Sometimes when we use them in a careless or slipshod manner, their meaning becomes confused and misunderstandings easily occur.

One such word is 'critical'.

Unfortunately, the tone of the word is often one-directional. It implies that something is wrong, not up to standard and so in its expression can be a cause of pain to others.

But it is a much broader word than that.

Being critical can, in fact, be a sign of sincere friendship, a friendship secure enough to cope with honesty, with a suggested adjustment in language made in good faith, made with good reason. Such an exchange is in fact a sound measure of a real friendship.

Critical comment within the Church isn't always taken that way.

Too often in the past and, regrettably still in current times, it has been presumed that critical comments are a sign of disaffection. Yet that is not necessarily so.

Within a family there is usually a freedom to speak, knowing that understanding is there. The negative reaction of the Church only gives rise to further problems.

The prophet is always assumed to be the one who in some way foretells the future. Maybe we should re-adjust our view and accept the prophet as one who is critical of the present circumstances, of how we got here and where we might be heading.

The sadness is that we do not always listen to our prophets, that they are ignored and the vibrancy of their message falls by the wayside. Later we realize our mistake as hastily discarded words are read again and their true beauty and truth realized.

When the word 'critical' is followed by the word 'care', then we realize there is an urgent need for attention. The implication is that an emergency has been declared.

Likewise, with government declarations of security levels, 'critical' is the most serious of terrorist alerts.

Some would suggest that there are aspects of Church practice that have reached the critical care phase. That may be so, but as we address them we need to remember that the Lord promised his presence would be with us always.

Still we have to listen and act in consequence.

It is possible for an institution to silence the critical view in a heavy-handed manner as happens in totalitarian regimes.

Physical repression and prohibition can severely limit free speech, however courageous and well-intentioned it might be.

The alternative route involves a silent disregard for critical opinions. The regime continues to act in a pre-determined manner, regardless of comment.

The Listening Church offers an open door, a place of familiar security where differing views may be expressed and a common understanding reached.

That, after all, was the reason for calling the Council of Jerusalem where agreement was reached after discussion.

The Church's is to influence the times that we are presently experiencing

In the world of physics, the words 'critical mass' speak of the point where nuclear reaction is about to begin. It has to be handled extremely cautiously.

Carefully controlled, in a nuclear power station it provides the source of electricity; allowed to continue without control, then we have the obscenity of nuclear weapons.

Within the Church, critical conversations must be allowed to continue, with understanding and appreciation of differing points of view. Without criticism, there can be no improvement. Critical comment can be constructive if the intention of making it is sincere.

Likewise, the one who is on the receiving end must also have an open attitude. Conversations conducted with a high-pitched voice rarely produce an equitable agreement.

We would do well to remember this need to be sensitive when, week by week, we are deluged with controversy, for we live in difficult and rapidly changing times. The Church is not a secluded space, unaffected by the secular society.

In fact, the mission of the Church is to influence the times that we are presently experiencing.

That time-honoured phrase responding to the stranger asking for directions, of 'if I was going there I wouldn't start from here', begs the question.

We are here, we have come from where our people started and where we are heading depends on our skills as explorers.

The poet T S Eliot wrote these memorable words in East Coker, the second of the Four Quartets.

'We shall not cease from exploration,

and the end of all our exploring

will be to arrive where we started

and know the place for the first time.'

That, in a few pointed words, sums up our Christian journey.

Our exploration, our critical listening to the prophets of our own time, as well as those of the Scriptures, enables us to live each present step, finally knowing where we have come from for the first time.

• Chris McDonnell is a retired headteacher from England and a regular contributor to La Croix International.
• First published in La Croix International, republished with permission.

We didn't think of the pause as prayer, but that's what it was.

On the morning of a reconciliation mass, a friend decided he wanted white magnolias in the sanctuary, and he asked me to help him gather them.

As we cut the blooms, we noticed little black ants swarming inside the glossy white cups.

I imagined the busy little creatures had discovered the magnolia's perfume was also good food.

But my friend shuddered, hurried the flowers to the garden tap, and flushed the ants down a drain.

The flowers did look beautiful in the chapel, but I was haunted by ‘dead ant' images.

That persisted until we came to the gospel reading of the prodigal son; then the murder of innocent ants became the murder of a little fat calf.

Why was beautiful intention so often tinged with darkness?

That melodramatic thought eventually deepened into a reflection on our instinct for perfection.

I call it an instinct because we all have it in us. Something inside us longs for flawless beauty and goodness.

Where does it come from?

Nothing on this earth is perfect. To be perfect is to be complete.

Yet all of nature is engaged with change, growing, or else decaying to become new growth.

So why do we all have this inner knowing and desire?

Once, it was thought that our knowledge of perfection came from the time in the womb; but the child's pre-irth experience is far from perfect.

We now realise that the baby developing in its mother, has discomfort, trauma even.

Well, I believe that our desire for perfection is a God-memory embedded in our souls. It's the gift from ‘home' that we bring into incarnation.

On faith journey it becomes a yardstick against which we measure everything.

But incarnation is not perfect. It is about spiritual growth, and growth happens with the tension between opposite states.

To be perfect is to have no room for growth.

We need imperfection.

So if you don't mind, I will keep the little black ants in the magnolias. Those ants represent the darkness in me. that is light yet to be born.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

The demand for being perfect, based on Matthew 5:14, "Be ye therefore perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect," became the deranged and deranging discipline that was brought to an end by Vatican II's healthier attitude toward spiritual growth.

One of the great, largely unseen and surely unsung tragedies of the old church to which Pope Benedict XVI's "Reform of the Reform" triumphantly proposes to return us was that of good-hearted and willing young men and women sacrificing their spontaneity and zest for life on the altar, more pagan than Christian, of trying to follow the Rule of Life that their superiors insisted was the perfect expression of God's will for them.

No wonder docility was the virtue dearest to the hearts of superiors in those days.

"Keep the Rule," they would say in one of their most addled dicta, "and the Rule will keep you."

Good-hearted young men and women thought these superiors, like the restored professional referees, knew what they were doing when they told them that spiritual perfection lay in following the rules — most of them more like traffic regulations than spiritual insights — that covered almost every waking moment in the lives of seminarians and aspirants to religious orders.

The seminary I attended instructed students with a solemnity unrelieved by irony, "Never appear at the window without your cincture on."

Those who broke any of the rules, mostly by doing something healthy, such as talking to another human being during imposed periods of strict silence, had to report themselves to their superiors. In its most baroque form, this took place at a Chapter of Faults, a public event, in which candidates could accuse themselves, and sometimes others, of rule infractions.

Being a seminarian or a novice in these circumstances was the closest thing to being an innocent bystander at the collision of inhuman but supposedly "perfect" spiritual nonsense with human and reassuringly imperfect common sense.

The so-called "Reform of the Reform" would love to bring back this idea that religion imposes some quest for perfection on us.

That is an illusion akin to the notion that the professional football referees will call every play perfectly.

Instant replay was only introduced when fans, owners and sportswriters complained that the professional referees made too many mistakes in their calls on the field.

The quest for perfection, which has no real application in the spiritual life, calls for a reach that is always beyond our grasp. Even instant replay, through which plays are examined from all angles in slow motion and in freeze-frame, does not always get it right. Continue reading