Woundedness
and Hope for Faith Today
From an
article published in Italian in Studia
Patavina 51 (2004), 613-630.
THREE
CULTURAL WOUNDS
Karl Rahner stressed that the crucial change affecting faith
in the modern era lies in the conditions surrounding our freedom, in other
words in the inevitable impact of culture on peoples decisions or
non-decisions. A radically altered cultural context can confuse the human
spirit and paralyze commitment. This environment can surround people like a sea
of skepticism with the result that God is missing but not missed (as a
Spanish theologian has put it).
Perhaps we
can identify three major wounds inflicted on people by their cultural captivity
and therefore evangelisation will require a healing of these wounds before the
Word of God can be fruitfully heard. The three zones I have in mind are:
memory, belonging and imagination. A French sociologist Danile Hervieu-Lger
has written a major study of religion as memory, where she argues that the
decline of faith today is due to a collapse of collective memory much more than
to any critiques from the world of Enlightenment rationality.[1]
Thus the symbols and narratives of faith have become a foreign or lost language
for many. This is the first wound, call it amnesia or absence of roots in any
tradition of meaning.
The second
wound is similar but more social. People often find themselves without
companions or communities of support. A certain half-believing without real
belonging is a phenomenon today. It is marked by a certain spiritual
loneliness. Like the lack of memory, this lack of roots of belonging means an
undermining of the natural ground of faith, which is community. Faith, it has
been said, relies more on affectivity than on ratiionality.[2]
And this second wound to our sense of belonging implies a wounded affectivity.
The dominant culture offers us superficial togetherness without commitment.
Therefore an important dimension of our humanity languishes in shallow waters.
Alert to these wounds contemporary theology of faith has retrieved and
highlighted the human richness of the Christian invitation: faith is no longer
thought of as mainly an intellectual assent to truth but as a relational
adventure with God in Christ, through the testimony of the living community that
is the church and nourished by the heart-encounter called personal prayer. In the
words of PierAngelo Sequeri, da un lato Dio considera immorale infatti una
fede priva di intima persuasione; dallaltro lato, dare la vita allaltro
la ripetizione simbolica della cura di Dio.[3] In
the spiritual isolation often induced by todays culture, to retrieve a quality
of prayerful receiving of Gods word has to go hand in hand with liberating an
energy of Christian service and self-giving.
The third
wound concerns religious imagination (an expression from Newman). Here I value an insight from the
Christian poet T. S. Eliot from more than fifty years ago:
The
trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things
about God which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God
and man as they did.[4] When
we suffer from impoverishment on the level of our self-images and our
God-images, we become incapable of entering into the vision of the Gospel. God
becomes not so much incredible as unreal. The wounded imagination could also be
called wounded desire. The dominant culture bombards human desire with small
and ego-centred goals. The constant message is that your autonomous
self-fulfilment is the key to happiness. In
the recent words of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, we are surrounded
by a soft relativism, where a new expressivist self-awareness brings to the
fore a different kind of social imaginary.[5]
In such a context the communication of faith today will need a
spiritual ecology of the
imagination to prepare our receptivity for faith.
These three wounded zones indicate new pastoral challenges
for the communication of faith. In this light perhaps the influence of culture
is mainly pre-religious, in the sense that it can silently shape those zones
of pre-disposition where people are either open or closed to the surprise of
revelation. The more radical crisis, as suggested earlier, is one of
sensibility rather than of behavior, of un-hope rather than un-faith. In this
way we are experiencing a new secularisation that is more than merely social.
EVANGELISATION AS COUNTER-CULTURAL SURPRISE
In this light how can we bring people, wounded by their
culture, to thresholds of truth that they unknowingly long for? Let me give you
my own description of evangelisation. I think it means surprising people with a
gift they do not know they need. And if that emphasis has some validity, if
many people are simply out of touch with their real selves, then it follows
that pre-evangelisation is all the more necessary if evangelisation is to have
any hope of fruitfulness. That term was used even in Evangelii Nuntiandi and highlights the priority of a
certain John the Baptist preparation for the Lord. It seeks to liberate peoples
disposition for possible faith, for the surprise of being loved by God. It
involves awakening them to their fuller humanity in various ways, to their
perhaps forgotten hungers, hurts, hopes, the whole range of readiness for the
Word. Then evangelisation proper involves of course a call to hear and respond
explicitly to the good news of Christ. Drawing on some words of the new
Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, who has voiced his mission as helping
Christian faith to recapture the imagination of people in todays culture: The
challenge is to do with imagination; what is needed is a way of bringing
people into a new place and a new perception.[6]
Returning to
another aspect of Evangelii nuntiandi, the new
tone introduced by this meditation (as the Pope called it) is a more
ambitiously critical one concerning the surrounding culture than is found in Gaudium
et Spes. In a similar way and in more recent years pastoral
theologians have developed what I would call an aggressive discernment of the
culture, not falling into mere complaint, but seeking to encourage genuine
critique and alertness to the dangers. Since we are talking about the
challenges of the lived culture, the most fruitful answer has to come from new
forms of lived faith with the Christian community. In the words of Michael
Warren, as in the early church, a vision of life is not verified so much by
its truth claims as in the life practice it fosters or produces.[7]
Hence, in his view, evangelisation is not just proclamation but a question of
creating appropriate life-styles in a community of cultural resistance.
