Faith as Encounter: Living the tension between suffering and grace 1 Most Christian theology would agree that the fundamental human condition is one of finitude - we are limited, we are mortal, we live in a particular place at a particular time within a particular language and culture which shapes deeply everything we see and know. Most Christian theology also characterises that finitude, as well as its results, as negative, as the result of the Fall. Some theologies, such as theologies of the cross or apophatic theology, hold that our finitude causes suffering, and that suffering will not be overcome, certainly not before the parousia. Other theologies, such as Charismatic or pentecostal theologies, hold that the encounter with the forceful presence of God and the Spirit can overcome both the suffering and the finitude that produces it. While these two theologies - let s call them theologies of suffering and of grace - seem to contradict each other, they agree that our finitude is the problem. The difficulty with this understanding of human finitude as negative is that it actually implies that the original act of creation was already a mistake or even an evil, since it is that first act of creation that imprisons us in finitude rather than any later act of disobedience. It also jeopardises the very distinction between creature (which is finite) and Creator (who is not). Therefore, the experience of faith can not be about overcoming our finitude, it might be about living the tension between suffering and grace. We can begin to explore that tension by noting some consequences of our finitude. On the one hand, the fact that we are finite imposes upon us a relationality with, a relationship of dependence on and interchange with, what surrounds us. At the most basic physiological level, I need to interchange oxygen and CO2 with my surroundings. Further, that dynamic of relationality also underpins human understanding. I have no way of knowing myself or others or the world aside from my interchange with that outside world.
More, I have no way of grasping the essence of myself or of anything else in itself, I can 2 know anything only in its relatedness to other things or people or circumstances and so on. On the other hand, our finitude imposes on us the need for trust. Since it is only as I risk interchange with the world that I gain any understanding of it, I can not predetermine the outcome of that interchange. I can not take up a detached position vis-a-vis what surrounds me, and then decide how to interact with it. Understanding and interaction are interlinked. Therefore, I have to trust that the world can be understood before I have any reason to think that it is. More, I have to act in accordance with what I hope I have understood to have any sense of whether I have understood at all. There can be no playing off against each other of faith and reason, or naive trust and critical suspicion. Finally, our finitude also means that the world around us remains mysterious. In the very moment of grasping what is before us we become aware that there remains a surplus of meaning that exceeds our grasp, what von Balthasar calls the ineliminable mystery of being. As he goes on to argue, [t]he truth of being will always be infinitely greater and richer than the knower is capable of grasping. The essential mystery of being gives being its value, its significance, and calls out for a response of love. In this way, our fundamental finitude imposes upon us a mode of existence that is characterised by relationality, trust, risk and mystery. In order for our fundamental relationality to become life-enhancing, to become the event (and it is always a dynamic movement, not a fixed state) of mutual revelation in mystery genuinely marked by love, it needs to take on the nature of what I will call an encounter - between the individual and the community that surrounds us, between us and other communities, between us and the created order, and between us and God. I will define that encounter through reworking four terms - apophasis, kenosis, ekstasis and inhaesio.
