Editor's notes (JRB):
Long reads of more than more than 5 or 10 minutes are seldom posted on Reckonings, but I hope readers will enjoy this exception. (Anyway, it barely makes it into the long-read category.) Notto Thelle is an old and dear friend. We came to know each other during my years living and working in Norway. We continue to nourish our conversation via Skype every other week or so. He is professor of theology at the University of Oslo, a Christian minister in the long-prevailing Church of Norway, and a longtime student of diverse spiritual traditions, especially those whose homes include China and Japan, to both of which he has been a frequent visitor.
Whatever my talents as an adult, they have not included facility in the learning of languages other than English, which remains late in my eighth decade a deeply pleasurable work-in-progress. It is partially in anticipation of the response I would elicit that I don't say, when asked, that my favorite book is the Oxford English Dictionary.
As a psychologist, I have necessarily become adept in the practice, as Notto puts it, of "taking the dark side seriously." Doing so, indeed, is essential to our realization of the light within us and in the earth.
The other key element in the chapter of Notto's book reprinted below that is central to experience of the sacred and the life of the spirit, whoever is learning and practicing, is relationship or dialogue. Even when one is practicing alone, one is not alone, but in relationship to an Other. Notto writes that "conversation is the innermost essence of faith in God." There is, of course, risk in every conversation. "But if we refuse to take this risk, there will never be any true encounter! Trust is created when we make ourselves vulnerable and turn an unveiled face to another, waiting for his [or her] reply. The conversation gets going when one of the partners dares to trust that the other will not misuse his name, but will instead protect it." And this: "We must never forget that silence too is part of the conversation." The interplay of silence and speech is crucial.
"What is it about faith that makes us break our silence all the time? And what makes us believe that the conversation is possible and meaningful? We are now coming near to the very center of our understanding of God, and of ourselves as human beings."
"Trust is created when we make ourselves vulnerable and turn an unveiled face to another, waiting for his reply. The conversation gets going when one of the partners dares to trust that the other will not misuse his name, but will instead protect it....This is why we continue to speak. Hope must be proclaimed, hope must be repeated as a protest. We must urge people to hope, setting up a bulwark against pessimism and all the forces that destroy life. We must remind one another unceasingly of the signs that point to the deepest forces in life and are stronger and truer than the signs that point to annihilation."
I have followed Notto's writing as best I can, and have been grateful both to the Paulist Press for publication of some of his works in English, including the book excerpted below, and to Notto himself for translating portions of other publications, most recently his prefatory essays in a forthcoming collection of four books, translations into Norwegian of the haiku masters Bashō, Issa, Buson and Santōka.
The lost Father – yearning for God in our days
Apropos Solar Eclipse
Notto R. Thelle[1], Professor of Theology, University of Oslo
Nearly fifty years ago, there was a total eclipse of the sun over southern Norway. We knew what would happen, so we sat and waited, with over-exposed black and white film covering our eyes, to see the details of the sun’s disappearance. Slowly, the sun was eaten up by the moon, and then it vanished. Only the radiant corona continued to glow. It was not in fact the darkness that made the greatest impression, but something we had not expected – the silence.
First came the shadow, like twilight in the middle of the day, then the brief night; all this was expected, but not the silence! The birds stopped singing, the cheerful group of people stopped talking, the world held its breath. It was not the peace of the night that descended upon us, but a paralyzing stillness. Was it the groaning of creation we heard, or the fear of emptiness, of being abandoned?
In his short book The Eclipse of God, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber interprets our age, i.e. the last two centuries, as an historical hour of destiny in which the sun is eclipsed. God himself is overshadowed by other phenomena.
In the silence which descends after God has vanished, philosophers seek new words, new images, new ideas that can bring him back. But Buber affirms that God is silent in the systems of the philosophers. One can dedicate oneself to ideas, perhaps even love them – but ideas do not love, so our love remains unrequited.
Buber reminds us that an eclipse is an event which takes place between the sun and our eyes, not in the sun itself. How are we to see the light again? Not by recreating it in our systems, for our words and ideas sometimes block the view, intensifying the darkness and imprisoning us in a fictional conversation with our own selves; no, we must search behind the eclipse until we find the divine mystery.
