I am sure most of us have the experience of being in a car and having its driving wheels caught in mud. The wheel is trapped in a rut and no amount of driving the wheels by the power of the vehicle’s engine will enable you to move forward. There are various techniques, but mostly, it is a question of initiative. Very often, you can get someone with another car or a farm tractor to attach a rope and pull the trapped vehicle free. At other times, we need to manage, by “rocking” the vehicle to get backward and forward momentum. Otherwise you can dig under the trapped wheel and put in a wooden plank or some gravel to give the wheel some grip.

I think you get my meaning. In our Christian life, we often get caught in a rut by being too obsessive about a particular point. Something we like and what we find stimulating like the liturgy. Others are concerned by various doctrinal and moral issues, and there is no progress, no learning, just sterile arguments that remain the same year after year. So how do we react? Give up? Bring the boat about and sail on the other tack?

Some of us become trapped in conservative Christianity because we are attracted to the old liturgy rather than an informal ‘meal’ around a domestic table. We often get so steamed up about it, and wonder in the end what is wrong with the ‘coffee table’ Eucharists some people prefer to High Mass in a church. Is a priest not ordained for all and for the service of the world outside the church?

Like “rocking” the trapped car, I think we can do ourselves some good by being daring and looking beyond our own horizons. We are often brainwashed into thinking we can only be Christians by being in an established community – Christian civilisation as lived in a village parish or a ‘most Christian’ kingdom? Man is a social creature. But, what happens if the society we live in is no longer Christian? You either relocate to where a Christian society or micro-society can be found, or you re-think your Christianity and live it as you can in the non-Christian world.

The Internet is an illusory world, where doctrinal and moral issues are discussed in the absolute. It tends to make us think we are in a social context, but the internet is merely a means of telecommunications like letters and the telephone. It’s just a little more sophisticated and ‘modern’, but it is not real. This is why I so detest Facebook. Blogs and forums are useful only for transmitting information. You just self-publish ideas, which is what I am doing now. I used to delude myself that blogging is a ministry. It isn’t. Ministry is contact with real people and doing something real in the world other than writing.

In our ideas and paradigms, we need to rise above ‘conservatism’ and ‘liberalism’, out of the stale old arguments about women clergy, homosexuals, mass facing the people or on the old altar of a church and so forth. Christianity is about approaching God through the Gospel narratives of Jesus’ life and teachings. We Christians have done little more than maintain Christianity as a kind of universalised Judaism rather than a totally new way of living and believing.

We do well to live with the people around us, most of whom are indifferent about religious questions or simply don’t talk about them. They like us are tired of religious disputes and fratricide. Most people believe that religion is a force for evil and division between humans, and most have also come to consider politics and all institutions in the same way. Our society has atomised into individualism. Living in a village as my wife and I do, it is extremely difficult to get to know people and converse in any depth. The notion is Christian community, even among the faithful of the local parish, is alien and ever more distant. Its effect on Christian spirituality is devastating and leaves us with bleak prospects.

Relationships between human beings are the result of interests in common, trust and a fundamental predisposition for empathy. In cities, there are concentrations and identifiable groups of people who need help, the sick, jobless, addicts to alcohol and drugs, the mentally unbalanced. The most obvious solution for such people is to have recourse to social workers, doctors and psychiatrists. In the country, the difficulties of life are hidden and much more difficult to find. A Christian wanting to do good can often just be seen to be a ‘nice and available’ person, one seen as kind and open-minded. But such an attitude attracts suspicion, because people don’t usually give something without expecting something back.

Most people are convinced that religion is pointless or that all religions and spiritual traditions alike are ways to transcendence and the realisation of our deepest aspirations. An open mind reveals that some Muslims are indeed peaceful and deeply spiritual people, and less inclined to proselytise aggressively than many Catholic and Protestant Christians. There are few of those here in the Norman countryside. Most are materialists or ‘cultural Catholics’ and still get their kids baptised and catechised, given their Communion and Confirmation. Their priorities are elsewhere, and that is probably not a bad thing. Who are we to judge from the outside?

