Upsetting the Balance of the Universe

Faith’s new way of seeing things is centered on Christ. Faith in Christ brings salvation because in him our lives become radically open to a love that precedes us, a love that transforms us from within, acting in us and through us. This is clearly seen in Saint Paul’s exegesis of a text from Deuteronomy, an exegesis consonant with the heart of the Old Testament message. Moses tells the people that God’s command is neither too high nor too far away. There is no need to say: "Who will go up for us to heaven and bring it to us?" or "Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us?" (Dt 30:11-14).

Paul interprets this nearness of God’s word in terms of Christ’s presence in the Christian. "Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ (that is, to bring Christ down), or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead)" (Rom 10:6-7). Christ came down to earth and rose from the dead; by his incarnation and resurrection, the Son of God embraced the whole of human life and history, and now dwells in our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Faith knows that God has drawn close to us, that Christ has been given to us as a great gift which inwardly transforms us, dwells within us and thus bestows on us the light that illumines the origin and the end of life.

Lumen Fidei 20

Reflection – One of my favorite new authors, Heather King, wrote that it is precisely this which drew her to Christianity after a long time journeying in the wilderness of alcoholism and despair. Namely, that the Christian God had drawn that close to humanity, had come down to us, had met us where we are. She writes in her memoir Redeemed that by the time she came to know her need for some kind of faith in her life, nothing less would have done for her. God had to know what it was like to be brought as low as she had been brought right then.

This is genuinely the unique quality of Christianity. God as understood in both Judaism and Islam is indeed a God of love and mercy, and I firmly believe we all worship the same God, but in their understanding He certainly did not come to share our human lot with all its genuine poverty, suffering, lowliness.

This is specifically Christian, this idea of the God become man for love of us, to raise us up to His divine state. If it is true, it changes everything, doesn’t it? That’s what the Pope means here by faith giving us an entirely new way of seeing things. God is just not ‘up there’ in some distant divine realm to which we must labor and struggle somehow. God is not even just pouring down graces upon us from that divine realm like some fairy godfather giving magic beans or cups or cloaks to his charges that will get them through our quest.

God came down—this is the central and fundamental proclamation of Christianity—and shouldered the burden of humanity upon his own divinity.

God sweated in the heat and shivered in the cold of the night. God wept, and laughed too. God bled, and when he stubbed his toe, it hurt. God was surprised (a most novel experience if you’re God, I guess!), and upset, and angry, and sad, and amused. Not one of these things is proper to the divine nature; all of this flows from humanity, from finitude, from the physical and temporal limitations and conditions of a spiritual being living a material life.

And of course, God died, and it was all for love of us, and God’s love for us is so strong that it proves itself to be stronger than death, so He rose from the dead, and because of that you and I and every other human being we can mention has a hope of defeating death and escaping the trap of futility and defeat.

We need to meditate long and hard on this essential Christian proclamation. It does factually change everything: our sense of who God is, what a human being is, what life is about, the whole calculus of risks and benefits, our whole sorting out of how we are to live and move in the world. As the Misfit, the depraved serial killer in Flannery O’Connor’s story A Good Man is Hard to Find, put it (I quote from memory, and thus badly), “He shouldn’t have done it. He upset the balance. If it’s true, there’s nothing to do but leave everything and follow Him. If it ain’t true, there’s nothing to do but get whatever fun you can killing people.”

Except for the killing people part, I wholly endorse that statement. And (ahem) I do believe it to be true, and God-help-me am trying each day to leave everything to follow Jesus. It’s such a wonderful religion! It’s such a wonderful life! Believing this does change everything. Faith is an extraordinary thing, like having the lights of the universe all turned on at once—a bit dazzling, but oh what a view!

Well, that’s quite enough for one day. I’m heading into Ottawa today for a book launch for I-Choice, so prayers are gratefully received for that (and attendance, if you’re in the Ottawa area). Blessings to you all, meantime.

Creatures of the Gift

On the basis of this sharing in Jesus’ way of seeing things, Saint Paul has left us a description of the life of faith. In accepting the gift of faith, believers become a new creation; they receive a new being; as God’s children, they are now "sons in the Son". The phrase "Abba, Father", so characteristic of Jesus’ own experience, now becomes the core of the Christian experience (cf. Rom 8:15). The life of faith, as a filial existence, is the acknowledgment of a primordial and radical gift which upholds our lives. We see this clearly in Saint Paul’s question to the Corinthians: "What have you that you did not receive?" (1 Cor 4:7).

This was at the very heart of Paul’s debate with the Pharisees: the issue of whether salvation is attained by faith or by the works of the law. Paul rejects the attitude of those who would consider themselves justified before God on the basis of their own works. Such people, even when they obey the commandments and do good works, are centred on themselves; they fail to realize that goodness comes from God. Those who live this way, who want to be the source of their own righteousness, find that the latter is soon depleted and that they are unable even to keep the law. They become closed in on themselves and isolated from the Lord and from others; their lives become futile and their works barren, like a tree far from water.

