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.