The Dark Door Thrown Open
I’ve spent most of the time that I would normally have spent writing my weekly journal in reading Benedict XVI’s new encyclical Spe Salvi (In Hope We Are Saved). So I’m going to content myself now with some very unorganized comments on a few passages that particularly struck me. I’d be happy to hear the views of others—there are already some in the comments on the “Intolerable Story” post below.
“Hope”, in fact, is a key word in Biblical faith—so much so that in several passages the words “faith” and “hope” seem interchangeable.
This is a crucial insight for me. Perhaps the words are not technically interchangeable (as we have discussed here about truth and beauty) but it is true that you cannot have either of them without also having the other.
The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life
One who does not recognize the enormous, shouting, leaping importance of this has not truly experienced the transition from not-faith to faith. I don’t mean that as a criticism; it may well mean that he has never truly been without faith, and that’s good. It could also, of course, mean that he says and maybe even believes that he has faith, but really doesn’t. And that’s bad.
…the liberation that [St. Josephine Bakhita] had received through her encounter with the God of Jesus Christ, she felt she had to extend, it had to be handed on to others, to the greatest possible number of people. The hope born in her which had “redeemed” her she could not keep to herself; this hope had to reach many, to reach everybody.
The attempt to share this hope with others is very difficult in the modern world, especially if the other is post-Christian or nominally Christian in the way that many Americans and Europeans are: having been surrounded with a dessicated and emptied Christianity, they believe they know what it is, and have rejected what they see. It is harder for them to see it as it really is than for someone to whom it is completely new. Some of my favorite writers (O’Connor, Percy) made the attempt to break through those barriers a major component of their art.
The effort to evangelize is perverted, it becomes a rotten and stinking thing, when it ceases to be a burning desire that the other would know joy and becomes instead an arena of egotistical combat, a sort of war or perhaps mere bullying, a determination to make the other submit. Some people who flee from evangelization do so because they are afraid of what the faith might require of them; more, I think, flee because they are afraid to hope—they do not dare to risk the disappointment of believing the promises and then finding that they are not true. But some flee because of the stink, and I don’t blame them.
On the one hand, we do not want to die; above all, those who love us do not want us to die. Yet on the other hand, neither do we want to continue living indefinitely, nor was the earth created with that in view. So what do we really want? Our paradoxical attitude gives rise to a deeper question: what in fact is “life”? And what does “eternity” really mean? There are moments when it suddenly seems clear to us: yes, this is what true “life” is—this is what it should be like.
I’ve know this in certain dreams: a combination of peace and joy that if encountered in waking life at all lasts only for an instant. I’ve had only a few such dreams in my life. But I remember them vividly, and I think I always will. And nothing that this life can offer could replace my hope that those dreams are a taste of a kind of life that I can really attain someday.
…we have no idea what we ultimately desire, what we would really like. We do not know this reality at all; even in those moments when we think we can reach out and touch it, it eludes us… All we know is that it is not this. Yet in not knowing, we know that this reality must exist.
Does the word must refer to my inability to bear the thought that this thing might not exist? Partly, perhaps. But also there is the mysterious half-formed intuition that there would be something that didn’t quite make sense, something that didn’t add up, in a cosmos where my soul is imprinted with the absence of this thing if it does not in fact exist.
Life in its true sense is not something we have exclusively in or from ourselves: it is a relationship. And life in its totality is a relationship with him who is the source of life. If we are in relation with him who does not die, who is Life itself and Love itself, then we are in life. Then we “live.”
And I would add: we have also those other human beings whom we love who also are, or should be, in this relation. Because I am joined to them by love, my hope literally does not exist if it is not also hope on their behalf. I don’t speak of “humanity” here; I can’t love “humanity” as a whole or in the abstract. I speak of specific individuals.
We must free ourselves from the hidden lies with which we deceive ourselves. God sees through them, and when we come before God, we too are forced to recognize them.
This is something I look to with both hope and dread. Anyone who has ever found such a lie in himself, a successful lie which did in fact deceive the very self that told it, must ever after feel unsure of his motives and wish to have them purified.
Suffering and torment is still terrible and well-nigh unbearable. Yet the star of hope has risen—the anchor of the heart reaches the very throne of God. Instead of evil being unleashed within man, the light shines victorious: suffering—without ceasing to be suffering—becomes, despite everything, a hymn of praise.
This frightens me. I doubt my ability to participate in this conversion of suffering to praise. I can only hope that God will not test me past my limits.
In the end, even the “yes” to love is a source of suffering, because love always requires expropriations of my “I”, in which I allow myself to be pruned and wounded. Love simply cannot exist without this painful renunciation of myself, for otherwise it becomes pure selfishness and thereby ceases to be love.
Like the song says: “Love hurts.”
The Christian faith has shown us that truth, justice and love are not simply ideals, but enormously weighty realities. It has shown us that God —Truth and Love in person—desired to suffer for us and with us. Bernard of Clairvaux coined the marvellous expression: Impassibilis est Deus, sed non incompassibilis—God cannot suffer, but he can suffer with….Let us say it once again: the capacity to suffer for the sake of the truth is the measure of humanity.
Or for the sake of love—meaning love in its fundamental sense, the will toward the good of the other. And let us not say only will; although I know that’s the traditional term, it only represents the essential: this “will” may, and properly should, include an active emotion of desire for the good of the other; Benedict describes this in Deus Caritas Est as a fusion of eros (not only in the sexual sense but in a broader sense, an actual and specific emotion of affection) and agape that is particularly, if not exclusively, a feature of Christian love. At our best, we will the good of the other not cooly but ardently.
Yes, there is a resurrection of the flesh. There is justice. There is an “undoing” of past suffering, a reparation that sets things aright.
“And even t
hough it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song…”
(Note: the online copy of Spe Salvi at EWTN is much more readable than the one at the Vatican site, in my opinion.)
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