How can God once again become a reality, so that our words are more than mere sounds in the empty air? I believe that, if our yearning is to succeed in uniting words and reality, we must also take the dark silence seriously.
Let us remain in the darkness of the eclipse for a little while. I shall not attempt to explain it; instead, let us listen to three writers, Sven Delblanc, Per Olov Enquist, and Arne Garborg. Their experiences are not mine, but I can recognize the truth in what they say. They intensify the darkness, but their somber words are also nourished by a yearning for the light, for play, for birdsong, and for conversation.
Are they talking with God? I think so, although I am not always sure whether the conversation is over – or only just beginning.
Sven Delblanc’s solar eclipse begins in a cornfield one beautiful autumn day in the Canada of his childhood. The golden, sweet corn is attractive. The book is called Livets ax (Life’s Ear of Corn). A little boy is getting to know the world by tasting and biting. The ears of corn are sweet, but they become rough and sharp, they crawl down his throat and try to strangle him. He coughs and cries out, but in vain: his father stands there and laughs uproariously, since he is a brutal, unfeeling tyrant. His sisters too laugh, since they are afraid of their father. For the screaming child, his father is a tower reaching up to the skies, mocking one who is helpless. Those who are stronger refuse to help! And then he sees the sun for the first time, hanging there like a blind face in the cloud, burning evilly, a face without eyes. He thinks: the sun is stronger than I am. The father who should have bestowed love and security gave us nothing but terror. And the sun was blind and evil.
A terrible childhood formed the picture of a world without grace. “His father had given him an image of God. Childhood had given him an image of what life was about: there were two alternatives, to lead the life of an executioner when possible, or to lead the life of a victim when compelled to do so.” The blind god is the counterpart of his father. His father is the Yahweh in his life, and the son lives in his shadow.
“I am. I am the One who is. You are only my shadow.”
I understood that he was speaking the truth – he was my life’s Yahweh. I am his shadow. As the years pass and the divine evil rises to its zenith, I shall shrink more and more. At the last, I shall be merely a stripe of gray dust at his feet.
What does one do when life is eclipsed by a blind and evil god who is stronger? What does one do when one is destroyed by an avenger who demands sacrifices and forgives nothing? One hangs on. The child grows up in an unchangeable world where God is eternal, his father never gets older, and terror endures. And the fate awaiting him is a rest devoid of feelings, like a fossil with staring eyes, its fear turned to stone.
But this petrified endurance in the feelingless shadow is not the whole story. His yearning and his dreams are alive. He has seen glimpses of another world: the dream of a lost paradise, fragments of faith in Jesus, and a cherry tree in bloom.
This tree is the most important factor. He discovered it on one of his wanderings away from home, a fountain of blossoms in spring, full of dark berries in summer. The tree was a friend and sister, with an important message for him: “Something about consolation in spite of everything, a message about a generous love which grows in the barrenest of soils … Only this flowering cherry-tree communicated to the boy that faith in life which many a time halted his steps on the threshold to madness, as he was on the point of going out into the darkness.” “The stony ground was bathed in a froth, the unimagined blossoms of the fruit-tree. It was like seeing God.” This is another God than the one he knew from his childhood home in Mölna.
The cherry tree is perhaps just another word for the dream of that lost paradise where the evil god had no power. “There existed a far-off country where his omnipotence did not reach: there, peace reigned. Only, you were expelled all too soon from that country, and this made you grieve all the more at the split in our existence.” In his childhood, he had wandered unnoticed and unhindered between that realm of shadows which we call “reality” and the far-off land of mysticism. He longed to get back to the true reality, to the light which cast shadows on the walls of his cave.
