Faith

Faith is not 'at the end' of a succession of rational articulations. You do not fall on God as on a new explanatory formula. Faith is in opening. It thus means the exit of the cave of our short-sighted obviousness, of our little interests and of our sourly obscurantisms. The faith is opening on the gift of sense. In its nudity it is exposed to an infinite plenitude which comes from the 'Other'.

The world of the animal does not extend very far beyond its muzzle. Man is not limited, like the animal, by the 'impassable horizon' of his instinct, his ignorance or his down-to-earth certainties. Man is open to infinity. Thus he cannot pass beside the eschatologic question. What is 'beyond'? What occurs 'afterwards'? After and beyond the space-time limits of our human condition.

The human reality is child of the word, the matrix of man. But which word generates which kind of man? Is it the tautological word in resonance inside of our 'bubble'? Or is it a word coming from elsewhere? When the spirit refuses its own limits and its enclosures, it opens itself critically ad infinitum. He becomes an inhabitant of the Opening.

Opening, from the start on, is not very accommodating nor comfortable. That undoubtedly explains why there are not big crowds willing to become expatriats. However sense is only given in Opening. Absolute Sense, of course, and not any little significance of pleasure or of utility. Ultimately it is about the Sense of Sense, and  basically the sense of the speech which generates us as humans.

This sense does not come from us. The Sense - the absolute one, Sense of sense - is given to us. It comes from elsewhere. It comes from the 'Other'. This gift of Sense is called, in Christian comprehension, the revelation. The etymology speaks here for itself: a veil tears, true reality appears, not in logical continuity with our prerequisites, but in rupture of radical innovation, in a purely free way.

Faith is not in my possession. I do not have it at my disposal. It disposes of me. Faith is not included but including. It situates you in the middle of the including extremes.

Faith breaks the necessities. It calls. In the openung of freedom and gratuity. Faith locates you from the start on in the middle of the including extremes. You are welcome in the matrix of the Absolute. Bathed in a light where every thing takes a new lighting and where even the shades are explained. Consequently the questions are not absolute any more. They are posed on bottom of an absolute answer. Even if no explicit answer is yet delivered, the sense of every possible answer is already given.

Faith is not contained 'in' our psychological or mental possibilities. It is not a product of an 'I think' individual or collective. It refuses to be enclosed in a system of ideas. Faith is free entry in the free gift of sense.

Faith is not of the order of 'what', namely something like an 'object' which could be seized, understood or manipulated. Faith is of the order of 'that'. It precedes every possible seizure and every possible comprehension. It is like the ontological imperative of the creational act. It is not constituted but constituent.

You are in gestation in the matrix of the Absolute. Bathed of a light where any thing takes a new lighting and where shades themselves - with the whole of the play of the shades - are explained. The questions are not absolute any more. They are posed on bottom of answer. No explicit answer is still delivered. But the Direction of a possible answer already-is given.

It is the Other one which saves. Salvation is not in the search of plenitude for oneself, nor in the conquest of the void of this plenitude. Because all these searches and conquests are always aimed at the 'same'.The Christian faith does not culminate in the illumination, nor in the gaping of the illumination, but in the encounter of the Other. Faith is opening to a presence. Faith is an encounter which celebrates the irruption of the Other coming by grace. The Other and with him all others. They come to disturb. Against this irruption thousand pagan defenses are working in search of a pure and impassive absolute.

But such is not the Christian Absolute which is called Love. "The infinite distance from the bodies to the spirits, says Pascal, show the infinitely more infinite ditance from the spirits to charity.” An infinitely infinite distance between the greatest splendors we can reach by ourselves and the glory which must appear in us by grace.

Which value has water when it overflows? It can get an infinite price when you are lost in the desert. We are not finished crossing our spiritual desert. To quench our essential thirsts we are likely to find only the obstructed wells and the polluted sources of our Master Thinkers. However they must well exist these 'sources of water spouting out for the eternal life”!

The prophetic word means the irruption of the 'Other'  right in the middle of our existence. The Other which comes from 'extra muros' to open our infinitely enclosures.

 

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