God Loves Me

Episode 3:   At an early age I realised that, 'Well, God loves me.'

Martin shares how the way he lives is faith has been shaped by Vatican II, by Jesuit writer Teilhard de Chardin, by opposition to nuclear weapons, and by his own  'overdeveloped sense of justice'.

Check out Martin's Nuclear Morality Flowchart

And the document from the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England & Wales: Called to be Peacemakers

A new episode, a different conversation, every Wednesday!
Email me: theresa@KindsofCatholic.co.uk
Facebook and X/Twitter Give me a follow @KindsofCatholic
Find the transcript: https://kindsofcatholic.buzzsprout.com

Music: Greenleaves from Audionautix.com

Transcript

You're listening to All Kinds of Catholic with me, Theresa Alessandro. My conversations with different Catholics will give you glimpses into some of the ways, we are living our faith today. Pope Francis has used the image of a caravan. A diverse group of people travelling together: on a sometimes chaotic journey together.

 That's an image that has helped shape this podcast. I hope you'll feel encouraged and affirmed, and maybe challenged at times. I am too in these conversations. 

So thank you for joining me, Martin, on this, episode of All Kinds of Catholic. It's really good to be here with you.

Happy to join. Yeah. 

So we're gonna talk about some of the things that have influenced how you live your faith. And we mentioned before we began recording that people have commented that you've got an overdeveloped sense of justice. So So let's see how that has been part of your faith journey, shall we? I wonder if you could start us back in your formative years then? What was what was going on for you as a Catholic when you were quite young? 

Well, I I think I was still at school. I was. when they started on the 2nd Vatican Council, and it was a big deal. And it went on for years, as you know. But if you can imagine, in a time when I might have been thinking, do I really want to be a Catholic, and this is a bit hard? Because it was a bit hard in those days, to be honest. There was this fairly revolutionary thing happening in the church, and that was a kind of motivator for me. It didn't bother me. In fact, it probably encouraged me that lots of conservative people thought it was all a bad idea. Because when you accept, you you can grow up in the church accepting that it must be all in Latin, and everybody started thinking radically. 

Okay. And when you say it was hard at that time and until you began to notice this change that was coming, what what was hard about that being a Catholic? 

Oh, yeah. You are quite a lot younger than me. And, basically, it was a religion of well, especially if you were in a boys' grammar school where it was very hard to keep everybody in order. So you bossed them all about and told them they would certainly go to hell next week if they didn't do this, this, this, and this. They more or less specified all the different kinds of sin in great detail. And I suppose we were told we had to love God. But then when you are growing up, boy, you've done not much. You think love's a bit of a soppy thing if anything. 

Right. 

Or when you're more little, but then it's it's quite a long time before I thought, well, well, I don't know about that, but God loves me. You see, that's what I, discovered in the end.  It's interesting. It's been in the readings this last couple of weeks, isn't it? From Saint John. That's been the core of it for me, but that took a long time to develop. And that's what I mean when it was a bit hard and unreasonable being a Catholic in those days. I have think it was a kind of child abuse, the fact that we were threatened. 

Strong words, Martin, but I understand what you're saying. Yeah. Absolutely. Maybe it felt like too much emphasis on punishment and failure

That's true. And also, if like me, you've got things fairly literally, and it takes a long time to realize that everybody else is compromising a bit. I expect, you know, I'm an engineer by profession, and I have that sort of  - engineers have to get things right. No messing about. So does it mean this or not? So that's how it is for me. 

Right. And then you read something and somebody who's influenced your thinking a lot? 

That would have to be Teilhard de Chardin. In those days, Teilhard was quite popular author. I mean, he died in 1955, I think, but people were just getting to know the books. And, ironically, nothing was published after he died. But then there was an awful lot of interest. His much wider vision of the universe and God's place in it.

Am I right, Martin? Am I just thinking of the right person? Is Teilhard de Chardin, was he a Catholic priest? 

Yeah. That's right. He was a Jesuit priest. I'm still telling people to look him up and and read him. I did a talk for the West London philosophy group recently. I just introduced people to to Teilhard. And his ideas I can imagine why people were quite afraid of him at the time because they weren't thinking. They just well, you know, the people he's gonna very, really, really disturb people because, he was a paleontologist, you see. He was a scientist. In fact, people still try and take a lot of the beginning of the Bible very literally.

Yep. 

