Dear Friends,
This past week, our parish ministerial team was listening in on a church conference dealing with digital
media. One of the speakers expressed how essential it is that churches today speak with their members
about the importance of a person’s core identity. She emphasized that this is the struggle of many in our
world. Their pain came from not being able to answer essential questions about the meaning of their life
and its purpose.
Her message reminded me of something the great theologian of Vatican II, Fr. Karl Rahner, had said
back in 1977. He spoke of the new cultural context in which tomorrow’s Christians would find
themselves. “Spirituality would always be a relationship with the living God,” he said, “who has
revealed Himself in the history of humanity, who has placed Himself within the innermost heart of His
world created by Him and within humanity—God, Himself as sustaining ground, most central dynamic,
and ultimate goal.” But there would be far fewer external supports for Christianity; ecumenism would
increase in importance; spirituality would be more focused on the essentials of Christianity than on
particular devotions, and it would be marked by a new sense of solidarity. He recalled what he had first
written a decade earlier: “the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not be a Christian any
more”. By “mystic”, he’s referring to a person who has had a “genuine experience of God emerging
from the very heart of our existence”. He was saying that this type of spirituality, mysticism, is not a
mark of the privileged soul, but rather a feature of people’s everyday experience as they struggle to live
the Christian way of life.
Rahner was saying that our faith will either affect ordinary awareness, create new ways of living and
energize every dimension of life, or it will be superficial and empty. The rapid pace and relentless
pressure of our lives, the questions of truth raised by pluralism, the explosion of knowledge and
technology, and the ongoing challenge of the human condition all work together to make believing
difficult. Faith can no longer survive on the meager nourishment provided by the mind alone – by ideas,
doctrines and arguments. Faith needs the nurture that comes from an encounter with God and an
experience of the Holy.
Our relationship to the mystery of God is not a matter of comprehending knowledge but responsive love.
In one of his early prayers, Rahner reflects, “most of what I have learnt, I have learnt in order to forget it
again and to experience in the area of knowledge too my poverty, narrowness, and limitation.” How,
then, can human beings draw near to the heart of all things? Like many of the mystics throughout the
church’s history, Rahner answers, “It is only the knowledge gained through experience, through living
and suffering, that does not in the end disappoint and turn into boredom and oblivion, but instead fills the
heart with the knowing wisdom of experienced love. It is not what I have thought out, but what I have
lived through and suffered through that should fill my mind and my heart. It fills the heart with the
wisdom of love, instead of crushing it with the disappointment of boredom and final oblivion. It is not
the result of our own speculation, but the golden harvest of what we have lived through and suffered
through, that has power to enrich the heart and nourish the spirit.”
It is the combination of reflecting on everyday life and time spent in prayer that were essential for
Rahner in Christians falling more and more in love with God, with being a mystic. We are all called to
this encounter. It is at the core of who we are. It brings meaning and purpose to our lives.
Peace,
Fr. Damian