THREE PILLARS OF FAITH FLOURISHING
From many
different parts of the world in recent years new pastoral creativity is
emerging and bearing fruit. What is particularly striking in my reading of the
situation is that we are rediscovering a wisdom that was present in the Acts of
the Apostles and translating it into the needs of our culture. In the early
church we were told about the triple convergence of charity for the weak, a
community life and all rooted in a spirit of prayer. These three ancient
pillars of faith flourishing are alive and well today, and are the perfect
response to the threefold woundedness that I diagnosed earlier. Pastorally
faith is a chord with three notes: community, spirituality, service.
Thinking
back on what I mentioned as three wounds in our culture, wounds to belonging,
imagination and memory, a clear parallel can be seen. If we can invite people
to a nourishing experience of community, this obviously answers the isolation
of surface living that afflicts many people today. If, in tune with the
spiritual quest of today, we can initiate people into a deeper journey of
prayerfulness and interiority, this clearly heals the stunted imagination that
can imprison people. And thirdly, remembering the famous expression of John
Baptist Metz that faith is a form of subversive memory, especially the memory
of the suffering of Christ, both then in His passion and now in so many places
of oppression, it is a question of inviting people to generous service of the
more wounded of the world. To give oneself in this way opens doors of human
compassion, and these in turn open the heart to the core of the gospel. In
short where one of these pillars of faith is strong, evangelisation has already
begun. Where all three are found – a vibrant community, growing in
prayerfulness and reaching out to the margins - evangelisation flourishes
naturally. It becomes obvious that truly lived faith is what the lived culture
needs most.
CONVERGENCE OF TWO THINKERS
I
want to end by uniting the adventure and the unique vision of faith. The
familiar distinction in fundamental theology between fides qua and
fides quae can never be a total separation without doing an
injustice to Christian revelation. I want to draw on two great thinkers of the
last century who are seldom put together – Hans Urs von Balthasar and
Ludwig Wittgenstein. When he wanted to explain the core of faith, Balthasar
more than once evoked an event of utter simplicity in all our lives – the
first smile of an infant as expression of an extraordinary mutual relationship.[8]
A baby arrives into the world and is welcomed with love and care. Speaking in
words will not arrive for about two years or more. The first smile, usually not
before the second month, is born from having been loved. It is saying something like: I recognise that I am
loved, thank you. And that is why the first smile is a perfect parallel for
religious faith. Sometimes people confuse faith with beliefs and creeds. They
are important but secondary. The communication of faith in any culture means
preparing the recognition of a relationship, of a love that embraces us long
before we can respond. So faith is a yes to a yes. There is Gods yes to us,
like a mothers love of a new born child, and then there is our unsteady yes in
return, like the first smile. Indeed the core of Christian faith flows from
that firstness of Gods love, spiritually and pastorally incarnated in that
threshold of the first smile.
Of
course faith is more than that. It is not always serene or comforting. It can
be a struggle in the dark where Gods furnace purifies complacencies. The world
has many love stories but nothing like the story of Christ, with its climax of
cross and resurrection. Evangelising means drawing people gradually into that
transforming drama and fullness, beyond all cultural common sense. But entering
that pilgrimage of meaning brings a healing of our hopes, which is what the
culture seeks so desperately, even if secretly.
Yes, there
is so much consolation to be had from this larger vision, but it is a costly
road too. It is the road of an ambitious lover whom we call God. So we are
ministers of a truth that transforms people when it really reaches them and
their lives are in a sense lost without it. We look around and see huge
obstacles to being able to reach people. Yet many people today are beginning to
see through the poverty of the merely utilitarian life, even if they cannot
glimpse an exit from it. We have the God-given vision. We have the willingness
to search ways of embodying it anew. The hungry culture looks for new
food. How can we serve a new
meeting between the gospel gift and the new human openings that are part of this
moment of history?
Let
Wittgenstein offer us surprising help to clarify our answers to that question.
It is not generally known that he occupied himself with modes of
evangelisation! But in fact this text from his late notebooks points in that
direction:
Christianity is not a theory about
what has happened . . but a description of something that actually takes place
in human life. . . Here you have a narrative, dont take the same attitude to
it as you take to other historical narratives. Make a quite different place in
your life for it. . . It is love that believes the Resurrection.