But he had a much wider vision all through time and space, and he could see God as a kind of burning heart of love, not part of the universe, but the creator of the universe. One of the keys to it is he put to us the idea, things come together. There's a convergence all the time. We're familiar with the idea of entropy and the universe is all running down. But then he also says, okay, but it started with a few fundamental particles, and they got more and more complex. And there were several generations of stars, stupendously complicated things like us were created. So he said this there's this other arrow of creation going on. This feature of the universe has got to be built in. The principle of God's love, of things coming together, pulling together, that's built into every particle of the universe. You can say, look, this is what's been happening to humanity for all the history we know about. I'm spending all this time doing my Teilhard talk. Might be not what you want. 

No. No. It's it's interesting. I think that will help people to understand something because I think he's quite a difficult writer to read. Explaining what you've taken from it after lots of study of Teilhard de Chardin; I think that's really helpful for people Martin. And if people were looking to follow-up on reading Teilhard de Chardin, where would you recommend they started?  What would be the most accessible thing for somebody who doesn't know this writer? 

Phenomenon of Man has now been retranslated because it's written in French. It's now called the Human Phenomenon. 

Better!

Google the man and you'll see lots of books about him as well. 

Okay. So that's some you know, you've talked about the 2nd Vatican Council, seeing fresh air come in to the church being really important for you in those formative years, and, a writer who is really continuing to engage your mind. What else has been important to you, Martin? 

I mean, perhaps because of that. I've got a global outlook. And so I get very stressed about all problems that keep on happening around the world that I can see are are not necessary. I suppose I grew up after the war, it was a fairly right wing time in a way, but then I gradually took on all these other ideas. And so I I wanted things to to come right. And so I would sit down and write letters and sign petitions. And we were very young. We were actually talking in churches. We would go along to a church and say, can we talk to all the people? Because there's not enough overseas aid and people that are dying in Biafra or something. 

Oh, who's we, Martin? 

I suppose some members of my family. But mostly people, I think some of them were, Young Christian Workers. But I I think that's where they got some of their initiative and association from. None of my direct school friends, but friends of friends and people I knew in the parish. And we went to all sorts of different churches. And, one of the local Church of England churches, they said, Look. We've invited these young people, to have come along here. And this young curate they had there, he did a very good sermon about it. He took as it's a as his example, Saint Martin of Tours. 

Yes. Yeah. 

Oh, I discovered that, I I mean, I always admired Saint Martin because he was an exciting fellow with a horse and a sword and and gave his cloak to the beggar. And I've always thought that was a good name to have. But then he told these people about how how Saint Martin was a conscientious objector, as you know. 

Yes. 

He did the very difficult social thing of being a senior person; he he was part of the imperial guard, and that was after his conversion, basically, after his conversion. But then he had to face up with it in his life from a difficult social point of view. Just said, oh, I'm not gonna do it. Yeah. So they locked him up. And he said, look. Okay. You can lock me up overnight and kill me in the morning. But why don't you just send me out to the enemy and and they'll kill me? And and, basically, the peace broke out, you know.

It's an amazing story, isn't it? So even better than just being being on a horse with a sword, person with convictions. 

Those those kind of things help build you up. I was still pretty young. I was probably only about 25 years old because I know it was before I got married. This helped form my way of life. This thing happened to me, something ever so slightly similar in a very small way much later. Because of my views about life, employment in electronics engineering all in the time of the Cold War was always a difficult thing for me. Yes. I'm I can own up to working on some pretty bad things.

Right. You mean, like, weapons related? 

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what it was all about. One time, by the time I had got promoted to being in the managerial position with a team of engineers, we had to look at all the invitations to tender for the communication systems that we were designing for air traffic control and good things like that. Something landed on my desk, and it just said Restricted, suitably anonymous. But because I was a member of CND, I soon recognized that it was actually a communication system for RAF Strike Command. In those days, RAF still had nuclear weapons, and it it's still about fighting a nuclear war. 

Right.

And it was radiation hardened and underground and all that kind of stuff. So I knew what it was about. So I went home and said to Anna, it's awful.I can't do this. She just said, well, you'll absolutely just have to decide. Anyway, the biggest problem was not that I'd have to put my job on the line. The biggest problem was to explain it to people.

Yes. Okay. 

It's really embarrassing to go into an ordinary workplace and take a high flowing moral line on something. 