Jesus is a minor character in Delblanc’s world, far too powerless to create any hope in the narrator’s darkness. He could indeed recognize and understand Jesus’ suffering, but he could make no sense of the idea that this suffering was meaningful! In his world, there was no place for grace and reconciliation. What weapons did Jesus possess to resist the overwhelmingly powerful blind god who enjoyed seeing human beings suffer? And Jesus never knocked on the door of his childhood home at Mölna:
Perhaps Jesus did indeed bear the lamp of love in his hands – that was possible. But he knocked in vain on the gate of Mölna, for no one heard him, no one let him in. The only love that still existed there was female and nature-grown like the cherry tree in the wood.
Per Olov Enquist writes about a mind darkened by life. Kapten Nemos bibliotek (Captain Nemo’s Library) is a mysterious book on the borders between poetry and madness. Only gradually does the reader understand that we are going through an inner world which is confused and darkened. At the same time, this darkness is a place of refuge which opens up the path back to reality.
The external drama is simple. Two boys are mixed up at birth in the hospital and grow up as best friends. When they are six years old, the mistake is noticed, and they exchange homes. The newspapers write about them.
The inner drama is a callous story about what it means to be abandoned in a town in northern Sweden where people find it very difficult to express their feelings. A child loses his parents, loses the friend with whom he had been mixed up, loses his identity, loses his mind – or rather, he takes refuge in mental illness, and the reader is introduced to a part of the landscape of his mind. This is a world where imagination and recollection and reality are woven together, but where the boy can find interconnections and perceive signals; perhaps he can even “put everything together” and create a new wholeness.
What has all this to do with God? Our initial impression is of harshness and tears – nothing else. There are only three kinds of human beings: executioners, victims, and traitors. God is overwhelming, distant, one who punishes. The human fathers are absent and dead, but nevertheless represent a threat in virtue of their very absence; the same is true of God, the highest “father.” The boy had heard Mia Hallesby’s pious stories which were served up to children at that time, and had understood that God was eternal. Eternity was a huge rock in the sea, where a bird flew once every thousand years to sharpen its beak. It takes an immensely long time for the rock to be completely worn down, but all that time is merely one second in eternity. And the human being fights against this overwhelming God, sharpening his beak against the rock in order to destroy it and so gain access to his Benefactor.
Hope was to be found in the Son of Man, who was not evil like God. He had a wound in his side, in which one could hide. In the local chapel, there was a picture of him and the children, with indentations in its frame. He made intercession with the divinity. “It took me all my childhood to learn that the Son of Man usually had no time – only very, very seldom.”
If God is a crushing eternal rock, and the Son of Man has no time, one must find other helpers. The boy’s benefactor is Captain Nemo, whom he had met in one of Jules Verne’s books. Captain Nemo leads him into a concealed world under the rock, with his submarine “Nautilus” as its innermost, closed room.
The name Nemo means “No one.” In one way, both he and his world are the product of a sick imagination; but it is a world that offers a place of refuge, and Nemo acts as guide to the narrator’s ego, which has no identity of its own. “If one has no name, one is No one – and that too is a kind of liberation.”
Is this merely a story about someone who returns from the eclipse by reconstructing his life with the aid of a fictional helper? I do not think so: because en route, after more than four years in silent illness and confusion, he has perceived signals and signs.
He has come to understand that the biographies of the victims, the executioners, and the traitors are interwoven. He has perceived the clumsy, almost invisible signs of goodness in the barren society of his childhood, a society so poor in feelings. He writes without bitterness – and that in itself is a little miracle. He has seen the loneliness of the friend who became a traitor. Not least, he has grasped the abandonment and fear felt by his stepmother as she stood at the top of the stairs like a deity and destroyed her children’s lives. Her fear showed him a glimpse of a deity who was different: “I saw her face when she turned towards me. Afterwards, I thought: How strange that a powerful God who punishes us can be afraid of being abandoned.” He had experienced something similar when he made his escape and climbed a fir-tree with branches as thick as God’s fingers. The branches had begun to tremble, as if God was afraid:
One could reflect on that for a while. It had never occurred to me before now that God was afraid, but this time the fingers had trembled, just like Elma Markström’s fingers – her hands were shaky. Really, it seemed that God was afraid.
