Through
distance
The
silence of God crucifies the faith. You have to read again the Book
of Job. When all the obviousnesses seem to be right against the
existence of this invisible God! Here is Job torn apart between the
absurdity and the speech wanting to rationalize. Isn't the greatest
evil not to find the word which carries it? The whole Book of Job is
desperate dialog to find such a word. And God himself keeps silent!
As if the world were delivered to blind powers. And here is one
speaking! But this human word delivered to itself is unable to bring
something else than itself. Chitchat. Vain speech.
What
an astonishing speech that of the Book of
Job, so different from the Dialogs of Plato! In first scene, all
walks round and round. Beyond, however, a sense arises. A different
sense. It comes in the hollow of the speech. It comes in gaping from
a fashionable wisdom. It comes through silence.
I see that you are
able to do every thing, and to give effect to all your designs. Who
is this who makes dark the purpose of God by words without knowledge?
For I have been talking without knowledge about wonders not to be
searched out. (Job
42,2-3).
Sometimes
he does nothing but pass. You do not recognize him. Or you recognize
him too late. Thus in the Book of Genesis, chapter eighteenth, when
Abraham accommodates under its tent in Mambre these three mysterious
unknown visitors. Strange foreigners who make an incredible
promise. A too strong one for Sara. She laughs…
Deus
incognitus… The presence of God is not imperative. Neither is his
absence. There is no any reason given for or against which does not
meet a contrary reason. Enough reasons, as Pascal perceived it, to
doubt and enough reasons to believe. Beyond the reasons thus. On the
side of freedom.
There
are heavy and cumbersome presences. There are the infinitely delicate
ones. Some insist. Others are concealed.
A
Presence does not cease haunting the
human reality. Since there exists a humanity which, without any
doubt, would not exist without this presence.
Strange
presence of That which we call God. He is there. He is not there. An
absence in my fullness. A presence in my faults. It's impossible to
lock up this presence right in the middle of your experience and your
daily certainties. It returns towards the extreme highs and the
extreme depths. The depths especially. More interior in you, as saint Augustin says
, than you are yourself in you.
Why
is God through so long a distance? Why is it necessary to go beyond
yourself to meet the alive God? This distance must be for a encounter
in greater truth. God does not want to be present to man in the
manner of a master key. His presence is the opposite of that, neutral
and indifferent, of a 'thing' on which one can put the hand anywhere,
any time and anyhow. God wants to be sought. God wants to be found.
God wants to be met.
This
distance is for a crossing. It opens the space of your freedom. Man
is not made for the definitive answers. He is not made to live behind
fences. He is made for the open one. Man is a walking being who is
truly himself only through this research and does achieve himself
only in this encounter. But the distance remains always so large that
nobody will be able to ever say: I met God, once and for all! The
discovery is infinite. It is a task always to be started again. It
remains permanent challenge. Pro-vocation.
This distance is for the going
beyond. It is necessary to seek God at the vertical of yourself. God,
in you, is always further in front of you and thus forces you to go
further yourself. God is in your infinite distance so that through
this distance you grow yourself infinitely with the disproportion of
God. This distance is also for the transparency. It opens you to the
mystery of humor
which is also that of God.
Provoked
out of the cave… God is not in the cave. God is not in any cave.
You have to go out to meet him. Plato suspected the reasons of our
blindnesses. The play of the 'shades' is sufficient for the
recreations of the cave-dwellers and the concerns to their managers.It seems to occupy the total field of the relevance. Only the one who decides to quit his first
facilities can be allured by the true light. He has to dare leaving the cave. Then he will suffer a
long dazzling. Few are ready to venture on such inhospitable
paths and run this risk.
The
totality of reality is not unidimensional. God is not in continuity
with our immediate possible. You can meet him only through ruptures.
There are heterogeneous orders. There are thresholds. There are
distances. The infinite distance from
the bodies to the spirits, writes
Pascal, represents the infinitely
more infinite distance from the spirits to Charity…
In hollow… We are thus made,
we need to embrace. All our external and interior senses, all our
physical and spiritual faculties, want 'to seize'. To see. To feel.
To touch. To perceive. To test. To check. To understand. But God does
not let himself monopolize. He does not let himself seize.
Perhaps he will simply allow you to touch him with the end of a
finger. And not without a small reproach. Like apostle Thomas.
Our
obviousnesses nourish from 'contact'. Intellectual searches, inner
debates, logical argumentations… We are only satisfied when things
'hold together'. But God does not cease to 'escape'! God is not where
our fullness is. God is in the vacuum between
the lines. In its way the absence of
God is more 'speaking' that his presence. And our silence on Him can
be eloquent.
Perhaps the only
possible true theology is remaining negative
for ever. Of the divine mystery it
can never but say: It is not that.
The Other one... In the hollow of the doubt can spout out a nourished
cry of certainty.
Silence... See
Elias is in the mountain Horeb. Here passes
the breath of God. Here passes the Spirit. Then
the Lord went by, and mountains were parted by the force of a great
wind, and rocks were broken before the Lord; but the Lord was not in
the wind. And after the wind there was an earth-shock, but the Lord
was not in the earth-shock. And after the earth-shock a fire, but the
Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, the sound of a soft
breath. (1
Kings 19,11-12).
A
soft breeze… Only a soft breeze...
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