The world as suffering and as entering transformation is crucifixion. At the heart of the world is the continuation and working out of Golgotha. The revolution of peace is the world in the critical process of overcoming its self-resistance to unity through the upward convergence of love, a process animated by the union of God and man.

But the world is creation as well as crucifixion, natural growth as well as divine revolution. Man is born in the cathedral of earth and sky, reaches out to the infinite silence of the universe, and begins to form himself in a rhythm of creation and self-recognition. Man is growing and maturing through time, provoking and provoked by a progressive self-understanding. Today the world as creation is man’s cumulative discovery of himself in time, not at his deepest self-identity—for his deepest manhood is found through his suffering union with God, through crucifixion not creation, or through that unique creation which is crucifixion. But the world as evolving creation is man’s growing discovery of himself as distinct and fully responsible, as that one called from childhood to recognize and affirm the possibilities of a world come of age.

In The Secular City Harvey Cox has effectively described the present point of the world as creation in terms of secularization, of ‘man turning his attention away from worlds beyond and toward this world and this time’ (The Secular City, 1965, p. 2). The age of the secular city is a liberation of man from religious world-views whose orientation distracted him from the task of building the earth.

The monk pointed his pistol. ‘As far as I am concerned, the community no longer exists. The land is mine. I suggest you get out— and quick!’ The two hired thugs made it clear the threat was a real one. Reluctantly, the little group of Benedictine postulants, and their superior, packed up their few things and trudged off into the heat and dust of a Mexican afternoon. So ended the first period of one of the most interesting experiments in the monastic life in this century.

The superior was, it turned out, a man of rare courage. Born in Lille in 1912, and educated ih Louvain, Dom Grégoire Lemercier spent seven years at the abbey of Mont-César before accepting the invitation of a Mexican colleague to accompany him and another monk, a Belgian, to found a monastery in Mexico. The project was delayed by the outbreak of war, during which Lemercier served as a chaplain and was taken prisoner. When he was released he left for the United States, and joined his two companions at their abbey of Monte Cassino in the north of Mexico in 1944. The foundation was a double failure: the Belgian threw up his vocation and got married, and the Mexican apostatized and at the end of 1949 took over the monastery by armed force. Two years later, little daunted by this experience, Dom Grégoire founded another monastery, Santa Maria de la Resurrección, a few miles from Cuernavaca, following the strict Benedictine observance.

It is a disease. The World Health Organization has defined it, and yet, when one has known and felt the nature of the thing, all medical definitions, even theirs, seem to lack something. To call the condition a state of sin is equally insufficient, for although the alcoholic has grave moral responsibilities, particularly regarding his first drink after a period of abstinence, no one can identify the stages either at which he becomes capable of recognizing that alcohol is his problem, or at which he loses control of his will.

I am an alcoholic. I am a person whose drinking was consistently or sporadically compulsive. This produced an effect of progressive deterioration in my physical, mental, spiritual, and social wellbeing. For years I had an intense nostalgia for religion, yet was helplessly aware of the absence of God. My condition was alleviated only by abstinence from alcohol.

We are constantly being told there is a ‘crisis of authority’. Catholics in particular are always talking about authority and worrying about it, in fact they seem to have a sort of obsession about it—for or against. But they aren’t the only ones who worry, it affects all aspects of public and private life. It affects, naturally, the idea of what kind of leadership—if any—Christians can give at a time like this, in a society like ours. Does the ‘crisis’ mean that the possibility of leadership has gone, at least for the time being? Is there any sense in Christians trying to shore up the crumbling walls of authority?

In order to answer questions of this kind we need to ask two others, which we seldom do ask because we take the answers for granted. These questions are first, What is authority? and secondly, What kind of society do we live in?

It’s important to see exactly what we mean by authority, otherwise we are likely to waste a lot of time talking at cross-purposes.

Authority is primarily to do with community, in fact it is an essential ingredient of community. We tend to think of authority as synonymous with power, or government. Authority may involve the exercise of governing power, but that is not its nature.