When I looked for a Norwegian parallel to these Swedish voices, I thought at once of Arne Garborg (1851-1924). Some consider him a rather old-fashioned writer, but he may be more modern than we think, despite all the distance in time. When he writes about human life, he has something of the intensity we find in the two Swedes. He speaks of one so wounded by life, so wounded by faith, that he had to leave home in order to seek a remedy. And yet he still longs to find a light and a meaning behind the solar darkness of his childhood religion.
In Den burtkomne Faderen (The Lost Father: the title alludes to the parable of the “lost” or “prodigal” son), he writes: “I had lived like the lost son and had experienced destitution, just like him. But when I made my way home again, my father was gone. I never find peace. I am myself this unease that never comes to rest … I was a son of an age that has forgotten what ‘home’ and ‘rest’ are.”
Truly,
I am not the lost son,
but you are a lost father;
and no one dares to wait for your return,
but you are missed by all your little ones.
The beautiful and empty words of the church sound like a wake held over the dead Father. But here there is nevertheless one last hope: the Master.
A God?
What do we need God for?
We are perfectly capable
of condemning ourselves.
But a Son of Man
who knew us
and knew everything,
and possessed the healing word
and help
where the others merely pronounce judgments
and raise cold eyes;
a Son of Man –
oh, why are you no longer here on earth!
I have used fragments from the worlds of these three writers as material for my own reflections, but in doing so, I discovered that they also do something with me. They draw me into their world and make the subject matter much more difficult than I had initially thought.
Two points are particularly appropriate to this book. First, all three speak clearly about the pain caused when God is eclipsed. Their characters are marked by this absence, consumed by loneliness and abandonment, crushed by fear of the evil and arbitrary divinity. They hang on, they flee, or else they rebel. But will they ever escape?
Secondly, behind the pain and the flight and the rebellion lives a yearning: Garborg’s search for the lost Father, which leads him to yearn for the Son of Man; Enquist’s description of the helper in his imaginary world, Captain Nemo, the “No one” born of the imagination, and his glimpses of a God whose hands tremble; and Delblanc’s longing for “a far-off country.”
Both absence and longing are clothed in strong language. There is something universal here; we are not speaking of phenomena confined to Scandinavia at the beginning of the new millennium. When his longing reaches breaking-point, the human person returns anew to his search. The night is at its deepest just before the dawn.
Our task, then, is to speak credibly of God in a world full of distorted images of the divine. We must find something to replace the images of malicious and absent fathers and dominating mothers, something other than loneliness and guilt and repressed sexuality, something more human than power-hungry groups who so readily utter condemnations. We must speak of a God who does not crush us or force us down into the dust, but instead lets us stand upright so that we can meet him face to face and talk with him. Without a credible language, there is no true answer to human longings.
All this is no doubt true; but at one point, our writers disturb the clarity of our system, because they touch on something that gnaws at us and leaves us uneasy. It is not just a matter of a distorted religiosity that destroys people’s emotional lives, their language, and their images of God – for Delblanc’s father did not believe in God, nor did he desire to force any particular religious ideas on his son. He was merely a bad and brutal father who ruthlessly laid bare one aspect of reality, namely the cruel harshness of the world. How can we believe in a good Father, when it appears that quite different forces form human existence? Are not abandonment, violence, and heartlessness far more obvious realities than the goodness of existence? Is there any reason to believe in a good and loving Creator, rather than in a cold regularity, blind chance, or an evil power which has made the world our torture chamber? Is it not true to assert that we are abandoned? Must we not create our own world and find a benefactor, our own Captain Nemo?
If we take this reality seriously, we will not speak superficially about God.
However, many Christians breathe a sigh of relief in the present time: “Yes, people are truly longing! At long last, we can talk about God – and people pay attention to us. Our young people get involved in church activities. The poets and writers own up to their emptiness, the theaters take up religious problems. People are having religious experiences, they are rediscovering the Bible, they light candles in churches, they grope for words to describe their longings. There was indeed a silence after God’s light was eclipsed, but the empty space is now being filled!”
