The synod, which here means a church assembly, is more than a parliament. But it is also a parliament. For all in the Synod are like in the parliament representatives. They represent the people or the people of God. No member is there as they are. It is not their personal meeting, it is an ecclesial meeting in the name of Christ, the founder of the church. It is a meeting, which is in Christ for Christ and with Christ.
Pope Francis is making two important two revolutionary changes in church’s way thinking on authority and thinking. First is authority is not in one but in plurality, second knowledge is not seeing but hearing. The Bible does not believe in the eyes but in the ears.
A word of methodological clarity. The fourth Gospel starts: “In the beginning was the word (logos).” Logos has primacy; in other words Rationality, dialogue and language have priority over the Will. Romano Guardini’s book on liturgy, “The Spirit of Liturgy”, closes with a chapter “The primacy of the Logos over the Ethos”. Guardini warns of the Ethos having complete precedence over the Logos, the active side of life over the contemplative. The Faustian temptation to make the Deed the first word of salvation becomes a frightening reality. Dr. Faustus of Goethe’s poetic drama who has sold his soul to the devil says, “In the beginning was the Deed”. The Ethos became all-dominant during the ugly works and days of the Nazi regime inspired by Nietzsche’s will to power. The will can function and produce, but cannot see. It is a monologic subjugation.

“The church is the body of Christ, but the temptations of the Grant Inquisitor is real. Christ can be shut up and expelled from church meetings! He has no body but ours, and unless he gets a body and a tongue, he will be absent in any synod.”

Michael Bakthin (1895-1975) reveals to us Dosteovsky’s invention Polyphonic nature of his novels. His novel become a poetical paradigm by “constructing the novel in scenes and thus reducing authorial discourse to the status of a stage direction.” In Polyphony, the miracle of our “dialogical” lives together, is thus both a fact of life and, in its higher reaches, a value to be pursued endlessly. Bakthin wrote, “There is a “centrifugal” force dispersing us outward into an ever greater variety of “voices”, outward into a seeming chaos that presumably only a God could encompass”. With that chaotic polyphony or cacophony, how does the author create an aesthetic event? How does the author exert his authority? I recall to you Jacques Derrida’s maxim: “No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy.” So, any democratic act is a literary act, a poetic act.
Michael Bakhtin gives an excellent metaphor of synod as a multilingual novel like the Brothers Karamazov of Dostoevsky. A synod is an aesthetic act, a poetic endeavour. Aristotle wrote in his poetics, “historian tells stories of yesterday and the poets tell stories of tomorrow.” A story writer deconstructs reality as he likes it to be. The future of a community shown as it can be or should be. A modern novel according to Camus “is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images.” So, when we are involved with our future in councils and meetings, we are acting as poets.
Where is the author of a novel? As Roland Barthes says the author is dead as the writ is written. His name is on the cover as a name written over the tomb-stone. Similarly, Christ is taken away from history, he is not here. He will not preside over any meeting of the church. How can he enter a meeting? How can he become author or exert any authority? He is absent.
In the novel of Karamazov Brothers, the father is killed by one of the sons. Which son? Demitri the eldest is condemned by the court to imprisonment. He as well as the other brothers know that he has not killed him. Someone else killed the father. But he goes to jail happily. Why? He says, “I did not kill him, but I wished to kill him.” This can be the tragedy of any synod. All have directly or indirectly participated in the patricide. Either you participated in the patricide directly or indirectly or you did not give enough light to prevent it. In the novel, there is no authority at all except as sceptre (ghost) haunting the characters. Authority stands outside; there is no authority. There is no God in the world, he is absent. God will not come to settle any dispute or conduct any synod. He is gone silent after the cry of the cross. Writing a novel is a literary act, an aesthetic act of creation- invent out of the bundle of contradictions of immeasurable sanctuary of memory and hope, ghosts of past and illusions of future, we can make out of the tohu wa-bohu, the original chaos of the book of genesis, an aesthetic event, a masterpiece. I quote Saint Augustine, “See my wounds, I do not hide them” (Conf. 10.28.39). A wound is an abscise, an absence, An evil, a privation. Augustine names that the Medicus – the physician. So, Augustine prays in his Confession, “Lord, You were with me, I was not with you, you were within me, I was outside”. The characters of the novel are the characters of the author with definite calls. The authority is not one, either out or in, it is in the plurality, in the polyphony. In multi-voicedness” or “multi-centeredness”. Dostoevsky’s languages in novels do a kind of justice to life itself that other novelists have not achieved. It is in the reading of the “arche-ecrite”, an expression of J. Derrida, the archaic-writing in the flesh of you and me happens. The primordial wound in all of us. The question is do we read the archaic writing and respond? I am pointing out to you something very simple in Christianity: what Kierkegaard said was the Point of Christianity – the self-denial which everyone has forgotten – the kenosis of Christ.
The author has to take possession of the characters. Which means the participants in the synod has to be docile to the author. It is a poetic act. Who is the poet? Kalidasa says the poet is Rudhithanusari Kavi, One who follows the cry? They have to listen to the prayers of the author. Prayer is attention in humility. Go to any synagogue, what you hear is sma Israel – hear O Israel. Listening to the cry of the crucified Lord and the people. Of all our organs, the ear alone is most ethical. One who does not listen has no right to speak. Only one who is attentive to oneself will be attentive to the divine within. This is the paradigm change, the Council, Pope Francis is calling for in the church. It is a symbolic turning to the people or I may say facing the people. The Orientation need not necessarily mean this. But the compulsion to face the East may signify an Orientation to the Ghost of History, not the Son God Christ, but the Sun God of Plato and Caesar –The Power of the Pontifex Maximus. The face is the Epiphany – the face of the Other is the face of Christ for me. The face generates language of hospitality and diakonia.
Christ has become a bodiless Spirit. If only like Mary Magdalene we are ready to “carry him away” (Jh 20:15) he will not enter history. The church is the body of Christ, but the temptations of the Grant Inquisitor is real. He can be shut up and expelled from church meetings! He has no body but ours, and unless he gets a body and a tongue, he will be absent in any synod. Here is the call of Christ, the prayer of Christ for a body, it is a cry for possession. Unless we are possessed by the spectre of Christ, he will not become contemporary. Hence I conclude with my final appeal for a carnival of Christ – Give our bodies to him.