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Creation Ordered toward the Son and Hope
The entire world was created by the Father with a view to the Son; the Father who creates thus shows his love for the Son. As it comes forth fresh and new from the hand of God, the world is pure and free. However, Adam misused his freedom and alienated himself from God, and creation was dragged into this estrangement. Mankind struggles for its place between subjective alienation from God and its enduring objective meaning as created for the Son. Even after the appearance of Christ on earth, this conflict remains within man. In fact, now that the demand of God has been revealed, it becomes greater. The Word of God has issued forth; but man does not want to encounter God, because he is afraid that he would have to do what he does not want to do; namely, he would have to decide to conform himself to his original purpose. So he prefers to forego knowledge.
Of course, many evade this only from ignorance or partial knowledge. They have heard that there is a God who has spoken, who presented himself as a God of Love, but who places great demands on men. In both respects, this God opens the meaning of existence beyond finitude. Men shrink back before such a God. They long for a religion that does not call into question earthly values and proportions. Thus there arises a sort of contest between the voice of man, which grows louder and louder in order to drown out God, and the voice of God, which maintains its divine volume. The more man wants to decide for himself about his destiny, and thus also about his past and future, the more he falls prey to the limitations of life on earth, the more everything becomes smaller for him. He pushes greatness to the side as absurd. Man would prefer anything rather than to appear absurd. And if he himself has so little knowledge of God, those who come after will know even less.
And yet there are moments, whether he wants them or not, when he is placed before things beyond his ken and his competence because they seem to come from another world. He denies them, but they still suddenly make their presence known. And because things are created as ordered to the Son of God, this voice from beyond can also resound from a thing, an event, an illumination—from something that is almost nothing but is nonetheless something. It has meaning as something created for God,and precisely now it seeks to unveil this meaning. It is not about ‘‘God in all things’’ but rather ‘‘all things pointing toward God, pointing toward Christ’’, about all things as signposts. Man truly needs countless signposts in order to recognize the path, indeed, even to suspect that the path leads in this direction. And yet it is a path that determines the world. It is, however, directed against the state of the world as the active is against the passive, as life is against death, as obedience and love are against abuse and guilt. The ordering of all things to the Son is a powerful and permanent reality that cannot be denied. It can appear hard, sharp-edged, and merciless. Man must reconcile himself to its unalterability; he cannot break this boulder. It is the primary rock of earthly existence, indeed, of the creative power of God. The path of obedience was traced even before man appeared in the world. There are countless points of entry to this path.
Man, however, has become accustomed to look at the things of the world with the eyes of memory and to judge them according to their past instead of creatively looking at their future and considering them in view of their purpose. So his spirit loses contact with the creative act of God. He works with the stuff of the past, which is, as such, rigid and unalterable, perhaps already putrefied. He must learn to meet God and to work where the creative act takes place: toward the purpose of things, into the future, into hope. The hopelessness of the world’s condition lies in the fact that memory has taken the place of creativity and that freedom is placed behind man because he does not want to see it in front of him. In this way man, while remaining in sin, has reversed the sign of time. In place of the future, he has substituted the past. In God, however, these signs remain unchangeable, and the believer need only adhere to time as it is in God in order to find a way to God in things. It is a path away from the ‘‘I’’ into the future, from hopelessness into expectation, from decay to new life.
If man begins to think about his goal, then he changes the position of the world as he changes his own position. It is as if he were to go back thousands of years in order to get from a gloomy prison into fresh air, to get to the place where God the Father strolls in paradise, the place where the Cross stands and where resurrection and redemption take place. The Father created everything for the Son; in redeeming the world, the Son directed everything anew toward the Father; the circulation of love is guaranteed by the Holy Spirit and made knowable and accessible to us in faith. This occurs without any regard for the condition of the world. Each of us, before we seriously encounter God and recognize the direction of things, lives in the condition of the world. But conversion does not mean turning to God in such a way that one turns one’s back on the world. For we are in the world, and we are created as part of the world. When we change directions, something in the world changes. At the moment when we encounter God, we cannot forget the destiny of all others. The Lord emphasized our belonging together in the command to love our neighbor. Our neighbor, however, is the entire world. We have to take the world with us on our personal way to God. Certainly, no one (even were he Francis Xavier) will be able to convert all his brethren in the world. But he will bring the world with him in the spirit of the Carmelite mission so that the world, too, will be able to encounter God. He will take it with him into all of the activities of everyday life. Above all, however, he will take the world with him into prayer, where the final encounter with God occurs. Here the direction of all things is perfectly clarified; here also purity still exists, and from the purity of the divine exchange of love the world can be healed. The world as a whole, as the sum of all the individuals who come from the hands of the Father in the unity of their end, and who, through the hands of the Son, will be given back to the Father in the Spirit. This world is simultaneously created and recreated—recreated because the work of redemption is based on the Resurrection. The old hope of things, the old promise of creation, is fulfilled miraculously in that the world passes through the hands of the triune God.