We must never forget that silence too is part of the conversation; nor that the solar eclipse and the paralyzing stillness were often due to the fact that the conversation had lost all meaning. The denial and mockery of religion can be prophetic words that are far more true than many a polished affirmation about God. If the conversation does not allow this silence too to be heard, words become cheap. Garborg noted something of this truth in his novel:
Many seek God today; and some even tell us that they have found God. I read these testimonies. But in this matter, one person cannot help another. They have had it too easy, and they write too fluently. They write and write and write. But we have so little confidence in words. We feel disturbed by everything that is said to the blast of trumpets.
The solar eclipse is not experienced only by those who lack faith. Often, faith too speaks out of the same desperation, crying out to God and refusing to accept the account the Christian faith gives of him.
It was Abraham, our father in faith, who refused to accept God’s terrible solution to the problem posed by the evil of Sodom and Gomorrah. He called God to account, opposing the small-mindedness of the tribal deity in the name of the divine generosity. But perhaps he fell silent when the towns were destroyed all the same? Is it not Job’s protest against unjust suffering that has inspired people for more than two thousand years, rather than God’s overwhelming demonstration of power, which brings Job to silence at the close of the book? In every generation, there have been Christians who had to get out, to reject the language of their tribe, and settle somewhere else. They had to bid farewell to a fossilized theology and to the pious folklore of their childhood home. Faithfulness to God required them to say “no” to God. They had to lose their speech and their language before they could sing a new song.
A few years ago, I read Tatiana Goricheva’s little book Talking about God Is Dangerous. The title has a double message. It recalls that one risked one’s life in the Soviet Union if one talked about God – this could lead to prison and torture. But the title indicates something even more terrible. She refers directly to her title only once in the book, when she describes the church in the West. She saw a preacher talking about love on television with smoothly practiced gestures and a polished surface. He was long-winded, empty, faceless. “For the first time,” she writes, “I understood how dangerous it is to talk about God. Every word must be a word of sacrifice, full to the brim of authenticity. Otherwise, it is better to be silent.”
Otherwise, it is better to be silent … And yet, we speak!
What is it about faith that makes us break our silence all the time? And what makes us believe that the conversation is possible and meaningful? We are now coming near to the very center of our understanding of God, and of ourselves as human beings. In order to speak clearly, I shall employ images.
According to a Jewish legend, the world was created when God gave birth to the earth from his own body. In other words, the earth is life born of God’s own life, bound to the divinity by the bonds of love and of blood. But at the same time, when the world was born, it became something completely distinct and separated from God. It was to lead its own life: it would attain a true relationship to its origin precisely by being something other than God.
I remember clearly the birth of our first child. As soon as she emerged and the umbilical cord was cut, she opened two big blue eyes which looked at us and said: “Here I am, and there you are.” And we returned her gaze and saw the miracle of a new life – an infant totally dependent on our care and love, and yet the tie binding her to her mother had been cut.
A child is an autonomous living being who must find an equilibrium between nearness and distance, in order to become a complete human being. We can suck the strength out of a child by binding it to ourselves with a thousand ties, we can dominate it and over-protect it, raising it in a symbiotic relationship; but we can also cripple it by means of distance and poor care, creating a mirror image of our own inability to show feelings. In both cases, the relationship is distorted and we end up unable to communicate with each other on any meaningful level. A genuine relationship needs a wide space where child and parents can live in a free interplay. The nearness is taken for granted, but a living relationship presupposes freedom and difference. If a genuine conversation is to take place, distance is just as important as nearness.
The world is God’s first-born creation and bears the imprint of likeness to its Creator. But the umbilical cord is cut before God looks at his earth with proud and loving eyes and sees that his work is good. We must live in an open space of distance and nearness, free to form our lives and to become ourselves. Then we can encounter God face to face, as one distinct from our own selves, and we can talk together. The conversation needs a shared space, a relationship which binds both dialogue partners together; but it also presupposes their difference.
I have long been fascinated by two biblical expressions for the relationship between God and the human person: face and name.
This book speaks of the wish to find the true face of the Godhead. I have described the fear faith experiences when his face disappears. But many are just as much afraid of an insistent nearness, of the face that looms at close quarters, seeing everything and controlling everything.
