Heard interesting parish mission talk... Some notes:
We talked yesterday a lot about mystery and even the theological mysteries of our faith, but also kind of the mysteries of reality itself. We can oftentimes arrive boundary at a limit and then because that's as far as our mind can go, and we presume that that's as far as reality goes. But that's not really the case. I found a quote: “mystery is not something about which we can never know anything, but something about which we can never know everything, so there is always something that we have not yet arrived at”. Horizons of possibility is what happens both in science - we saw yesterday that the highest degree of certitude in science is probability, and we have certitude and faith in so far as what Jesus Christ has revealed and has told us, aside from that is speculation and we reach horizons of the probable without being able to define and close the definition.
Faith - that which should be awe-inspiring - has become in too many cases too ordinary for us. Autobiographically, I remember in the mid-80s having studied in the seminary Thomas Aquinas and I studied theology in Innsbruck which was the theology basically of Karl Rahner and so these were my mindsets, my intellectual mindsets, about how to figure everything out. Because I always have to figure it out because I always have to be able to articulate it, and my Methodist father was a great debater and I never wanted to lose to him.
But by the mid-80s I thought neither of those systems were really very responsive to the questions that I'm having with things or with my mind and my heart, and I thought, “I have to find something I have to find a new way.” A lot of times people decide at that point either to turn around and walk away, which was very popular in my day, or where they just kind of had to make it up themselves.
But just making it up isn’t a good idea and I took this from Fr Romana Guardini. He was one of the great teachers fo the Faith and said most disturbing fact is if a man who is expounding on God relied upon subjective criteria and experience, his conception of God showed a suspicious similarity to his own personality.
Consequently, one man would find God to be a divine reality which best conforms to his own temperament thereby losing sight of the living whole. We run into a lot of people who say, “well you know I don't follow any organized religion that I'm a spiritual person” and they run this risk of being the creator of a god who looks too much like themselves to be too credible outside of their own consciousness.
This doesn't mean that I have to know everything, I just have to know where I am in relationship to this thing we call faith. And so at that time in the mid 80s I took a trip up to St. Bonaventure University to an older priest who I had been in graduate school and I was an undergraduate school and I told him I can't articulate the faith well anymore, I don't have the language, I don't have the concepts. He said the language is exhausted and that what I have is inadequate. He said I should start reading St. Bonaventure which I did, and Bonaventure opened something like windows because what I felt before was the idea that somehow or other Catholicism is confining, and that's what was troubling me because I don't like being confined in my thoughts or in my heart and soul.
He opened the windows for me and as I explore those more and more I began to see other possibilities, other ways of being faithful, other ways of believing that I had had before.
Then later on, while I was pastor here, I was with a monk friend at the Abbey of Gethsemane, and I would go to confession and talk about things with Fr. Hewitt and we were talking and he said something very interesting. He said, “you know, I think the language we use is exhausted. If you want to continue to explore in this journey, you’re going to have to turn to physics.” He said there’s a new science called quantum physics and it’s beginning to open up vast horizons about reality. And he recommended a book to me.
There is a core, a secret, a mystery, who possesses the sacraments and is the one who owns them, and who possesses the words, the books of the Bible. What happened in the Protestant Reformation is once the Scriptures turned from being a person to being a book, then who makes sure what the book really means? If you put the book forward and Luther says, “this what the Scripture means and how you interpret it”. What do you do when John Calvin comes along and says, “no it means this”. Then how are you going to figure out what it means?
Well, the solution was: “let’s subject it to literary criticism. And we will go back and analyze the language and the structure and we will go back and decide intellectually what it means and we will treat it like a book, any other book.” And all of a sudden there is no mystery, no secret anymore. It doesn’t have a meaning of great depth. It becomes maybe ethical, moralistic, historically questionable. All of those kind of things. So what is it? It’s another book. But that isn’t what it is because the word of God is a person not a book.
And there was a great struggle that went on just before Vatican II, and a young doctoral student named Joseph Ratzinger was about to flunk the major exam of his life because he said that the Word, the Person, is the subject of revelation and that we know what that is in our relationship with him. The professor said that’s unacceptable because it means that something about the truth of Jesus Christ depends on how you or I interact with him, how we receive him in our lives, and that can’t be done. And Ratzinger overcame the difficulty and during the Second Vatican Council he basically wrote the document on the Word of God and he wrote what he wrote in his exam and so now is a conciliar document of the Church. We receive the word in our own hearts. Without a relationship with the Word of God we have no entree into the secret of the words of God, i.e. the Scriptures. Therefore subjectivity is part of Catholic faith. Not that we take it and reconstruct it in ourselves any way we please. If a couple gets married in a good relationship but they don’t really care what’s inside the other person, they just know who they have to become to make me happy, it’s not going to last very long and it’s not going to be a pleasant scene.
No comments:
Post a Comment