Taking the World to God
When man begins to think, he envisions his adult life in a certain way. He would like to do this kind of work, to have this kind of home, to use his freedom in such and such a way. His plans occupy a great part of his thinking. He tries to gather, to enjoy, and above all to select from his education, his experiences, and comparisons all that the years of youth have to offer. He does this in such a way that everything is ordered to the image of the future that he has designed for himself.
If he is a believer from childhood, his faith will also influence his plans. However, it is seldom that he is aware already in his youth that he has been created by God for a definite purpose and that he has to accomplish something that may indeed lie outside of his human plans but that lies soundly within the divine plan. Once it occurs to him that he is answerable to God, who created him, a confrontation between his own plans and the plans of God becomes unavoidable. This gives rise to areas of friction. If faith is alive in him, the moment will come when he lets his own project fall away in favor of God’s plan in order one day to be able to answer God face to face. But even when he does this, he must still reckon with the world that surrounds him, with its immense fullness and variety, its fallen condition and longing for redemption, its moving away from God together with its wish, nevertheless, to find God. He stands in the midst of this world; both realities must be measured, and it is not easy for them to get along. The reality of the world cannot deny the reality of the man standing here; and this man in his singularity cannot dispute the plurality of the world. His self-gift to God must acknowledge the world created by God, if not as a presupposition, then as background. He must take the sinful world along with him, taking note of the world with its progress and its movement backward, its provisions and efforts. Man will not reach his goal without affirming what exists in such a way that he knows therein also the No of distance, fear, and disgust. His Yes is such that it passes through the world to God. The desert or monastic solitude can be the world for him, and his collaboration with the world can be limited to vicarious prayer and atonement: the world is nonetheless present. This presence also bears the stamp of the present moment of history in which each of us is situated. That the world exists would remain true even if the condition of the world were to consist of sheer lies and resisted every Christian intervention. In the truth of its existence, the world still points immediately to God’s hand. It may be that this truth urgently points to the untruths of the world’s condition, to false problems and situations, to the dangers provoked by human thinking, to the problems raised by technology and its future, which are becoming ever more important for the world, which cannot afford not to work toward a solution. The Christian, who in prayer has the greater world of God’s love before his eyes, still must learn to recognize God in this condition of the world. He must look through all the veils and all the lies to see the single truth. Indeed, he must know that the one who prays in solitude with closed eyes and given over to God will experience God no more and no less than he would in the tasks that the world places before him. God may have wanted him in the monastery cell, but he can also place him in the busyness of the technical world of work. He may want to encounter him here and not there, or perhaps there as well as here. The life in a monk’s cell is not anachronistic; in the same way, the God-given vocation to live in the world is not a new invention. God can lead someone into the solitude of the mountains in order to be worshipped there by him. He can also place him in a factory or in the chaos of a big-city firm together with countless nameless individuals. If God dares to bring man into such contrary positions, it is because he, as omnipresent, can meet him anywhere. In order not to narrow his image of God or constantly to paint God in his own image, man has to see and recognize the triune God’s unforeseeable possibilities and ways of appearing. This knowledge has value, however, only if it allows itself to be integrated in relation to the goal of the world and human life, only if it makes man more capable of meeting God in the way he has become visible to us in Christ. God speaks to us; we need only find the place where we are able to hear his voice. God addresses his word to us personally; indeed, he addresses himself person- ally as word to us. But when we hear him personally, we must take care that our contemporaries also hear the word. This is best guaranteed when our attitude testifies that we have heard and that we find ourselves on the way that leads directly to God.