What sets us free is the presence in an open space, the blessing and peace which are imparted when the Lord lifts his face and lets the light of his face shine. Our conversation with God is now an anticipation of what Paul calls the face-to-face encounter in perfection, when we no longer see only in fragments, and no longer talk like children. Our conversation trains us to approach the Godhead as fully mature persons, freed from parental authority and false ties, so that we can stand upright when we meet Him who is our origin. According to a mysterious tradition, Moses spoke face to face with God on the mountain, as one human being speaks with another (Exodus 33:11).
The name is related to the face. For the Bible, name and reality are one: to know the name is to have power, and power may be used wrongly; but to know the name is also the basis of trust and fellowship. To know God’s name is to share in God, but to misuse his name is to assault God himself.
According to the creation narrative, Adam was permitted to give names to all living beings on the earth. This implies an enormous power, for it is really the Creator who puts names to things. God calls the day light and the darkness night, he gives names to heaven and earth, he determines the number of the stars and calls each one by its name (Genesis 1; Ps 147:4). When he put names to things, Adam received a share in the divine power.
In reality, trust is more important than power. Trust is the close relationship between the one who knows the name and the one who bears it, as we see clearly in the manner in which the Bible employs names. Again and again, we are told that God calls people by name: “Adam, where are you? … Your name shall be ‘Abraham’.” Jacob is given the name “Israel” because he wrestled with God and won. God calls Moses, Samuel, the prophets. The Servant of the Lord is called from his mother’s womb, and God has spoken his name before he was born (Isaiah 49:1). He has called and formed the people too: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1). The good shepherd calls his sheep by name. In the New Testament, the nameless are given a name: we do not know the name of the rich man who lived in luxury, but Lazarus, the beggar at his door, has a name that resounds down through the centuries (Luke 16:29-31). He is the representative of the innumerable nameless and despised persons who received life because the Master gave their names a meaning.
We say: “In the name of Jesus,” and there is a rich treasury of hymns and prayers which praise this name – love-poetry at its finest.
Faces can be disfigured, images can be distorted until they are unrecognizable, names can be misused for evil purposes. This is the risk in every conversation. But if we refuse to take this risk, there will never be any true encounter! Trust is created when we make ourselves vulnerable and turn an unveiled face to another, waiting for his reply. The conversation gets going when one of the partners dares to trust that the other will not misuse his name, but will instead protect it.
We are formed by the images and words we use. Faces and names do something to us. It is certainly not irrelevant to ask which images of God we carry around with us; and our choice of words and names for the divine thing is equally important. Do we evoke the radiant face of blessing, or the blind god, the stern father who mocks the helpless? God's eye can be full of concern, an eye that neither slumbers nor sleeps. But it can also be Garborg's divinity, who watched over him "with eyes of fire," so that he had to escape in order to know gladness. Or it can be the Son of Man who "possessed the healing word / and help / where the others merely pronounce judgments / and raise cold eyes.” Or it can be a divinity who is the eternal rock that blocks the path to our benefactor.
We have tried out a number of images and words: face to face; the name that calls to another name; the umbilical cord is cut and the child meets its own origin as Another. Many people criticize Christianity for directing its faith to something outside the human person, thereby depriving us of our autonomy. There is something correct in this charge, but it is basically wrong, since the point is not that we localize faith somewhere else and seek an object “out there.” The important thing is the relationship, the interconnection. Faith lives in the space between, i.e. in what we call trust, conversation, encounter, and love.
When we keep on breaking the silence and speaking, this is not because we have adequate words to describe God or to speak to him, but because conversation is the innermost essence of faith in God. If the divine had been a set of rules inherent in the world, an idea, or an impersonal divine force permeating all things – including the deepest dimension in our own being – then we could perfectly well have remained silent, as in some forms of mysticism, which rest in the realm of the unutterable. Enter your own sanctuary, they say, and remain in the silence; words are superfluous, since you yourself are the divine. Here there is no face for us to meet, no Other with whom we can converse, only unity with our own innermost self.
