Meeting with God during Lent
Lent is traditionally a time when Christians attempt to grow in their spiritual lives. Every year publishers bring out books designed to help this to happen although few present-day writers on spirituality can compare with such figures from the past generation as Alan Ecclestone, William Vanstone or Austin Farrer.
One of the problems of contemporary writing on spirituality is that it rarely tackles the collapse in traditional ways of thinking about God. Fifty years ago this year, John Robinson drew attention to this problem in Honest To God with his criticisms of a view of God as a being who existed alongside the world, ‘out there’ or ‘up there’ but his own positive suggestions of how better to think of God were too vague to catch on.
Dualism has collapsed. The idea of a supernatural realm separate from the world in which we live is becoming difficult for people to grasp. In America large numbers continue to tell opinion polls that they believe in God but if you look carefully at how they understand God there is, in the words of the sociologist Robert Bellah, ‘instances of massive reinterpretation that leaves Tillich, Bultmann and Bonhoeffer far behind’.
When Robinson’s book was first published in 1963 it sold 300,000 copies in the first few months. Philosophers and theologians had no difficulty tearing it to shreds but what the critics overlooked was the source of Robinson’s appeal. He may have misinterpreted Bonhoeffer and mixed Tillich and Bultmann together in inappropriate ways but he was right to suggest that traditional ways of thinking about God no longer seemed credible or appealed to the imagination. Unfortunately instead of offering new ways to think about God, Robinson and the radicals of the 1960s appealed for ‘religionless Christianity’, a concept they derived from Bonhoeffer without sufficiently understanding what he meant by that phrase.
The following decade saw theology take a more conservative direction as Karl Barth started to have an impact and non-foundationalism blunted the threat that logical positivism in philosophy once seemed to pose to Christian belief. A new generation of theologians made the radicalism of the 1960s seem old hat but although they steered well clear of the images and language of theism that Robinson had criticised they struggled to find ways on talking about God that appealed to the popular imagination.
One theologian who did offer ways to think about God in a nondualist way was Karl Rahner. Unfortunately he could be obscure and hard to understand and his reliance on the unfamiliar philosophy of transcendental Thomism probably made him suspect in England. Anglicans were more attracted by Hans urs von Balthasar, who may have been a more conservative theologian but who seemed to draw more than Rahner did on the Church Fathers and scripture.
But Rahner was a Jesuit and behind his theology can be detected the influence of a spiritual writer who has much to teach us today. St Ignatius Loyola wanted Jesuits to ‘seek God our Lord in all things’. One of his close disciples said that Ignatius was endowed with a special grace ‘to see and contemplate in all things, actions and conversations the presence of God and the love of spiritual things, and to remain a contemplative in the midst of action’.
Rahner developed Ignatius’ ideas to argue that all of us can become mystics and enter into a direct rela- tionship with the ineffable, incomprehensible God. He spoke of the mysticism of every day life and analysed acts of faith, hope and love to show how they contained a primordial experience of God.
He argued that people have an implicit but true knowledge of God that is perhaps not always reflected upon or verbalised. This position led him to formulate the controversial concept of ‘anonymous Christianity’ but it also led him to analyse ordinary experience to show how it contained an awareness of God.
Asked in one interview if there was one question that seemed to him to be important, Rahner replied: ‘Yes there is one question. It runs like this: Is human existence absurd or does it have ultimate meaning? If it absurd, why do human beings have an unquenchable hunger for meaning? Is it not a consequence of God’s existence? For if God doesn’t exist, the hunger for meaning is absurd’.
God is always present as an immense longing whispering to us that this finite thing is ultimately not where we have set our hearts. But God is also present in other ways as well leading us to find joy in service or acts of forgiveness, hope in situations of despair, or consolation from experiences of love and beauty.
Above all in affirming another person’s worth through self-forgetting love Rahner claims that we experience the mysticism of everyday life. Love of neighbour and love of God are bound up together.
Lent is a time for drawing closer to God. With Rahner’s help we can do this not by withdrawing from the world but by seeing it in new ways, not by renouncing earthly goods but by seeing the proper place they occupy in God’s scheme of things. We find God in ordinary experience, in the midst of daily life.