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(Veni Sancte Spiritus…)
“Upon my bed at night, I sought Him whom my heart loves. I sought Him but I did not find Him. I will rise, then, and go about the city, in the streets and crossings I will seek Him whom my heart loves. I sought Him but I did not find Him. The watchmen came upon me as they made their rounds of the city. “Have you seen Him whom my heart loves?” I had hardly left them when I found Him whom my heart loves. I took hold of Him and would not let Him go till I bring Him to the home of my mother, to the chamber of her who gave me birth.”
My dear sisters in Christ,
In our final conference of yesterday, we spoke of the Bible as being an interpretation of historical events made in the light of Faith. We said that anyone not sharing the Faith of the Sacred Authors would never have seen any deeper significance in those events, and they certainly would not have seen in them the direct intervention of a Personal God. It stands to reason, then, that Faith is of prime importance in the life of anyone who is seriously searching for spiritual and human perfection through union and communion with the author of all creation. Faith is important because it is both the point of departure of our spiritual journey and the safe sure path along which we travel.
The passage from the Canticle of Canticles that I have just read to you lends itself remarkably well and quite beautifully to interpretation in terms of Faith. It helps us to perceive the inability of finding God by the use of our natural faculties, and to see that we must transcend nature in order to encounter Him. Please bear with me as I try to explain it.
“Upon my bed at night I sought Him whom my heart loves.” Our bed at night represents our own mysterious selves, all the things that go to make up the unique, incommunicable and complex human person that we are. The expression “my heart loves” signifies our instinctive longing for a support to cling to. It is our heart – or will –, which is the faculty by means of which we adhere to reality under the aspect of goodness. We are able to love because our self-awareness, the internal testimony of our being that we are created and finite, brings about in us a leaning and an open-ness toward the uncreated and infinite. We say we love because our search reveals that we are persons and that we need therefore to relate to and identify with another person. We do not; obviously find any constituent element of our individual concrete human nature to be the Person who is subsistent being and supreme goodness. We are forced to rise up to go and look elsewhere.
And so we go to look for Him about the city. We look for God – it is He whom our heart loves – among all the realities, all the good things presented to us by our faculties of sense. But we soon discover that no good thing which is apprehended by our sense reveals itself as the supreme Good and Self-sufficient reality. We have looked for Him whom our hearts loves and we cannot find Him. Then we chance upon the watchmen of the city. We awaken one day to the power of intellect and speculative reason. We ask them if they can direct us to Him who is the very ground of all being and all reality, so that we may cling to Him for our heart loves Him. But the watchmen don’t even attempt to answer. The God who revealed Himself to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Israel, who had to take the initiative and enter into creation from without utterly, transcends the categories of human thought. Our intellect and speculative reason simply cannot grasp Him.
Now we come to the really significant part of the passage: “I had hardly left them when I found Him whom my heart loves”. As soon as we get beyond trying to understand God, we then come upon Him. Once we leave reason and speculative intellect behind, we enter into the realm of Faith. And it is by Faith that we grasp Him and hug Him to ourselves. When we hold Him by Faith we will not let Him go. We cannot afford to. The text continues, “Until I have brought Him to the home of my mother, to the room of her that bore me.” This we can (and must) interpret in two ways. According to our modern English meaning of until, it means we cling to God in Faith until we reach Heaven, the home of the Church triumphant, the chamber of her that gave us spiritual birth. In the Biblical sense of until it means ‘and afterwards’ or ‘with the result that’. According to this meaning, the line must be interpreted: “with the result that we bring Him to our daily life, to every sphere of human activity – to humanity itself – to the secular city, “for it is secular humanity that is our first and our natural mother.
We can say, therefore, that Faith is a way of knowing that does not make use of our natural faculties of knowledge. It is a supernatural faculty bestowed upon us by God enabling us to grasp Him under the aspect of truth and to present Him to the will as Goodness itself. Faith is both light and darkness to the intellect. It is like darkness because it represents God by means of assertions, which cannot be explained or understood by human reason. It is light because it introduces one into the realm of God, a light who is otherwise inaccessible. This feature of Faith is well signified by the cloud, which separated the Israelites from the Egyptians on the Egyptian side of the Red Sea. It was a cloud (according to the Vulgate translation), which was dark, yet gave light to the night. Faith not only transcends the intellect, it also purifies and elevates it, and renders it capable of being united to God in that by Faith we really know Him.