Saint Augustine tells us in his usual concise and striking way: "Ab eo qui fecit te, noli deficere nec ad te", "Do not turn away from the one who made you, even to turn towards yourself". Once I think that by turning away from God I will find myself, my life begins to fall apart (cf. Lk 15:11-24). The beginning of salvation is openness to something prior to ourselves, to a primordial gift that affirms life and sustains it in being. Only by being open to and acknowledging this gift can we be transformed, experience salvation and bear good fruit. Salvation by faith means recognizing the primacy of God’s gift. As Saint Paul puts it: "By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God" (Eph 2:8).

Lumen Fidei 19

Reflection – Well, Tuesdays with Francis time again, as we continue to read through Lumen Fidei bit by bit. As with last week’s paragraph 18, p. 19 is jam packed with ideas and depth of insight, this time on the theme of faith in St. Paul.

It’s this whole deal of receptivity that is so much the heart of the matter. This is what comes out in all the Church’s contemplation of Mary which has been a bit of a theme on this blog this week. Mary is the faithful one, and she is the one who knows that everything she has is from God: ‘He has looked on his servant in her nothingness.’

Yesterday’s Gospel at Mass was the rich fool building bigger barns, and the Lord’s clear teaching that ‘a man’s life is not made secure by what he owns.’ (Lk 12: 13-21). That is the key issue of faith/not faith in our lives, which Pope Francis/Benedict make so well here: are we seeking a life apart from God, or do we know ourselves as fundamentally creatures of the gift, creatures both held and perfected in being by Another who is all love and generosity?

Anyhow, I think I’ll leave it at that for now (shortest blog post ever!). Too many words may blunt the point the Pope is making here, and it really is worth it to simply sit with LF 19 and meditate on it. Tomorrow, God willing, back to Mary for a couple more days. See you then.

The Reasonableness of Faith

This fullness which Jesus brings to faith has another decisive aspect. In faith, Christ is not simply the one in whom we believe, the supreme manifestation of God’s love; he is also the one with whom we are united precisely in order to believe. Faith does not merely gaze at Jesus, but sees things as Jesus himself sees them, with his own eyes: it is a participation in his way of seeing.

In many areas in our lives we trust others who know more than we do. We trust the architect who builds our home, the pharmacist who gives us medicine for healing, the lawyer who defends us in court. We also need someone trustworthy and knowledgeable where God is concerned. Jesus, the Son of God, is the one who makes God known to us (cf. Jn 1:18).

Christ’s life, his way of knowing the Father and living in complete and constant relationship with him, opens up new and inviting vistas for human experience. Saint John brings out the importance of a personal relationship with Jesus for our faith by using various forms of the verb "to believe". In addition to "believing that" what Jesus tells us is true, John also speaks of "believing" Jesus and "believing in" Jesus. We "believe" Jesus when we accept his word, his testimony, because he is truthful. We "believe in" Jesus when we personally welcome him into our lives and journey towards him, clinging to him in love and following in his footsteps along the way.

To enable us to know, accept and follow him, the Son of God took on our flesh. In this way he also saw the Father humanly, within the setting of a journey unfolding in time. Christian faith is faith in the incarnation of the Word and his bodily resurrection; it is faith in a God who is so close to us that he entered our human history. Far from divorcing us from reality, our faith in the Son of God made man in Jesus of Nazareth enables us to grasp reality’s deepest meaning and to see how much God loves this world and is constantly guiding it towards himself. This leads us, as Christians, to live our lives in this world with ever greater commitment and intensity.

Lumen Fidei 18

Reflection – Classic Benedict here, even as we do our ‘Tuesdays with Francis’ reading through the encyclical. Also a bit on the long side, but I couldn’t really cut this fine paragraph down. My comments will be correspondingly short.

Pope Benedict Emeritus points out here, as he often has in his writings, that ‘faith’ is not some weird thing unique to religious people. Everyone engages in an act of faith whenever we trust the knowledge of another person without ourselves verifying the truth of the matter. And life in the world is unlivable without that kind of faith: we cannot fly on an airplane, go to a doctor, learn from a teacher, or eat a meal we did not personally cook without it.

We all know that we cannot personally master every corner of reality and of our own certain knowledge determine the truth of every matter. So we take the knowledge of the experts and go with it, always knowing that they might be fallible, but choosing to live in a species of ‘faith’ in various areas. It is such a commonplace reality that we hardly even think of it—only someone suffering from a paranoid disorder has any difficulty with it.

And yet, when it comes to ultimate truths—God, the human person, the meaning of life, death, the future, good and evil, suffering—there is a long tradition of thought that says ‘faith’ is unacceptable, that only what we ourselves determine to be true by our intellect is worthy of our intellectual assent.

