On March 24, 1958, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan sent a remarkable memo to a member of his Cabinet, Dr Charles Hill, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The memo read:

How fruitful is this Decade of Evangelization going to be? The analyses and proposals offered in this essay refer specifically to the missionary enterprise in Africa south of the Sahara. But the implications are much wider, touching even the raison d‘être of each one of Christianity’s multiple ecclesial manifestations.

Because the world‘s irreducible cultural pluralism cannot be ignored with impunity, much less scorned and replaced with alien cultures, the declining esteem for what missionaries have done may be seen as an inevitable consequence of the European and American cultural monomania that produced a network of dependent Western spiritual colonies through sub-Saharan Africa.

Much lip-service was, of course, given in official ecclesiastical documents to the goal of establishing culturally integrated, self-sustaining, indigenous Christian churches with their own vibrant missionary outreach and original cultural contributions to the universal family of Christians. Far from ignoring the local cultures of the people being evangelized, much less destroying them with foreign ways of being human and religious, missionaries were supposed to accept and evangelize the cultures themselves. This has been the official position of the Catholic Church, in theory, ever since St Paul, on this very issue of cultural pluralism, ‘withstood Cephas to his face ... in front of everyone’ (cf. Gal.2; Acts 15).

One aspect of modernity which is of particular theological significance, and whose existence is intimately linked to the twentieth century’s distance-shrinking communications networks, is our new awareness of the sheer diversity of human religiousness. Those who live in a world where TV, radio and the press are commonplace features of a sophisticated media environment, cannot be blind to the fact that different people believe different things. This simple insight has profound implications for the way in which we formulate our theologies, communicate with each other and treat the natural world which is our common home.

Many theologians and philosophers have begun to acknowledge the quantum shift in thinking which the contemporary experience of religious pluralism demands. Langdon Gilkey, for example, considers the encounter with other religions to be ‘the most important new issue confronting Christian theology at the present time’. Wilfred Cantwell Smith predicts that ‘the religious life of mankind from now on, if it is to be lived at all, will be lived in a context of religious pluralism’. And Ninian Smart has suggested that ‘the earth has become in our time more or less a planet, a single globe. It is now a kind of city, the geopolis’ where the different faiths are brought into inevitable contact with each other.

It was a late afternoon when frantic parishioners were clamouring at the front door of the rectory. There had been an automobile accident just three blocks from the church. By the time I approached the location, a large crowd of people had already encircled the scene of the accident. Still a half block away, I couldn’t help but sense an eerie silence pervading the air. The scene had none of the usual circus atmosphere that characterizes spectator curiosity in face of such circumstances, with the din and shoving movements of people positioning themselves for a better look.

Upon arriving at the site I could see that although two demolished cars dominated the centre of the circled crowd at the intersection, all attention was riveted upon a woman holding a limp child tightly in her arms. She was moving about the inner circle of people stooping quickly here and there to pick up what looked like pieces of debris resulting from the fierce impact of the two cars. No one had the courage to intrude upon her business. A holy awe and respectful reverence pervaded the scene.

As it turned out, the woman was grasping the body of her dead son close to her bosom. She was stooping to pick up pieces of his head that had been scattered in the street from the furious impact of his body upon the pavement. In a desperate attempt to restore his life she was trying to put pieces of his head back together again. What else could a mother do? She had no time to think. The reactive panic of losing her only son compelled her to do this act of madness. Who could interfere?

Every day in the farm where I live the shrill scream of the wild geese flying overhead is heard. The cry is so strident as to make us stop our activities and ask, ‘To where does the wild goose fly?’ The well-known line from John’s Gospel comes to mind: ‘The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes...’ (3.8) For the wild goose is an ancient Celtic symbol of the Holy Spirit—made popular in contemporary spirituality by the Iona Community in Scotland. The cry of the wild goose—and the sheer power of its wings—evokes a sense of the unknown, that wild transcendence and yearning for freedom which lifts us from our daily frustrations. And that is why faith in the Spirit seems to offer hope and renewed possibilities to a ‘tired’ tradition: it is certainly why Feminist Theology attempts to develop a Theology of Spirit as a means of redeeming the oppressive structures of patriarchal theology and Church.