Gaping mystery

Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. (Genesis 32:24-25) The fight with the angel does not finish during this long night of our crossing of the scandal. A single stumbling block would be enough for us to lose composure. But they are too numerous not to be likely to make us fall.

A world gaping on its contingency and its negativities... Our world is not able to be buckled in harmony. Its immanence is not of paradise and its transcendence poses problems. Why is there always something going the wrong way? Why does our party so often finish by spoiling itself? Why isn't man innocent of evil? Man precisely and not the animal! The wildest carnivore is innocent, except in the fables, but there it 'speaks'! Happy animality which the scandal does not touch!

An world open on an infinite 'why' without answer. Why this entropy of the world where reigns irreversible degradation? Why all these failures? Why this absolute indifference of the creation vis-a-vis the spiritual values? Why is nature only functioning by 'struggle for life'? Why are there so much obscure forces of destruction and of self-annihilation at work? Why stupidity and foolishness? Why are there humans prisoners of inhuman conditions? Why is good and evil living side by side without major clash? Why is this world crucifying the Innocent one? Why Auschwitz?

This world is burdened with an incompressible and irreducible negativity. The evil of the world resists, irrational, to its own comprehension. It lets the stupefied helpless reason going on the side of ridicule. There remains only the painful mystery in its crucifying desolation. Too present. Too enormous within the strict limits of our world. But can it find comprehension elsewhere? Too present the evil, the sin, the suffering, violence, death… Too present the absence of God who apparently lets grow the indigestible mass of negativities. Too much for the sensitivity. Too much for the reason.

Why is evil living in our world? Why is evil living in our hearth? Why aren't we born innocent, like the animal? Evil is prolific. Evil generates evil ad infinitum. Just read the headlines of your newspaper...

Today we are badly equipped intellectually to understand these powers ofevil. The epistemological vicissitudes of our time, however, should not prevent us from gaining a sense to this mystery of evil which surrounds us and too often dominates us. We need a supplement of clearness! Sin is Promethean only in fictions. In fact it starts with insinuation rather than by thundering invectives. It arrives in a roundabout way. It comes by slipping. It comes masked by 'nobody'. See Babel. No big boss. No leader. Simply a diffuse 'one'. Courage comes through irresponsible resignations. 'One' gets along with half-word. 'One' weaves. 'One' says the one to the other… 'One' feels all the more stronger in the anonymous mass.

Is it so different these days? Screen the megatons of uttered words, this innumerable mass of mediatized and mercenary verb. 'Snowball' effect… The alleged 'audacities', which are nothing more than pure 'resignations', accumulate and inflate while accumulating… There are always enough imbeciles to applaud and always enough scoundrels to get money from this applause. And 'it' functions…

How to cross the scandal? It seems impossible to circumvent. The faith tries to cross it. All in us conspires to celebrate the merry mysteries and to push this celebration on the side of the glorious mystery. Such a continuity in the euphoric register is however not Christian. It is the cross, crisis and criterion of an authentic spiritual existence, which operates the great understanding. Between the merry mystery and the glorious mystery of Christ is held, scandal, its painful mystery.

The painful mystery in its crucifying desolation… It's really a mystery. It's invading the space of an existence. It's identified however primarily with distance. The sacral distance between 'fascinosum' and 'tremendum'. It is inaccessible. It is impossible to circumvent. It causes fear and respect. It is inexpressible. It is incommunicable. It culminates in silence. One can only speak 'around' it.

The painful mystery is combat. Fight with the Other one. Like Jacob, you will find yourself limping with your wounded word. Humanly, this mystery is an obscure enigma. In the faith, it remains always enigma, but its darkness is irradiated with a quiet clearness. Like a distant proximity, that of Christ on cross.

The extreme of this mystery is the evil in its crucifying desolation. This evil of the world which resists any comprehension. Too huge for the immanence which it overflows from all sides. Transcending in its way with a kind of negative transcendence. Tremendum mysterium iniquitatis! A world which makes die the Innocent one. A world which crucifies Christ. A world which invents Auschwitz… Inseparable from the sin of the world, its trans-history root, the deep wound at the side of the world shouts its gaping and its transcendence. Incompetent to buckle itself on his pagan euphoria, this world has to be opened on Redemption.

That our world is the stake of a confrontation which exceeds it, hurts obviously our modernity. After having reduced the plurality of the orders to the only phenomenal reign, transparent to our only scientific possibility of today, we presuppose a world axiologically neutral and impenetrable to the invisible. Science can certainly claim, and vert legitimately, that such a world is sufficient for it. But the world does not have any raison to be as sure that, thus reduced, it can be self-sufficient! It has on the contrary a lot of reasons to suspect in its gaping calls towards its own transcendence.

Paradoxically, culture was never more sensitive to the crucifixions and, at the same time, more allergic to the Cross. Modernity expels the cross as violently as it expels the transcendence. This crucified Messiah who, since the origins, is madness to the pagan ones remains, today, more madness than ever. It is true that without transcendence, the cross is only absolute nonsense. Very profoundly the cross is crisis of the being in all its width and all its depth. It is bankruptcy of all logics and all values. It crucifies all our capacities. Not being able to accept such a distortion, remains only to our modernity an escape or an absurdity. Contaminated by the ambient loss of transcendence, certain Christians themselves, today, lose the ontological truth of the cross of Christ to keep only its moral or symbolic significance.

A carnal approach, conditioned never to see than the back of the world, cannot understand the transcendent depth of the mystery of God. You have to go down in your own depths. Here only the 'hearth' can see. The Spirit alone can look face to face this `tremendum mysterium'. The Spirit alone can reveal it as the painful mystery of a 'crossing'. 'Mysterium iniquitatis' in its passover Exodus towards the 'mysterium gratiae'.

The crucifixion of iniquity so that grace can triumph is called Redemption. Here the reason is always impotent and the explanations it can give are as scandalous as the mystery itself. But here, at the same time, is discovered the divine way par excellence, the negative way. It crosses vertically all horizontal dimensions. It crucifies. Going down initially, kenosis, before rising in glory.
 

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