#halík

Reality stands before us as an inexhaustible mystery, full of paradoxes, open to many different interpretations – and the interpretation we choose is a matter of personal choice, risk, and responsibility. However, if we choose the interpretation of the world that I denote by the word faith, a great paradox awaits us: we realize that our faith is not merely “our affair” (merely our choice), but that it is already an answer to a challenge that preceded it. “It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you,” Jesus says. The Catechism of the Catholic Church characterizes faith similarly as a dialogue: God Himself places “metaphysical disquiet” within the human heart, the need to seek meaning, and God responds to this questioning with His Revelation; and people then respond – by an act of trust and self-surrender: their faith – to that divine sharing, the Word, wherein God gives Himself.

Nietzsche would seem to have been the first – as he was in many other things – to realize the problematic fragility of the “spiders’ web of reason” and he truly, profoundly understood that every perception is limited by the perspective of the perceiver, and every opinion, indeed every contemplation and observation, is of itself interpretation. It is impossible for us to attain “the reality about ourselves” entirely separate from our own involvement and our cognitive activity; we cannot step beyond our interpretation; the only way for us to broaden our own perspective is through dialogue with others.

Although it does not constitute a staggering percentage of the population, a considerable number of people in this country have been returning to religion, Christianity, and the Church in recent years. They have done so by finding somewhere a tiny opening into the world of faith that seems to them humanly and intellectually honest, and at least a bit “intelligible.” Intelligibility here is not a matter of primitiveness or simplification, but of someone speaking about faith in such a way that it resonates with their own experience. As a rule they do not encounter anything that is particularly surprising or “new” when the faith is preached in this way, but they feel that someone has managed to express precisely what they somehow already sensed long ago. The only thing that is new and surprising is to find it expressed from within the ranks of a church that is generally “written off” as obsolete. Whether they are re-converts returning to the faith in which they were brought up or they are to which they once converted, and whose original belief died for some reason, or they are converts who have practical no experience of Christianity but are returning to it as to something in which they sense the beginnings and roots of their country’s spiritual culture, I always try to demonstrate to them that a true spiritual “return” is not some kind of regression or step backward, but ought to be instead a step into the depths.

I am deeply convinced that the twentieth century can leave in the memory of humanity two images of hope that may be a sign that it was not simply a century of historical darkness and suffering, but also a moment of change and hope. One is the photograph of the planet earth taken during the first human landing on the moon; the other is the photograph of the pope, holding hands with the Dalai Lama in the company of representatives of Judaism, Islam, and other world religions in front of the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. These two images have much in common. Not only does the photograph from the moon bear testimony to an enormous achievement of human courage and intelligence; it also shows how small our world is – just a little boat sailing through the endless darkness of the universe, “far away from all suns.” And the image from Assisi is evidence of the hope that maybe we are beginning to realize that we have to learn to live together aboard the single frail vessel.

The German poet Georg Büchner called suffering “the rock of atheism.” When confronted with suffering, many people have concluded that the “hypothesis of God” must be erased from their perspectives on the world. All right, let’s erase it, but does that do anything to reduce the degree of suffering in the world? Or doesn’t it rather reduce the power of hope and thus give evil an opportunity not only to triumph in the external world but even to blight the human heart with cynicism and despair? Faith, which can be humanity’s ally in the fight against the evil of violence and against suffering and cynicism, must not churn out tawdry explanations; it must radiate hope.

After all, Christianity truly does not glorify violence! It simply does not censor the reality that violence is part and parcel of our world and our Lord was not spared it. But it also says that violence does not have and must not have the last word, that Jesus preferred to allow himself to be killed through violence, rather than use or condone violence. Christian belief states that after Christ took violence upon himself, violence no longer existed as a harrowing absurdity, but underwent an inner transformation, by the meaning that Christ gave his suffering and death. The cross is not a “demonstration” of violence, suffering, and death; on the contrary, it is a message about a love that is “stronger than death”. It preaches the strength of hope that relativizes and mocks death itself: “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” One cannot distort the significance of the cross in this way and wrest the symbol out of its context! The Gospel does not relate the story of the cross as a horror story in which suffering and horror are an end in themselves, where they are a means of achieving a pleasant nervous thrill. The image of the cross and suffering points to a broader horizon – and that’s what it’s all about!

The Gospels are not documentary accounts by unbiased witnesses, but instead confessions of faith presented in the form of narratives intended, by means of a special interpretation, to render the “reasons for our hope” accessible to people in ever different environments. Their significance and value have nothing to do with precise photographic details of the external features of these events, but are related to their (often “implicit”) Christology, that is, appreciating what Christ meant to his disciples and for the world.

Hard problems such as how far is it permitted to go in areas where science and technology open up undreamt of possibilities (and not only in the field of genetics) will not be solved by inspired books, biblical quotations, or decrees of Church authorities; the legislative framework will be established by means of democratic decision making by parliamentary panels, and the actual decisions of individuals can offer any guarantee of infallibility. There is only one realm that can, to a certain extent, be formed and influenced by the decisions of parliamentarians and individual consciences, and that is the “moral climate” of society, which is a somewhat broader concept than “public opinion” (that other pretender to the throne of infallibility). The moral and spiritual climate of society can cultivate public debate – but again only to a certain extent. That is where believers should be involved, as competent partners respecting the rules of dialogue and conscientiously using all the resources at their disposal: Scripture and reason, tradition and the study of present-day sources of knowledge, awareness of responsibility before God and people, and the thoughtfulness that prayer and meditation confer on human reflection and behaviour.