In the Christian faith, I encounter Another, a face and a name that are not my own. This is my origin, but the umbilical cord has been cut. I must grow apart from my mother’s womb and my father’s embrace, learning to straighten my back and stand face to face.
We too can remain silent as we stand before the divine mystery; words are obviously inadequate. But the silence will always be broken, just as a man and woman who love one another will always grope for words to express their love, however poorly. In the same way, friends cannot remain silent. The beloved one has a face.
How can we speak credibly about the object of our faith? How can language be recovered, and the words arise from the dead?
“We must pull up our socks,” think the preachers – and get a bad conscience. “We must improve our formulations, discover new images, seek inspiration in poetry and literature, speak with greater commitment, draw on art for help …”
Rhetoric and beauty are certainly important, but I have come to believe that the vital thing is not our ability to formulate or our rhetorical skill, but the space in which our words are heard, and not least the space which our words create. We must help people to experience faith anew as an open space, a landscape they can enter, where they will receive a language by hearing and speaking, seeing, and experiencing. But they need fresh air around them in this landscape, and they must be free to leave again.
People are accustomed to see faith as something ministers and preachers want to force down their throats: a system, a language, a whole world of opinions that they must accept. The words are weapons launched against them, seeking their weak points. They are meant to sting like salt in open wounds, giving them a bad conscience. The goal is to bring them to conversion. But they get claustrophobia and then retreat, since there is no place for their own reality in the words’ closed room. The church’s language reminds them too much of authorities that seek control, of parents who cannot let go of their children.
If language is to live, it must be formed in a vast space, large enough to accommodate the whole of life. It must be tested in longing and rebellion. It must have depths in which both blasphemy and adoration can resonate – and desperation, fear, and exultation. Abraham could quarrel with God because he inhabited a huge universe of faith. Job and the prophets shook their fists at God and cursed the day of their birth because they needed fresh air around them. Language must be heard in a vast room of faith which people can enter without feeling imprisoned. Perhaps such a room will make it possible for them to really commit themselves!
Some people have to go so far away that the last remaining bit of the umbilical cord breaks, before they come as adults to long for another kind of conversation, and try to pick up the threads once more. Perhaps the god who breathed fear and coldness into them may turn out to have loving qualities. There must also be space for the “foreigners” who want to try out a language they have never learned. In this way, faith can become a voyage of discovery, on which their lives are given a place in a larger landscape with new dimensions and new joys – though assuredly, there will be hitherto unknown abysses as well.
Ultimately, it is the Gospels’ stories about Jesus that open up the landscape and sketch a face of God that allows us to believe that our longing can actually lead somewhere.
It is not by chance that Jesus was a wanderer – from one village to another in Galilee’s mountain landscape, with their pastures and small fields, on streets and market squares, and in the wildernesses where no one lived. Around him, a whole world took form. People were drawn into a reality that was utterly close yet different and new – a reality he called “the kingdom of God.” This was not a place, but a path and a landscape which they were permitted to share by following him and trying it out for themselves.
The Gospels speak of very simple matters: Jesus meets people and talks with them, touches them, blesses them, eats with them, heals, weeps, speaks about life’s mysteries, about God. They had indeed heard about this, but now it was here! The path also went to Jerusalem, where it seemed that Jesus’ world was collapsing – the king in the kingdom of God received a gallows as his throne. In his world, God was the highest and the lowest. Heaven and hell were God’s place.
The Jesus of the Gospels is not a nice but powerless reconciler, with no weapons to challenge the divinity who was an “eternal rock.” The Jesus of the Gospels is not an absent figure who never dared to knock on the door, because a brutal father and a blind god were all too much alive for him. No, in the Gospels it is the Highest himself who visits the earth. God makes his way through narrow lanes and back alleys and says: “Let there be light!” Eyes that were dulled become bright, people straighten up. Those who had been despised are given back their names, and the sinners receive a face.
