The God Who Talks To Us

The prime characteristic of Christian faith is that it is faith in God. Furthermore, that this God is someone who speaks, someone to whom man can speak. The Christian God is characterized by revelation, that is, by the words and deeds in which he addresses man, and the goal of revelation is man’s response in word and deed, which thus expands revelation into a dialogue between Creator and creature which guides man toward union with God.

So prayer is not something on the periphery of the Christian concept of God; it is a fundamental trait. The whole Bible is dialogue: on the one side, revelation, God’s words and deeds, and on the other side, man’s response in accepting the word of God and allowing himself to be led by God. To delete prayer and dialogue, genuine two-way dialogue, is to delete the whole Bible.

Joseph Ratzinger, Feast of Faith, 16

Reflection – It is October, of course, and in Catholic tradition this month is dedicated to a religious theme, as each month of the year is. October is dedicated to the Rosary, and I hope to have posts dotting the month that relate to that theme. Posts on Mary, and posts on prayer, perhaps posts on the specific mysteries of the Rosary. That’s the plan, anyhow (I'm making it up as I go along...).

This excerpt from a very fine book by Ratzinger brings out the central nature of prayer in our faith. The whole revealed picture of God we get from the Bible and taken up in the tradition of the Church is a God who wants to be in conversation with us, a God who talks to us and wants us to respond. Our God, the God of Christianity, is not some enigmatic cloudy figure up there somewhere, not some energy field or faceless voiceless ‘ground of being’, or some philosophical axiom or the answer to a metaphysical or ethical puzzle. He may well be all those things in some fashion or other, but ultimately, He is a Father who wants to be in relationship with his children.

And so, prayer. At the very heart of Christian faith is Christian prayer and Christian worship. We are made, not simply to be in good order with one another, not simply to work for a humane, kind, just way of life as a human community. We are made to open up this human life and community to something altogether other, altogether transcendent from ourselves, and to live not only on good terms with one another but in communion with this Other, this One, this God.

And this is not, as it is in some religious traditions, a task reserved for some elite class of ‘professional religious’. Even in our Catholic tradition, the corruption of elitism has entered in, and true union with God has at times been reserved to the monastics or rare elect souls. But that is not a view consistent with Catholic theology—it is a corruption, a distortion.

Our Catholic sense is that God wants to be in union with all of us, with every human being, and all of us together as a body, a community of persons. This is consistent with the whole Bible, where God comes to individuals but then fashions them into a people of his own. And so the deepest realization of communion with God comes, not on a mountain top or in a lonely hermitage or in a trance, but… well, at Sunday Mass.

You know, that place with the crying babies, the bored teenagers, the crabby old people, the priest who is a total doofus, the sour judgmental holier than thou types, the nightmarishly bad music… or whatever your current beef might be about your parish. That’s where heaven comes down to earth, God speaks to His people, gives Himself to them most fully this side of heaven and asks us to respond, individually and communally, by pledging our lives and our hearts to Him.

Prayer, but prayer always understood in that biggest context, that call to communion that draws us first to God but then to the community, the body of the Church. And it all goes together—our life long seeking of God and His love, His presence, His voice, and our life long struggle and joy of loving our neighbor as ourselves.

It’s all part of the same picture, and that picture is that the God who speaks to us and wants us to speak to Him is Himself a Communion of Love, a  three-personed unity that utterly exceeds our understanding. It’s a good thing we have Mary to help us in all this, and that the Rosary has been given to the Church as such a simple way of being with Mary. It’s all a bit too much for us, but she seems to get it, and helps us get it a little better each day as we turn to her for help. So, happy October to you.

We're (not) All The Same

The path of the Asiatic religions seems logically consistent and religiously profound: they start from the ultimate identity of the ‘I’ which is in reality not an ‘I’, with the divine ground of the world. Here prayer is the discovery of this identity, in which, behind the surface illusion, I find my own serene identity with the ground of all being and thus am liberated from the false identity of the individualized ‘I’. Prayer is letting myself be absorbed into the what I really am; it is the gradual disappearance of what, to the separate ‘I’, seems to be the real world. It is liberation in that one bids farewell to the empirical, experienced world with its chaos of illusion and enters the pure nothingness  which is truly divine.