You know, maybe I’m thick as a plank here, but I don’t see any logic in that argument. If I decide for perfectly valid reasons that my family physician is a trustworthy man and so take his advice on this or that course of action, this is fine. But if I decide for perfectly valid reasons that Jesus is Trustworthy in a more ultimate way and that He has communicated Himself to me through His Catholic Church, and consequently base my whole life on that judgment of my intellect, it is not fine, somehow? I don’t see any logical basis for that distinction.

Anyhow, there’s a great deal else going on in this section from the encyclical, and I may come back to it tomorrow, but it is good to consider the reasonableness of faith here—so often we blithely accept the opposition of faith and reason that the modern world throws up at us. Really, they are more in tandem with each other than opposition. Reason indicates to us we should trust the word of another; we accept that word as true (act of faith), and then can use our reason to take deeper hold of why and how this word is a trustworthy one. Reason-faith-reason is a normal pattern, as is the alternate one of faith-reason-faith. And that’s all I have time and space for today. Tomorrow, more on this subject…

At This Point, What Difference Does It Make?

Christ’s death discloses the utter reliability of God’s love above all in the light of his resurrection. As the risen one, Christ is the trustworthy witness, deserving of faith (cf. Rev 1:5; Heb 2:17), and a solid support for our faith. "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile", says Saint Paul (1 Cor 15:17). Had the Father’s love not caused Jesus to rise from the dead, had it not been able to restore his body to life, then it would not be a completely reliable love, capable of illuminating also the gloom of death.

When Saint Paul describes his new life in Christ, he speaks of "faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal 2:20). Clearly, this "faith in the Son of God" means Paul’s faith in Jesus, but it also presumes that Jesus himself is worthy of faith, based not only on his having loved us even unto death but also on his divine sonship. Precisely because Jesus is the Son, because he is absolutely grounded in the Father, he was able to conquer death and make the fullness of life shine forth.

Our culture has lost its sense of God’s tangible presence and activity in our world. We think that God is to be found in the beyond, on another level of reality, far removed from our everyday relationships. But if this were the case, if God could not act in the world, his love would not be truly powerful, truly real, and thus not even true, a love capable of delivering the bliss that it promises. It would make no difference at all whether we believed in him or not. Christians, on the contrary, profess their faith in God’s tangible and powerful love which really does act in history and determines its final destiny: a love that can be encountered, a love fully revealed in Christ’s passion, death and resurrection.

Lumen Fidei 17

Reflection – ‘Tuesdays with Francis’, now on a new day for this week only (in all the disruption of travel, I forgot about it yesterday). I was talking recently to a man of deep faith and prayer who was lamenting somewhat the religious indifferentism of some of his family and loved ones, that what for him was the key question of all of life—God, the meaning of it all, Jesus Christ—was a matter of supreme indifference and irrelevance for them.

It does seem to me that this is what Pope Francis (although honestly I hear Pope Benedict’s typical style loud and clear in this paragraph) is saying here. God is somewhere else, or on some other level of reality, or not really acting in the world, or just a big cryptic question mark that cannot possibly be resolved, encountered, entered into a real relationship with. If I thought that about God, I too would conclude that the God question is an irrelevant distraction from the business of life, and just get on with it.

The Christian faith is that God has come very close to us, has indeed entered right into the deepest stuff of our life—the questions that do exercise every human being who has not descended into utter insensibility. Life, death, pain, joy, love, hatred, family, the past and its successes and failures, the future and its uncertainty—surely every human being with any degree of interiority is concerned with these matters.

It is our belief that God has planted Himself squarely on the ground of His creation called ‘man’, the place of our humanity and its most urgent and universal longings, questions, concerns. And it is Jesus Christ, his life, death, and resurrection, that provide the surest guidance and most beautiful divine answers to all these riddles that have presented themselves to mankind from the beginning.

What is becoming more and more clear to me, though, is that as necessary as a lucid presentation of our beliefs are, as much as we have to find words to explain to people just how it is that Jesus and the testimony of the Gospels makes our humanity shine forth with divine radiance and opens a door in our finite mortal nature to a sharing in the infinite eternal glory of God, words are not enough for this.

We live in a world sated with words, bloated on words, and in which words have too often been reduced to instruments of manipulation and control rather than servants of truth and wisdom. We need, not only words, but witness.

We need love—Christians who will not just talk about the faith but practice it with ever growing generosity and fidelity, who put their skin into the game, who go out from the parish and their own homes into the streets and alley ways, the town centers and the obscure outskirts, to make the love of God poured out in Jesus visible to the world. This is really what Pope Francis is calling all of us to do, or if we are already doing it, to redouble our efforts, to never say ‘Oh, I’m doing enough for God’, but to earnestly ask what more we can do.

It seems to me that the witness of Christian love is the only thing that will move people out of religious indifferentism and spark a renewed hope that maybe there is a way to God in the world, a way out of death and futility into hope and joy. I also believe that the world is heading into truly tough times and, frankly, Christians are going to need to be ready to love generously and take care of people’s material and spiritual needs. Are we ready for that? If not, let’s get praying and earnestly seeking the Lord’s help. And with that… time for this little Christian to go to community prayers!