A
religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment . . .
its really a way of living. Instruction in a religious faith, therefore, would
have to take the form of a portrayal . . . It would be as though someone were
first to let me see the hopelessness of my situation and then show me the means
of rescue until, of my own accord, or not led to it by my instructor, I ran to
it and grasped it.
Practice
gives the words their sense. Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences
are what bring this about. [9]
What I find
extraordinary and stimulating in these sentences is the clarity with which he
puts his finger on key issues. Faith is not theory but event, not cold truth
but narrative, and without entering that event and that story we dont know
what it is all about. In a sentence that could be pure Newman or Balthasar, he
insists that only from within a disposition of love is faith credible. As
Newman once put it, with similar simplicity, "we believe because we love". Then Wittgenstein moves into
pastoral methods. Existential teaching of something so passionate has to
dramatise and witness to its reality. Almost like a traditional evangelist he
suggests that we have to face emptiness and sin before appreciating the
possibility of salvation. And this has to be in a spirit of freedom, attracted
by the vision offered. Finally, and in tune with so much catechetical thinking
today, Wittgenstein puts lived commitments and learning experiences at the
heart of the evangelising process.
Putting
Balthasar and Wittgenstein together can focus the question I leave you with:
how can we make real the surprise of Gods love through languages that will
reach people now? There is no one answer but I close with a few concrete
examples. Some years ago I spoke to a group of parents in a Catholic school.
The usual themes surfaced about how to help the children to believe and belong.
Eventually one mother stood up and said something like this: Father, your ideas
are fine, but in the busy life of each day I have little chance of talking to
the kids about God or faith. Instead I try to disturb them with my happiness
and I trust that they will realise sooner or later that this happiness comes
from God. Yes indeed, young and old need to see faith as humanly
fruitful, as a different way of happiness. We have this treasure in earthen
vessels but with the call to let our light shine. In brief, we are asked to
disturb people with our happiness and our generous service, disturbing them
into wonder about our hidden treasure.
There
is that essential way of daily witness but it needs an important companion if
faith is to be communicated to the sensibilities of today. I am thinking of a
pedagogy of pastoral imagination. I began with the image of the suppression of
spiritual desire in that painting of an Australian street. Let me end by
evoking one major way in which the spirit is being rescued from those forms of
cultural desolation – through the wavelength of creative imagination. It
is one of the more positive signs of postmodernity that people are aware of
having paid too high a price for the achievements of modernity. The
contemporary phenomenon of revisiting and retrieving the spiritual and the
aesthetic together reveals something important about our hungers and
sensibilities. This can be illustrated by the huge success enjoyed by Tolkiens
Lord of the Rings, both
as film and as book. Tolkien was a committed Catholic who intuited that we had
neglected the springs of wonder in our pursuit of surface living, and he saw
his writing of fantasy as a way to refresh our imagination and to put it in
contact again with larger spiritual hopes. In his own words a story can let us
experience a sudden and miraculous grace, that lets a gleam come through
and so we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater.[10]
Tolkiens own inspiration as a writer was consciously rooted in the gospel. He
wanted to awaken the adventure of redemption for a culture where that language
of desire seemed faded and where the disposition of wonder seemed asleep. This
is only one final example of a Christian pedagogy that has been so central and
rich in pastoral history and in the art of this very city. In a privileged way
the road of human imagination can help people re-imagine their lives in God,
and it is emerging again as one of the great avenues for communicating faith in
an Incarnate God for our contemporary culture.
[1] Danile Hervieu-Lger, Religion
pour mmoire, Cerf,
Paris, 1993.
[2] Jos Ignacio Gonzlez Faus y
Igancio Sotelo, Sin Dios o con Dios? Razones del agnstico y del creyente, Ediciones Hoac, Madrid, 2002, p. 23.
[3] PierAngelo Sequeri, Il timore di Dio, Vita e Pensiero, Milano, 1993, pp. 75,
163.
[4] T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, Faber & Faber, London, 1957, p. 25.
[5] Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 84, 87.
[6] Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: reflections on cultural bereavement, T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 2000, pp. 85, 184.
[7] Warren, At this time in this place, p. 12.
[8] Hans Urs von Balthasar, LAccesso alla
Realt di Dio, in Mysterium Salutis, a cura di Johannes Feiner e Magnus Lhrer, Vol.
3, Queriniana, Brescia, 1969, pp. 19-21.
[9] The Wittgenstein Reader, ed. Anthony Kenny, Blackwells, Oxford, 1994, pp. 296-304.
[10] J.
R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, Unwin, London, 1964, pp. 60-62.