There is nothing more depressing in October than the sight of Christmas lights already strung across streets in London’s West End and shop windows full of tinsel, baubles and faux snow. Fleeing, I said to myself: I suppose it is a sign of the times.
That expression is one of those feelgood mantras to emerge from the documents of the Second Vatican Council which is often quoted without any amplification or justification. A Google search provides the following illumination: “ ‘Sign of the times’ is a phrase strongly associated with the Catholic Church in the era of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. It was taken to mean that the Church should listen to, and learn from, the world around it. In other words, it should learn to read the ‘sign(s) of the times’.”
Sadly the phrase is all too often used as a kind of theological-sounding equivalent of the more colloquial Sixties slogan “Get with it” or Bob Dylan’s “The times they are a-changin’ ”. In such a context it has about as much intellectual rigour. As the definition so neatly and ironically reveals when it says “associated with the era of the 1960s”.
The notion that there is a reading of the signs of one’s own times, which somehow allows one to get ahead of the march of history and confirm its arrival, to become a seer with the authority to invest some innovations with retroactive inevitability and status of value by mere virtue of their novelty, is folly of a particularly adolescent temper. As Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI pointed out, by definition, if innovation and novelty are themselves positive values for you, you are destined to be constantly disappointed by your latest discovery.
The idea of reading the signs of the times makes reference to something Jesus says in St Matthew Chapter 16 where he chides the Pharisees who are asking for a sign from heaven. How is it, he asks them, that you can read the weather and yet you can’t read the signs of the times?
I take this to mean that the signs of the times are observable in the same way that the weather is. That is, they follow a predictable pattern which is known by the received wisdom of experience and observation. In other words, the weather changes all the time, but you expect to continue to understand the underlying meaning of this by reference to an established pattern of what such changes mean. It is the pattern which is the constant and meaning, not the change itself.
A change which does not confirm this pattern, some deviation in what you observe, ought, by definition, to make you fearful and recognise that an aberration is in process, in which case all you can say is: “This is an aberration. It is not yet possible to know what it means.” It does not automatically negate any meaning derived from previously familiar patterns, nor is it rigid to adhere to the idea that it may just turn out to be an aberration.
Despite this, a spirit of the 1960s continues to haunt the Church, fed by an historically idealist view of the Second Vatican Council and its fruits, and totally intolerant of any questions as to why many things proposed by it were not adhered to, and why many never even envisaged by it are now apparently its most significant and treasured legacy. (Nowhere more so than in liturgy, which is, of course, a measure of belief, the one which touches most Catholics most nearly.)
The same historical idealism is evident among some commentators who insist that the present Holy Father better understands the true spirit of the Council (whose watchword was ressourcement, returning to the sources) than his four predecessors who actually attended it.
All too often it is a secular view of history which is exalted to the level of some kind of biblical virtue when the phrase “reading the signs of the times” is invoked. Christ is the same yesterday and today, his identity not someone we recognise from our experience of the world and its changing views of what is authentically human. The extent to which the world can teach us is defined by that same Vatican Council document which speaks of reading the signs: “In reality it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear.”
The direction in which we should be looking for enlightenment is at least clear.
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