First, encounter requires apophasis - the acceptance of the limitedness and 3 insufficiency of my understanding of what or who is before me. I can only truly begin to understand another if I accept that I have not understood them yet, if I acknowledge the essential mystery of what is not-me. And that insufficiency of my grasp is never removed, no matter how often I may have encountered them before. Second, encounter requires kenosis - a willing laying-down of my demand on the one hand to have my needs met, my desires fulfilled, by what is before me, and on the other to evaluate, to define, others only in terms of their ability to meet that need, to fulfil that desire. I need to surrender my project for it. Finally, encounter requires a simultaneous movement of ekstasis and inhaesio. It requires ekstasis, a stepping out of myself, to willingly leave myself and my preconceptions behind, to abandon previous knowledge and step into not-knowing, in order to encounter what is now, and anew, before me. And it requires inhaesio, a new indwelling, an abiding with what is before me, in the new perspective, the new grasp of the world it offers me. It requires me to throw my lot in with you. Yet, an encounter is only possible when each of these movements meets upon a reciprocal move from what is not-me towards me. I can not encounter you if you hide yourself or if you refuse to reciprocate in kind. The risk, and the terror, is that this encounter can not be commanded or coerced, since the result would not be encounter. It can only be called for, it can only be hoped for, it can only be risked. Encounter is not the predictable effect of some efficient and identifiable cause, the necessary consequence of some action. Moments of encounter happen, when they happen, at 90 degrees to everything else. In this dynamic of encounter humanity might be said to be made in the image of God, human personhood echoes the Personhood of the Trinity. The Father encounters the Son in perfect self-emptying and self-giving, but does not empty himself only, because the Son
4 responds in perfect self-emptying and self-giving towards the Father. Out of this dynamic encounter, the life of God overflows into the Spirit who again pours it out into creation - both in the act of creating and in the ongoing presence or abiding-with of God with creation - thus continuing the movement of kenosis of the encounter of Father and Son and Spirit. In the Spirit God empties out the fullness of God s being in order to encounter us and to abide with us in our finite humanity. As Rowan Williams puts it, The Holy Spirit is present in self-emptying and in patience - in self-forgetting - by being there alongside our fallibility, not overcoming it, not taking it over and ironing it out. Risk is a necessary corollary of the need for encounter. The inescapable dynamic of encounter means that I am always vulnerable to being invaded, to being taken over by what I encounter, even into my deepest interiority. I am always vulnerable to domination, to manipulation, to violence. I am also vulnerable to my own misunderstanding of what is before me and to being misunderstood. I am vulnerable to the misplacing of my trust in those who are not worthy of it, and not being worth the trust placed in me. I am vulnerable to my own and others refusal of encounter, or its evasion, in distrust. Thus, both I and others are lessened, are diminished in our humanity and in our grasp of the world because we are denied the revelation in mystery that is encounter. And, in what might be a final irony, in the very act of defending myself against the risk, I kill myself, I cut myself off from the only means I have to know myself and the world around me. Suffering is therefore inevitable. The risk again and again becomes reality. Even when we move towards each other in goodwill, we will fail again and again to properly encounter one another, even in the most intimate relationships, because we remain finite. There is no way past or behind or beyond the risk of suffering that is not at the same time a retreat from the very encounter that we seek and need. There is no way to resolve the tension between the risk and the possibility of encounter. And that tension is an existential one rather than a conceptual one - I need encounter in order to exist at all.
5 Therefore, the question becomes how to live in the midst of it, and not to retreat from it in one of a nearly endless number of ways. It is here that the Incarnation gains central importance. From the point of view of encounter, we can interpret the Incarnation as both marking God s entry into the tension of encounter by taking on human finitude in Jesus Christ, and offering a paradigmatic example of what it means to live within the tension rather than to try to resolve it. In his entire human life Jesus enacts perfect human encounter with God in and through and by the power of the Spirit, by both concretely embodying God s selfrevelation and invitation into encounter, and by embodying the perfect human response of trust to that invitation. Central to this dynamic realised encounter is the work of the Spirit, since it is the dynamic overflow of the Spirit into creation that enables both the Incarnation and the encounter between the Incarnate Word and the Father. Remarkably, Jesus willing embrace of the risk of encounter does not earn him divine protection. Instead, Jesus willingly suffers the inevitable consequence of the risk he embraces - misunderstanding, opposition, rejection and death. Yet, much as suffering ought to be the last word, it is not. Jesus experiences God s answer to the suffering that is the inevitable result of the risk of encounter - the inexplicable and unexpected miracle of the resurrection. There again is no necessary causal or conditional link between the crucifixion and the resurrection. The resurrection, again, stands at 90 degrees to everything else. The resurrection is God s new-creative answer to the cross, to the inevitability of suffering produced by the refusal of encounter, an answer that is utterly new even if it was the answer God would always give. What we are offered in and through Jesus Christ, therefore, is not a way to resolve the tension of the risk of and the need for encounter, but a way to enter into that tension and live. I can risk encounter because I trust that its failure will no longer be my end. In other words, as I willingly embrace the suffering that is the inevitable consequence of the
6 risk of encounter in the same way that Jesus did, as theologies of suffering call me to do, so I experience that I am also resurrected as he was resurrected, as theologies of grace assert that I will. Yet, my experience will never exclude the need for trust - I will not know that the answer will be resurrection until I have died and have been resurrected. Christian spiritual praxis thus needs to create, in some way, the space to embody the dynamic of encounter by inviting this voluntary giving of trust.