If this is the face of God, then we can straighten up and try to speak. The Almighty has a human countenance. This is a God whose hands tremble, to borrow Enquist’s image: “It had never occurred to me before now that God was afraid … Really, it seemed that God was afraid.” This is a God whose image is reflected in the fear felt by the victims – and by the executioners and the traitors. What other founder of a religion was terror-stricken and cried out: “Now is my soul full of fear” (John 12:27)? Jesus’ life and death – his failure, in human terms – were not a sacrifice demanded by a harsh God, nor were they the defeat of a well-meaning idealist. No, they were made of the same stuff as life itself. Those who ruled were able to take power and honor from Jesus, for he himself had already laid such things aside; but they could not take life and love from him.
Perhaps, in the final analysis, something of this Jesus was revealed in the glimpses of life and of meaning in Delblanc’s gloomy world: the fruit-tree in the abandoned smallholding which bloomed unseen in the dark forest and told him “something about consolation in spite of everything, a message about a generous love which grows in the barrenest of soils … It was like seeing God”!
What I have written about the relationship to God implies that the meeting between God and the human person takes the form of a conversation. This relationship is nourished by words, develops in words, and is shaped by words. The intensity varies, and there is an alternation between distance and closeness; words may be many or few. And it is certainly true that the spoken word is not the only form of expression! Nevertheless, faith seeks words.
It may be tempting to reflect on the consequences which this basic relationship to God has for the language of theology and of preaching, but I content myself here with one single affirmation. One element in the crisis in theology and preaching is that they have become detached from the fundamental language of conversation, that conversation which takes the form of prayer, lamentation and hymns of praise, cries of fear and of joy, accusation and protest, the longing of the abandoned lover, the intimate dialogue, the poetry of love, and the silence that simply waits for the other.
The language of preaching and theology is not, of course, this direct conversation itself. But its language is without passion when it loses contact with the experiences and insights we derive from the direct conversation. The words become abstract, lifeless, and tedious.
We must return briefly to one point, which was taken up in the introduction to this section: the solar eclipse, the silence after God disappears. For it is not only ideas that put God in the shadow; it is not only distorted images of God and a ruined language that reduce us to silence. We can solve such problems by renewing our language and painting other images. But what are we to do when the eclipse is caused by the brutality of reality itself, when we are plagued in our hearts by the absence of light and of goodness, when it seems that darkness reigns?
Faith has no solution to this, nor any genuinely satisfactory answer; nevertheless, it answers in the inner distress. It answers by speaking. The biblical answer is protest, the cry of anguish, accusation, and expectation – “How long? Have you forgotten us? Have you forgotten who you are, o God?” Faith speaks because it goes deeper than the inner distress, and is nourished by hope’s defiance. Many factors can block our view, dull our eyes, and spread the contagion of hopelessness. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is impossible for us to profess the optimistic faith in divine providence which came so naturally to earlier generations, whose life was successful but who perhaps saw less. A thousand truths assault our faith in God’s goodness, which is full of contradictions and as vulnerable as a little child in the thick of battle.
This is why we continue to speak. Hope must be proclaimed, hope must be repeated as a protest. We must urge people to hope, setting up a bulwark against pessimism and all the forces that destroy life. We must remind one another unceasingly of the signs that point to the deepest forces in life and are stronger and truer than the signs that point to annihilation.
In the depths, our words of hope draw their nourishment from faith in a God whose hands tremble, who is familiar with abandonment, a God who resembles the cherry-tree defiantly blossoming unseen on barren ground, a God who has a face like the Son of Man.
But a Son of Man
who knew us
and knew everything,
and possessed the healing word
and help
where the others merely pronounce judgments
and raise cold eyes;
a Son of Man –
oh, why are you no longer here on earth!
Garborg was right to reject the overwhelming, power-hungry Father. If he had persevered in his search, his appreciation of the Son of Man might perhaps have restored the Father to him. The reader perceives this possibility in the silent wonder at the close of his novel: “If I could live a few more years, and lead a new life, I believe that I could still find the Father.”
[1] Chapter from Notto R. Thelle, Seeking God’s Face: Faith in a Time of Perplexity, Paulist Press, 2008.
Blueberry ledges, photo by John R. Boettiger (2001)