by the sort of language adopted by the Council Fathers. It reads like a litany:

‘From commands to invitations, from laws to ideals, from threats to persuasion, from coercion to conscience, from monologue to conversation, from ruling to serving, from withdrawn to integrated, from vertical and top-down to horizontal, from exclusion to inclusion, from hostility to friendship, from static to changing, from passive acceptance to active engagement, from prescriptive to principled, from defined to open-ended, from behavior modification to conversion of heart, from the dictates of law to the dictates of conscience, from external conformity to the joyful pursuit of holiness.’

I remember several years ago watching a documentary on the BBC about the Indian Public Service. Viewers were shown warehouses that contained pile upon pile of pink and green papers, all bound up and stacked, one upon the other. There were thousands of these piles, as far as the eye could see. When a top Public Servant was asked what they were for, he replied that they were the duplicate and triplicate of every document ever produced by his government department for the past 50 years. When pressed a little further, and asked why these documents were being kept (and of course, why were they being produced in the first place), the answer, as unbelievable as it might seem, was the age-old cliché: ‘because that is the way we have always done it.’ It was Public Servant bureaucracy gone mad (and that was the point of the program), and an unfortunate legacy of British colonial rule. Not only was it a complete waste of tax payer’s money, they had locked themselves into a rigid way of doings things. I was a British Public Servant myself for a good part of my working life, and there were times our office didn’t seem that far removed from its Indian counterpart!

I am not, of course, suggesting that we jettison the past and invent a new program for the future. Certainly, the Second Vatican Council did not suggest any such thing, but it did inspire a new way of thinking in a ‘spirit of renewal.’ As these musings suggest, whether it be church or society, we are not on this earth to merely guard and protect some kind of museum. However, let me suggest this – we are here to cultivate a garden full of abundance – one flourishing with new life, and new promise, which will lead us into the future. Certainly, we are not meant to sing over and over again melodies from the past, just because ‘that is the way we have always done it.’ Rather, we are called, as the psalmist says, to continually ‘sing a new song to the Lord.’