Yes. And did you share that some of that moral line was because you were a Catholic? That, you you know, that was about your faith? Because, you know, there's there's a moral argument against nuclear weapons too, isn't there? That's not about faith necessarily. 

Well, that's true. Well, I don't know if it's just about being a Catholic, but, certainly, it's about God and and knowing/having the right relationship. And and I had anyway, I had to explain this. He said, well, why?  - that's my boss. He just was really puzzled. He was just genuinely, desperately puzzled. He said, Oh, why, Martin? In my desperation of trying to explain, I said, well, it's against my religion. And he said, what religion is that then? So so I just had to explain. And I had to admit that probably most of the Catholics he knew didn't object to nuclear weapons. Well, insofar as they thought about them at all. 

Yep.

I I just had to struggle with that. And he said, well, it's perfectly alright. Anyway, you know, because you've got Dave. He was my best engineer. He was a brilliant fellow. And I said, nobody who works for me is gonna work on this on project. And so that was the critical moment. And he just had to come and say, well, God, we have to sort that out. But I didn't volunteer to resign. Maybe I wasn't brave enough, but perhaps logically, I said, well, why should I? You know? And and, basically, I thank God for that whole episode because after that, life was easier. 

Okay.

I had complained about things before. But then it's easier to go on and compromise. 

Yeah. So you you let your conscience be your guide as they say?

Yeah. In in the end, with with the support of my wife, I could just say, well, I'm not gonna do this. You deal with that how you like. And so they did. But after that, then they would say, well, Martin, I don't suppose you want this job too. There was a contract to tender for a communication system. And, basically, there was like a concrete aircraft carrier. Everything was underground. Airplanes would pop out and zoom away and and bomb people to bits. You know, this was really big money. I remember my boss saying, I don't suppose you'll be interested in this Martin. And I said, anyway, I think if you get into that, peace might break out any time, and then you'll be out business. And this is the, this is the lesson. I put this as a lesson for everybody. That's exactly what happened.

Berlin Wall came down. War was was at an end, and nobody was interested in concrete aircraft carriers. 

Hooray. Okay. Well, thank you, Martin. That's really interesting. And I know that nuclear weapons, or at least opposition to nuclear weapons has been a big part of your life and your faith. 

Yeah. 

I don't know if there's anything you you can share about that. I mean, some of the people listening will probably, as you hinted earlier, not really have thought about nuclear weapons, you know, not really have thought about them certainly in the context of our faith. You know, they're not mentioned in the Bible, but what is it for you that makes nuclear weapons just something that you really have to speak out about? 

 Well, because we are all responsible for them. They are totally useless except in a deterrent mode. And the deterrent mode involves a commitment to commit unimaginable crimes. It cannot be done without putting the whole of creation at risk. And at the very least, you're talking about 100s of thousands of innocent lives, an immense amount of ongoing suffering from even the smallest use of nuclear weapons. That cannot add up because it's a complex system and deterrence theory - that's why I developed that logical flowchart so that people could think it out. 

Just to add for listeners, Martin has created a nuclear morality flowchart, a kind of decision tree. And there's a website where you can view the flowchart, and you can work through it, and it helps you think about what nuclear weapons mean for all of us. The link to that website is in the episode notes. 

I thought, right, now people will see their way through, and that will solve the problem. But it's ever so hard to actually get people to to take it on. And the trouble is, even though after a lot of badgering, our church is among those; well, all the churches condemn nuclear weapons. And thanks to Pope Francis, it's absolutely unequivocal, the notion of nuclear weapons. Problem is that in spite of all the good statements, and and there's been good statements from from our bishops and our Bishops' Conference, but nobody knows about it. No one's banging a big drum about it.

I think you're right, Martin. That's a source of frustration to me too. It seems to be not an issue that comes up in the church very much really as though it wasn't important when in fact, it just seems massive to me too. 

Oh, yeah. It's an existential threat to humanity. What we're all about is looking after God's world and humanity. 

I'm with you on that. That's that's been really interesting, Martin. And I think there's lots there that some listeners might be very familiar with, but some listeners might really not. And so it's helpful to have some challenge and some new ways of looking at things and for people to hear about what's been important for you on your faith journey so far. So thanks for joining me today. 

Thank you, Theresa. That's great. 

Thanks so much for joining me today on All Kinds of Catholic. A new episode of this podcast is released each week on Wednesdays. I do hope you'll tune in again.