Mystical Ministry: God s Hidden Presence and Theology.... refreshing our theological vision in the milieu of our spiritual life and ministry

Transcription

1 Mystical Ministry: God s Hidden Presence and Theology... refreshing our theological vision in the milieu of our spiritual life and ministry

2 Which future would be hardest to accept for someone you love? A. Becoming a successful venture capitalist. B. Becoming a singersongwriter. C. Joining a religious order. D. Becoming divine as well as human.

3 What do you remember? Childhood experiences of God What was that like? A sense of God wanting you? A sense of God creating you

4 Life of the community: interpreting our own Example of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd Our experiences becoming more significant, more resonant of God s language with us Mystical that which is hidden: the infinite, inexhaustible presence of God.

5 Four-Fold Sense of Hidden Meaning in, e.g., The Song of Songs Gregory the Great ( ): The bridegroom hides, when he is being sought, so that, not finding him, the bride will search for him with renewed ardour ; and the bride s search is prolonged so that the delay will increase her capacity for God, and she will eventually find in a fuller measure what she had been seeking (Moralia in Job, 5.6). Literal: love song of bride and groom Allegorical: the love of Christ and the Church Moral meaning: God (Christ the heavenly bridegroom) and the soul Anagogical: the joy of Heaven

6 And what about human identity? Along with a hidden (mystical) depth of meaning in Scripture or worship or the created order, mystical teachers direct their audiences towards their own lives. Could it be that the self you think you are, or that the world tells you to be, is not the full truth of your being? Like Scripture, do we have levels of meaning? Mystical writers often speak of a depth or ground of our existence, where the truth of who we are flows purely and freely from the divine source.

7 A Hidden Self? Only Known through Death and Resurrection? We have been buried with him by baptism into his death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life (Romans 6.4). Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory (Colossians 3.2-4).

8 Theology as Seeing Deeper Baptism as sharing in Christ s dying and rising. From this flows the Church, the beginning of the new creation, dating from the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. As the world is drawn through baptism into Christ s dying and rising, the deep mystery of the extravagantly prodigal life of the Trinity is more fully expressed in us and everything as GRACE.

9 Israel Called into Existence Israel created by rescue from weakness, exile, and slavery in Egypt and later in Babylon. Deuteronomy 4:32-39 and 7:6-9 There is no necessity in God s calling of Israel : it was not because you were more numerous... that the LORD set his heart on you for you were the fewest of all peoples. It was because the LORD loved you....

10 Extrapolation: from the Historical to the Cosmological Israel experiences itself as called into existence by an act of divine freedom, intelligence, and love. Israel understands the existence of the whole cosmos by extrapolation or analogy: just as Israel is called into being out of chaos as a free act of intelligent love, so also has the whole universe been called into being, been created, for no reason of its own or inherent necessity.

11 A Contrast with Greek Religious Thought In Homer, gods are envious of each other and of mortals. The strong, among both gods and mortals, do what they like, and the weak do what they must. Violence may be the most basic feature of reality.

12 The Greeks: The gods and nature both part of the whole, both subject to the necessary laws of nature. Israel: God not a part of the whole but the reason why there is anything at all; God not subject to laws of nature but the author of nature and its laws. God wields the universe by letting it be itself. In Genesis, God acts not by necessity of nature but by freedom, intelligence, and love.

13 The Relations of the Three Divine Persons: the Ground of our own Desiring? At the ground of every creature are not simply the biological necessities that govern its natural life, but the eternal freedom of God who generously chooses to make space for finite others, and so calls each creature into existence in GRACE. This is the foundation of human liberty and creativity, and the cause of for our yearning for goodness and truth.

14 . The Relation of the Creatures to God If grace is God s free generosity, this is definitively present in our world in the free self-bestowal of Christ. This is the key to understanding the act of creation itself: just as Christ redeems by an act of supreme self-giving that makes space again for creatures who were falling back into nothingness, thus did God create all by a generous making space for others who apart from this would not even exist.

15 New Creation in Christ: Sacramental Depths of Creation Restored The creation can be seen and heard again in Christ as an event of communication, of divine language: e.g., in the world of Hamlet, everything exists as an expression of Shakespeare communicating with us. Every thing that is, precisely in being the very thing that it is, is also at the same time the language of God the language of the future communicating at a deep level within, and by means of, the language of our present. The implicit love of God is discerned within the world.

16 Excursus: World as Sacramental Un petit d un petit S etonne aux Halles Un petit d un petit Ah! degres de fallent. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. There is a deep level of meaning in this poem, not found by translating it from French into English, but by discerning that this other level of meaning is already given.

17 The new reality called Grace Our usual view: the more something is caused by x, the less it is caused by y (e.g., parent-child actions!). This is usually true of things in the world, but God is not one of the things that exist; God is the reason why anything exists at all. So God is not in competition with creatures for existence, or power, or anything whatsoever (e.g. Shakespeare and Hamlet). Everything that happens is an act of God, not by diminishing a creature s act but by causing it to be itself at all: double agency. The more a creature is attuned to this reality to God s unstinting giving of the creature to itself the more authentically and freely it can be itself: grace happens.

18 The Two-Fold End of Human Life Sharing in Christ s dying and rising confronts us with an end or consummation of our life that surpasses the natural goods and goals of this mortal life. We see that we re called not only into the natural goodness of human being, but into life in God: an infinite Goodness, Truth, and Beauty beyond even the greatest of creaturely achievements or capacities. God just gives us this Infinite Life because he loves us so much; yet the Gift is so inestimable we often cannot sense it, and are easily led to prefer more graspable gifts of our own accomplishing.

19 The Self We ve Become We cling to this self as it is. We fear it is all we have. Even its sufferings are familiar and we clutch them because their very familiarity is comforting, and saves us from facing the deeper suffering hidden underneath.... We make our present state of selfhood the meaning of existence, and thus refuse the deeper meaning which lies within and beyond this present. When this refusal becomes refusal to trust in the giver of life and the greater community he is creating it is sin Daniel Day Williams, The Spirit and the Forms of Love, 207.

20 St. Catherine of Siena, We discover with what blazing love God s goodness is established within us, because we see that he loved us within himself before he created us (Noffke, vol. 1, 120). Love, then, love! Ponder the fact that you were loved before you ever loved. For God looked within himself and fell in love with the beauty of his creature and so created us. He was moved by the fire of his ineffable charity to one purpose only: that we should have eternal life and enjoy the infinite good God was enjoying in himself (1, 132).