There can be no doubt that this is a path of impressive proportions; moreover it appeals strongly to man’s painful experience, which causes him to wish to abandon what seems to be the illusory surface of being. Only a radical abandonment of being, in favor of nothingness, seems to offer hope of real freedom. It is no accident, therefore, that the way of Asia presents itself as the way of salvation wherever the content of faith is relegated to the level of an untenable piece of Western metaphysics or mythology yet where there is still a deep spiritual and religious will.

I believe that as far as religion is concerned, the present age will have to decide ultimately between the Asiatic religious world view and the Christian faith. I have no doubt that both sides have a great deal to learn from each other. The issue may be which of the two can rescue more of the other’s authentic content. But in spite of this possibility of mutual exchange, no one will dispute the fact that the two ways are different. In a nutshell one could say that the goal of Asiatic contemplation is the escape from personality, whereas biblical prayer is essentially a relation between persons and hence ultimately the affirmation of the person.

Feast of Faith, 24

Reflection – Well this passage is bit longer than what I usually offer – it couldn’t really be cut down or broken up and still make sense. My reflections will be correspondingly brief.

I am struck, as I always am, with the friendly open tone Ratzinger has to ‘the other’, to the different world view. He is always eager to highlight what is true, good, beautiful in any philosophy or religion, while at the same time not lapsing into indifferentism or a false syncretism (we’re all the same, after all! It’s a small world, after all!).

We’re not all the same, and it’s tackling those differences head-on that allows us to genuinely learn from each other and benefit from one another’s point of view. To either demonize the other or to subtly dismiss the other by papering over the real difference in what they are saying closes the door to genuine dialogue and encounter.

Now I’m no expert in Asian religions, so in offering this excerpt from Ratzinger’s writings I cannot weigh in even slightly on how precisely accurate he is on the subject. Since he is a scholar of international stature, I presume he wouldn’t write about them without having done his homework.

But it certainly does strike me as a very profound question, this whole business of the affirmation of the person or the denial of the person. Is spirituality a plunging into something that ultimately negates our perception of existence, or does spirituality (prayer, God) ultimately affirm our actual existence and then draws us to transcendence through genuine personal communion with God?

It does seem to me that the two are very different realities. And that there is a fundamental question of the goodness and truth of what we know, what we experience, where life in this world has plunged us – is salvation an escape from experience, or a transformation of experience by a communion of love with Love Itself?

I am a Christian, and take my stand on the Christian approach to the question. But I would be interested in this learning, this exchange, this encounter of East and West, Asia and Europe, so to speak. There is much to ponder here, and Ratzinger shows us a good way and a good spirit in which to do this pondering.

Mighty Mites

The basic reason why man can speak with God arises from the fact that God himself is speech, word. His nature is to speak, to hear, to reply, as we see particularly in Johannine theology, where Son and Spirit are described in terms of pure hearing: they speak in response to what they have first heard. Only because there is already speech, ‘Logos’, in God can there be speech, ‘Logos’, to God. Philosophically we could put it like this: the Logos in God is the onto-logical foundation for prayer.

The Prologue of John’s Gospel speaks of the connection in its very first sentences: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was in communication with God.’ (Jn 1:1)—as a more precise translation of the Greek προϛ suggests, rather than the usual ‘with God.’ It expresses the act of turning to God, of relationship. Since there is relationship within God himself, there can also be a participation in this relationship. Thus we can relate to God in a way which does not contradict his nature.

Feast of Faith, 25

Reflection – It is just possible that many if not most readers of this blog have not lain awake at night agonizing over the ontological foundation of prayer and how it is possible for an infinite and transcendent God to hear the prayers of finite humans.