Such an observation of reality somewhat relativises the liturgical questions I often myself discuss. I celebrate Mass in my chapel, often with my family-in-law who are moderately practicing ‘cultural’ Catholics who make no bones about receiving ‘illicit’ Sacraments. It’s all the same. Who am I to dispute that? My two ladies in Dieppe are both Roman Catholics, and I fail to understand why they wanted me to celebrate Mass for them. They appear to be under no illusion about who I am or which church I belong to. Some mysteries are not made to be understood. Most of the time, I am alone like Fr Charles de Foucault in the Algerian desert. In pastoral terms, whether I do a traditional style service, Roman, Sarum or Syro-Malabar, or modern just wearing plain clothes and a stole sitting on the floor or on a stool at a low coffee table – it would make no difference. I have never done the modern style – I just see no point. So I just become like everyone else, or like their stereotype as perceived by conservative Christians half-way around the world. Or I adapt and make what I can of reality.

I have always been of the mind that I do not have the right to set myself up as an inquisition and discriminate against people by what they are or what they do. We are so incredibly diverse that the narrow dictates of culture, morality and other requirements of those who fiddle whiles Rome burns are just totally irrelevant. With the kind of people we live with, start talking religion and they will just see you as insane or a person with an agenda. Evangelisation? The word is grotesque. Jesus did not evangelise, but did wonderful things, and when people came to him to find out what it was all about, he told them. Today, we Christians cannot exorcise the possessed or heal the sick. We don’t have what it takes to make people curious. So, become all-inclusive! Our own faith won’t suffer but will become the richer for it.

It is not always easy to be kind and tolerant, and it is easier to believe than “hell is other people” than searching for the good and the transcendent in them. Our own empathy for other people will be helpful. I am still persuaded that there are two fundamental attitudes in life – love of what is good and needing to be built up, using what is imperfect to go ever upwards – or that most people are dross and have to be exploited to benefit the few or exterminated. The second attitude is totalitarianism and the product of those who have no conscience or empathy.

Experience of life brings us to search for meaning rather than the absolute certainty of a “truth”. Quantum science (very difficult to understand) relativises our conception of reality. If there are several or many universes, which would give some rational explanation to our survival or bodily death, then there are several realities. Dogmatic truth becomes like the experience of a fish that has swum in the sea being put into a goldfish bowl! Certainly, questions are of greater interest than answers. They are what drive explorers of their great voyages of discovery.

Many of us will do well to engage in humanitarian work in those places where it is done, and where volunteers are welcome. There is the usual work done for humans who suffer in one way or another, and there is also the possibility of action for resisting the harm capital and industry do to our planet. Every little bit helps, even if only by going sailing to show others that pleasure can be found without harming the environment. Not all left-wing political causes or methods are compatible with Christianity, but experience has brought me to be more in sympathy with the Left than the Right. I have no cut-and-dried answers, but I am more for being on the side of the people than the elite and the establishment.

Forming communities? Not easy in the atomised society we live in, but it would seem to me that something in common and the instinct of friendship do more than anything else. However, here in Europe, a community brought together for the sake of religious practices that is not the Catholic Church is called a sect or a cult, unless it is a Protestant denomination that has existed for several centuries or another religion like Judaism, Islam or Hinduism. Christianity seems to me to flourish better in a secular world than in one than is dominated by a religious institution. That is the genius of French laïcité and the separation of church and state, a free church in a free state.

Perhaps one thing by which Christians will stand up is by resistance to evil, to any tendency that would lead to totalitarianism, a replay of Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet hell or the dystopia of mid twentieth-century authors. Today, the evil has become that much more subtle, and is potentially within each one of us. The enemy is within, and that can only be fought with prayer.

Rock, rock, rock – do it enough and the car will come out of the mud and be able once again to drive on the road.