Votes : 0
What's Inside the Face of God?
O God, for you I long; for you my soul is thirsting. My body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water.
We pray these words with sincerity. Do we ever really mean them? Can we honestly say that the heartaches that drive us to our knees are a longing to see God? When we’re obsessed with an ache that won’t let us sleep, can we honestly say we’re thirsting for God? At first glance, no. Our existential thirsts tend to be more earthy, more self-focused, and more erotic than would merit the claim that they are a longing for God. Only the rare mystic (or perhaps one of us in a rare moment) can, at a given time, examine her burning desires and say honestly, what I want is God. I’m longing for God.
However, there’s another side to this. We need to make a distinction between what we explicitly desire and what we implicitly desire within that same desire. Allow me an earthy example as an illustration. Imagine a man on a given night feeling restless and seeking out sex with a prostitute. Is he longing to see the face of God? Is he longing for union inside the body of Christ? Explicitly, no. That’s the furthest thing from his mind, at least from his conscious mind. However, there’s something else inside his awareness at that same time (which he in fact knows but of which he is not explicitly aware). His desire, which on this evening has constellated so strong sexually, is in its true intent a desire to see the face of God and to be in union with others inside the body of Christ. Implicit in what he is hungering for is what St. Augustine expresses in his famous axiom: You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. He is longing to see the face of God.
In teasing out this distinction between what is explicitly intended in an act and what is implicitly contained in that same act, we should not conflate this with our notions of conscious and unconscious. These latter terms are psychological categories, valid and important in their own right, whereas explicit and implicit are philosophical terms, slightly different in meaning, with a particular insight into what is actually contained in any act. Again, perhaps an example can be helpful. Imagine yourself making a simple, elementary judgment. You look at a wall and say, this wall is white. That’s what you are aware of explicitly at that moment. However, for you to make that judgment (This wall is white) you also at the same time have to know, know implicitly, really, and as surely as you know that the wall is white, some other things. First, that the wall is not green or any other color; and, further, that you cannot say that the wall is not white without denying the truth of what you are seeing. These latter dimensions are something you in fact know, but of which you are not consciously aware.
Now, apply this to the man whose desire drives him to have sex with a prostitute. We see that what is on his mind explicitly at that moment is not any desire to see the face of God or to be in union inside the body of Christ. Far from it. However, as he is engaging in this act, he implicitly knows that this is not what he is really searching for and that he cannot pretend that it is. This implicit knowing of these other dimensions is not just a function of conscience, but a function of knowing itself.
There are multiple implications from this, beyond not feeling false guilt for the fact that, most times, we find ourselves congenitally incapable of making God the real focus, main object, and the All of our desires. Mostly we don’t see our obsessions and heartaches as having God as their real object. I suspect that this is because we do not conceive of God as containing the powerful allure, attractiveness, beauty, color, and sexuality that can so obsess us in this world. I wonder if anyone (outside of a mystic) has ever obsessed about seeing the face of God because he or she sensed that in God there was even a richer beauty, attractiveness, and sexual allure than can be found here on earth. Do we ever imagine God as infinitely more interesting and alluring than any sexual partner on earth?
Sadly, the God of religions is hard to long for! That God, while philosophically perfect and alluring, is existentially devoid of the real beauty and eros that obsesses us on earth.
Therese of Lisieux, young doctor of the soul that she was, offers us this warning: Be careful not to seek yourself in love because you will end up with a broken heart that way. Thankfully, an implicit knowledge of what we are actually longing for can help save us from that.
WHY STAY IN THE CHURCH?
JULY 12, 2021
Several weeks ago after giving a lecture at a religious conference, the first question from the audience was this one: How can you continue to stay in a church that played such a pivotal part in setting up and maintaining residential schools for the indigenous people of Canada? How can you stay in a church that did that?
The question is legitimate and important. Both in its history and in its present, the church has enough sin to legitimize the question. The list of sins done in the name of the church is long: the Inquisition, its support for slavery, its role in colonialism, its link to racism, its role in thwarting women’s rights, and its endless historical and present compromises with white supremacy, big money, and political power. Its critics are sometimes excessive and unbalanced, but, for the most part, the church is guilty as charged.
However, this guilt isn’t unique to the church. The same charges might be leveled against any of the countries in which we live. How can we stay in a country that has a history of racism, slavery, colonialism, genocide of some of its indigenous peoples, radical inequality between its rich and its poor, one that is callous to desperate refugees on its borders, and one within which millions of people hate each other? Isn’t it being rather selective morally to say that I am ashamed to be a Catholic (or a Christian) when the nations we live in share the same history and the same sins?
Still, since the church is supposed to be leaven for a society and not just a mirror of it, the question is valid. Why stay in the church? There are good apologetic answers on this, but, at the end of the day, for each of us, the answer has to be a personal one. Why do I stay in the church?
First, because the church is my mother tongue. It gave me the faith, taught me about God, gave me God’s word, taught me to pray, gave me the sacraments, showed me what virtue looks like, and put me in contact with some living saints. Moreover, despite all its shortcomings, it was for me authentic enough, altruistic enough, and pure enough to have the moral authority to ask me to entrust my soul to it, a trust I’ve not given any other communal entity. I’m very comfortable worshipping with other religions and sharing soul with non-believers, but in the church in which I was raised, I recognize home, my mother tongue.
Second, the church’s history is not univocal. I recognize its sins and openly acknowledge them, but that’s far from its full reality. The church is also the church of martyrs, of saints, of infinite generosity, and of millions of women and men with big, noble hearts who are my moral exemplars. I stand in the darkness of its sins; but I also stand in the light of its grace, of all the good things it has done in history.
Finally, and most important, I stay in the church because the church is all we’ve got! There’s no other place to go. I identify with the ambivalent feeling that rushed through Peter when, just after hearing Jesus say something which had everyone else walk away from him, Peter was asked, “do you want to walk away too?” and he (speaking for all the disciples) replied: “We’d like to, but we have no place else to go. Besides we recognize that, despite everything, you still have the words of everlasting life.”
In essence, Peter is saying, “Jesus, we don’t get you, and what we get we often don’t like. But we know we’re better off not getting it with you than going any place else. Dark moments notwithstanding, you’re all we’ve got!”
The church is all we’ve got! Where else can we go? Behind the expression, I am spiritual, but not religious (however sincerely uttered) lies either an invincible failure or a culpable reluctance to deal with the necessity of religious community, to deal with what Dorothy Day called “the asceticism of church life”. To say, I cannot or will not deal with an impure religious community is an escape, a self-serving exit, which at the end of the day is not very helpful, not least for the person saying it. Why? Because for compassion to be effective it needs to be collective, given the truth that what we dream alone remains a dream but what we dream with others can become a reality. I cannot see anything outside the church that can save this world.
There is no pure church anywhere for us to join, just as there is no pure country anywhere for us in which to live. This church, for all its checkered history and compromised present, is all we have. We need to own its faults since they are our faults. Its history is our history; its sin, our sin; and its family, our family – the only lasting family we’ve got.
tags :
Without comments 