Most of us who pray just sort of take it for granted. You pray; God hears; that’s it. How God answers our prayers, or quite often doesn’t appear to—that’s more the issue that disturbs the peace of the average Christian

Whether or not we get it quite, though, the issue raised by Ratzinger in this passage is very real. God is wholly other than us, an entirely different Being… to the point that we can hardly speak of God correctly in human terms at all. To call God ‘a’ being is misleading, as it implies that God is one being among many. To call God a certain ‘kind of’ being is even worse; that puts God on some kind of continuum with rocks, plant, animals, us, angels. Even to call God Being Itself is not quite-quite—this makes God a sort of cosmic underwriter for the rest of us beings.

It is the strangeness of God that we can easily miss. God is not just a Really Big Guy. He (and even there, we choose the least-inadequate pronoun!) is Infinite Mystery, Infinite Unknown, the Absolute and Utterly Beyond of all beyonds... and even then our words fall badly short and go awry. We can heap superlatives upon superlatives upon capital letters (The Infinite of the Utter Absolute of the Beyond Transcendent Hugeness!!!) and it is all just as infinitely falling short of Who God Is.

And so this strange reality of dialogue with God is indeed a strange reality. May as well strike up a conversation with a super-nova, or the force of gravity, or the color red. Except… that God is a Trinity of persons. God is in conversation with God, and in the Logos who is Jesus, we are drawn into that conversation.

This, of course, has enormous significance for us. It means we are drawn, not just into a dialogue with God, but into the interior life of God. By the simple act of praying, we are drawn into the communion of the Trinity. The wee child kneeling at his bed side saying, “God bless mommy, God bless daddy, and God bless me,” is participating in the life of God.

And we are all that wee child. All of us are tiny mites of being, crawling on the surface of the cosmos… and all of us are immense, terrible creatures called into the very life of God the Supreme One.

Mystery upon mystery upon mystery. And that’s what you and I do every day when we lisp and stutter and blunder through our daily prayers, half our mind on something else (on a good day). We enter God’s life and become filled with that life for the world.

Worship is the Central Issue

Faced with the political and social crises of the present time and the moral challenge they offer to Christians, the problems of liturgy and prayer could easily seem to be of second importance. But the question of the moral standards and spiritual resources that we need if we are to acquit ourselves in this situation cannot be separated from the question of worship. Only if man, as man, stands before the face of God and is answerable to him, can man be secure in his dignity as a human being. Concern for the proper form of worship, therefore, is not peripheral but central to our concern for man himself.

Feast of Faith, 7

Reflection – I should perhaps state as I begin to write this that, in this early morning hour of November 7, I don’t actually know what the final results of the US election were. When I went to bed last night it was all still in play, and it is not my custom to frantically turn on media upon arising in the morning. I prefer my first hour or so of the day to be spent in prayer, reflection, and writing rather than noise and media chatter.

So I’m writing knowing full well that everyone reading this knows more about the world situation than I currently do, which is kind of funny (so… Jill Stein pulled out a surprise victory? Who knew?). (OK... I'm posting this a bit later in the day, so I know now. Oh well...)

That being said, I chose this passage from Ratzinger on purpose. It is in fact the central issue, beyond any political and social matter. Where are we before God? Where is our worship, our prayer? Are we listening to Him, and are we entrusting our lives to Him as we must? If this central relationship and central concern of life is not in order, then it doesn’t really matter who is president or prime minister or dictator-for-life in our homeland.

I love how Ratzinger links standing before the face of God and being answerable to Him with human dignity. Again, we can get so very embroiled in the immediacy of political issues and controversies—this law, that election, this scandal—and we can put all our ‘human dignity eggs’ into the rather fragile and battered basket of democratic process.

Human dignity on the deeper level flows from communion with God. While we have to strive for the most just society we can attain (which at this precise moment doesn’t seem terribly just, alas), we do need this deeper perspective. My dignity is from God and my life in and with Him. And it is my accountability to God that presses me to treat every human being as a child of God worthy of profound respect and care.

So, this ignorant blogger who doesn’t even know who won the 2012 presidential election is pondering the call we all have, which has absolutely nothing to do with who is or is not in power, with what people in high places are doing or not doing—the call to preach the Gospel with our lives and with our words. And the call to come before God and worship Him in spirit and in truth, so that He can put our lives into proper order, which is the order of charity.

 

And that’s basically all I have to say today. See you tomorrow!