The Church in the World
The words of Christ appear to the world as a paradox; his commandments contradict what people consider to be clever and useful. What these words promise is always heavenly; it comes from heaven and leads to heaven. What people do in sin and unbelief, on the contrary, leads to eternal damnation. Heaven and hell are always the ultimate alternatives, and every conversation between God and the still unconverted sinner is thus concerned with setting these two extremes into relief.
The Lord, however, did not throw his word against the unbelieving world unprotected. He founded his Church in the midst of the world. The Church has one side open toward the world. Indeed, she herself is the open door for the world, so that the world can enter into God’s Holy of Holies, where the mystery of bread and wine is celebrated. Around this mystery the Church is a way of believing and hoping and loving and working whose origin is heavenly. By entering and experiencing this mystery, man finds heaven. And God did not build his Church in such a way that she would be accessible to only a few select souls who live in the purity of faith. He built her as a communal, public place, right next to the street where everyone passes by and can enter when he wishes. Outside is the denial of everything eternal; inside is the receiving into the infinite God of everything transitory in the world. The Eucharist is the innermost event whereby the Church renews herself and makes herself known. But also every divine service, all the remaining sacraments, are encounters with the Lord who gives himself, who points toward his redemptive suffering, and who sends forth those who belong to him endowed with the Holy Spirit. They are called to proclaim the gospel outside and convert sinners. Thus the Church is always a place of encounter between the Lord and the sinner, between heavenly grace and the world. And because it is God who reveals himself in this place, this event is overwhelming and beyond all expectations.
The Church is nonetheless also a worldly reality, a gathering place for Christians that is visible also to others and that serves as a reminder to them. At Mass, in hearing the word and in praying together, Christians themselves are reminded that they are called to be a reminder in the world. They have to show what they have received; they have to bring out into the open the hidden mystery that lives within them. Continually, day after day, they must actualize in visible discipleship the once-only call that they have received from the Lord. The once-only and the multiple are reciprocally related and flow into one another. Indeed, in the man he meets, the Lord sees not only a sinner who will receive absolution, but also a brother whom he receives into his communion of life. In this way he also enabled the word that he spoke only one time on earth to be expanded into a perpetual and living validity. His word lives because Christ lives and because he does not cease to speak the once-uttered word anew and with the same precision it had then. His words appear time-bound to us because we understand them in time. Our understanding, however, is made possible through their connection to eternity.
We are struck and wounded by the word. We could not live apart from the word anymore even if we wanted to. We entered into the Church as nuts with a hard shell; the word broke open the shell. Now, without the shell, we are simultaneously more sensitive and less sensitive: more sensitive because we recognize the traces of the word everywhere and we can no longer live in naive worldliness; less sensitive because the allure of sin does not grab us as much anymore. It is not that it has become weaker, but that it holds less interest for us and God’s defense against sin penetrates all the way through us. At every encounter, God also gives us something to remember him, a gift, never something dead, but his living word.
We hear this word in the Church; we find it in undiminished vitality also at home whenever we open the Scriptures or when we return to the word in prayer. Prayer becomes an encounter with the Lord whose word we are permitted to hear without ceasing. We are personally addressed, and we are allowed to respond personally, and in this twofold personal contact, the word works on man until the true ecclesial man takes shape. With every new encounter, God continues to do his redemptive work on that which the Creator declared good at the beginning and for which the Son offered himself on the Cross, not only until we are brought to completion in ourselves, but until we become useful instruments in God’s hands for his work throughout the entire world. God’s workshop is his Church.
In the Church, as experienced by priests or laymen, there is much that is unchangeable, and this occasionally goes against our spirit of modernization. If we attempt to see and understand with the eyes of love, then we discover that what is unchangeable in the Church comes from the word and its being beyond time. We come to see that, if the distance between the word and us has grown so great, then it is our fault. The word’s ultimate meaning remains veiled for us because of our sins and our lethargy. Only seldom are we able to see what is eternally valid in the word. Of course, a perfect hearing and understanding of the word could almost be compared to the beatific vision. Total understanding, as the fulfillment (to the extent possible) of our reason by the meaning of the word, is reserved for eternity. Nevertheless, when we encounter God and fix our eyes on the eternal, we understand from the triune God and the mystery of the Church all that is necessary for us to remain in a living faith and to embody in our lives what we have received from the encounter. We are given what is necessary in order to concentrate in our Yes to the vitality of today’s Church not only what we need, but also what is needed by our contemporaries for an encounter with God.
