In this pluralistic world, faith can no longer simply be a lesson when it is learned by heart. It requires a constant choice of values and a deepening of existence. It is bound to one's human journey, but no one can make this experience in our place. Today, as in the time of the exile, the believer is left only with the strength of his or her heart. He or she is thrown back on his or her essential poverty. God's ways can no longer be known before him. Reduced to essentials, faith becomes an adventure that joins up with the great human adventure. It is no longer something super-added. The believer journeys with others in the same night. He, too, must listen to the voices of the world and let himself be challenged by them. And it is at this level of the human journey that he or she is invited to hear the Word anew and discover signposts along the way. His faith, reduced to essentials, is open to the four winds of the Spirit. Today, as in the time of the exile, the Spirit breathes. And this breath is a breath of universality. It renews and assembles men and women coming from the most distant horizons.

[01:04]

A new people have heard of us being born, one which extends beyond traditional boundaries. This night into which we find ourselves going, not everybody experiences this, I don't suppose, but we all get some of it, puts us, as he just said, and I think that's a very important aspect, it puts us in the same situation with every human being. In other words, we're no longer insiders. The insiders are somehow eating at the same table, as Therese of Lisieux said about herself, with the outsiders. This is the only way that Christians, for instance, can be reduced from their feeling of superiority, from their kind of triumphalistic position, in order to relate to others in a way in which the faith itself can be transmitted. So, the darkness and the poverty that we may feel within ourselves is bringing somehow ourselves into union with the others and bringing us all together. We don't know how, we're not supposed to know how. If we knew how, we wouldn't have the darkness and it couldn't work. But we're learning from the darkness.

[02:09]

We're learning what it means to be a human being. And so much of contemporary theology, I think, the other kind of theology, the theology from below, we've been talking a lot, because we've been talking about John, we've been talking theology from above, Christology from above, the Word, the wisdom of God, who comes from eternity with God and comes into the world. There's another kind of theology that's prevalent today, and that's the learning of this human experience, the experience of every human being. All human beings have nowhere to go in the end except Christ. We have to share a lot of the darkness now, I think, ourselves, which in a way is a blessing, because it's a request of faith. I was thinking of saying something about Rahner's notion of the experience of God. I'll just kind of recommend it to you as being very applicable to our situation. He starts from the other side. Rahner is very reticent about the Word of God. He doesn't do a biblical theology, as some of the others do. He talks about common human experience and tries to find God at the bottom of it.

[03:12]

And the bottom line for Rahner's discussion of the experience of God is what he calls a basic experience of transcendence. That is that God is always present to us. That in every act of our consciousness, every act of knowing, every act of feeling, every act of willing, we know God. We know God in whatever we know. He says, he gets that from Thomas Aquinas. We know God in whatever we know, as the infinite background to whatever limited thing that we know. We love God in whatever we desire. I want to bring along that thing I brought up. Minister McCarty announced it, I forgot. Some of you know that talk I went to. His book on love. It says the proximate co-creator of God. It's true of us because we have an intellect, because we have a will, because we are spirit, and that spirit knows God and moves towards God. If you take that as a basic experience of God, then everything else sort of can be built upon that.

[04:12]

That's what Rahner does. He finds our experience of God most powerful and most genuine in the times when we're most, as it were, alone. When we're thrown back upon our own responsibilities. When we're carried kind of to the limits of our own abilities. I have a couple of other things I want to do this evening, but there's not time. Which I regret. I wanted to say something about the connection between Lectio and the experience of God. If you read the beginning of Origen's commentary on the Song of Songs, he's talking about the first line of the Song of Songs where it says, Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. Poor Namaste language in this story. And Origen comments that every time you understand something in the scripture without it being taught to you by someone else, without an intermediate stepping in, that's the direct speech of the word to you. In other words, that's the kiss of the word.

[05:14]

That's Christ talking to you. Okay, he wants to take this very literally, very personally. Now that's a precious insight. Which means that as you read the scripture, and as the scripture begins to open spontaneously to you, as it begins to light up inside of you, that's Christ talking to you. That's the word talking to you, whispering to you. The kiss of the word, as he says. And in one of St. Bernard's homilies, it's sermon number 32 on the Song of Songs, he gets into a similar vein. And he talks about the companionship of the word, and how when we're sad, you know, and we're kind of walking along like two disciples walking on the road to heaven, and we've lost our taste for the scriptures, we've lost our taste for prayer, and then we're reading the scriptures, and a stranger comes up alongside us and begins to talk to us, and a fire starts burning within our hearts, as he opens to us the scriptures, and he says, that companion, that hidden companion is Jesus, and that's the word. That's sermon 32.

[06:16]

And one other point, I want to say something about prayer. Back in 1978, I read an article in America by Henri Halle, about unceasing prayer, and he had wrestled honestly with the problem of how you pray all the time, and having a fairly lively mind, I guess he'd gotten himself pretty tense trying to, trying to use the Jesus prayer for one thing probably, trying to use other things which are doing one thing all the time. He decided that wasn't for him. It works for a lot of people, but it wasn't for him. His solution might be called the opening of your consciousness. It might be called simply allowing your thoughts to be open to the presence of God, which is there already. We were talking about co-consciousness before. Simply allowing what's going on in your mind, gradually to be opened to the presence of that one who is there, to the presence of Christ. It sounds very simple. It is very simple. It's very hard to do, because we don't really want to open all of our life to another.

[07:20]

But to allow our thinking gradually to become a kind of conversation. Our thinking is already a kind of dialogue. It's like there are two people always in this talking, one to the other. I don't know why that's so, but it is. But then it would become a dialogue with the third person present, and sometimes intervening, and the third person always listening. I'd suggest that you think about that. I think it's very fruitful. It relates to what we've been talking about, actually, that indwelling presence of the wisdom of God, the Word of God, and Jesus within our minds and our hearts. He recommends several practices, several concrete things to do in that line. One of them is reading the scriptures and then kind of putting your imagination into the Gospel. And then letting it stay with you during the day. It's like reading the scriptures for the masses of following day, and then kind of letting them percolate, and coming back to them the next day. That way the Word has an amazing coherency with us in our imaginations and our feelings.

[08:22]

It can become a kind of center for our consciousness. And that's a help on the level of feeling and imagination, for that indwelling Word to speak to us, and to pour His light and His life into us. Okay, that's all I have for this evening. It's been very good to be with you. It's been beautiful to walk with you. I'm very encouraged to be here. It's been a good retreat. Thank you very much. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. Father, I just want to thank you in the name of Jesus for your time and generosity. If you want to know what generosity means, the Father will only take His airfare for the time we're at these specific moments. So we're very grateful.

[09:22]

Father, I just want to thank you.

[09:32]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