We see, too why Faith is called a kind of death. Faith requires that we relinquish both the testimony of our senses and the conceptions and judgments provided by the intellect. This is never easy. We have an instinct of self-preservation regarding our psychic life that is surely as strong as our instinct to preserve bodily life. But what really dies when we make Faith the basis of our life is self-love. Faith does not deprive us of any information concerning the material and spiritual realities which surround us, although it comes to us second-hand, in virtue of another person’s grasp of what constitutes truth and goodness. Faith is death to self-love because it requires an act of profound humility, namely, that our own native ability to grasp the true and the good is inadequate, or at least not as trustworthy as that of another person’s. But at the same time that we relinquish the testimony of our senses and our intellect in regard to what God really is, we do make an act of supreme confidence in their native pose and ability to discover truth and reality indirectly. This is because we cannot make an act of Faith unless we have first judged that the other person, whose testimony we accept, is worthy to be believed. Our senses do find full scope for their activity when we are in the presence of this other person, and our intellect does have the opportunity to apply itself to the task of reasoning upon the data provided by the senses. The judgment we spoke of and which establishes the obligation to believe the person who reveals God to us must be based upon our own sense experience and intellectual perception of this person as thoroughly good, that is, incapable of hurting us (or even of wanting to) and as intellectually competent, that is, incapable of being mistaken. We say this explicitly when we make an act of Faith such as we learned as children. We say to God: …because you have revealed it, who can neither deceive nor be deceived.
What we have been doing just now, though we haven’t mentioned it outright, is showing how closely Faith in God is related to Faith in human beings. We know many things about God, yet, unless we are bona-fide mystics, we know it only because someone told us. We have learned our Faith from our parents and from our priests and from our sisters. A small child ordinarily has no trouble accepting the word of the grown-ups who surround it with love and concern. A child knows instinctively that its parents, who provide for all its needs can be trusted to give it what is good and to protect it from what is harmful.
When the child has grown older and begins to think and to feel more as an adult, when it can begin to wonder about and question the motives of its parents, it may decide that they are not altogether self-less. The child may conclude that the parents married more out of reasons of personal self-interest than genuine love. A young person seems to have a very good knack for detecting ulterior motives in older people. It is said that young people are particularly perceptive in regard to priests and sisters. In fact, not only young people but grown-ups also seem to find plenty of evidence for believing that we have a pretty soft racket. They seem convinced that we are, in large part, devoted to carving out a nice cozy un-involved future for ourselves. The laity has apparently found many of us to be very petty and incapable of warmth and genuine concern in our relationships with them. I say all this not to agree with them completely, but to illustrate the kind of effect that our personal ‘goodness’ has upon the faith of others. So many of our opportunities to be a persuasive sign of the truth of our Catholic Faith go sloshing down the drain.
At any rate, the act of Faith is something that always remains within our power to make or to withhold. Faith always does require a ‘leap in the dark’, and therefore a spirit of adventure. Faith is a risk, a gamble. Faith, while it is a gift of God is still genuinely human because it is genuinely free. The evidence for judging whether another person is worthy to be believed is never so over-powering that the element of risk and of gamble is entirely removed. Our free will must intervene and command the intellect: Go ahead and jump. Jump to the conclusion that this person or that lot of persons is good and intellectually competent. So it is right here where malice and/or self-interest can enter in and prevent us from making an act of Faith. If we do not, for some reason, want to believe a person, that is, make an act of Faith based upon him as a motive, we can so easily command our senses and our intellect to discover all that is bad about that person. And we seem always to be able to find reasons. It is almost natural for us to question the sincerity of others, and to question their wisdom, or their grasp of a particular area of truth. If we don’t want to believe what they are telling us it is very easy to command our intellect to judge that someone is neither good nor in possession of the facts. Or we might say he is good, but is either stupid or uninformed. But even when we have no grounds for impugning the virtue and wisdom of another, we can still refuse to take that leap in the dark - which is the act of Faith – when we know that it will mean we have then to relinquish something or someone we have grown attached to and don’t want to be without. In fine, my dear sisters, I think we can see from this that an act of Faith is both utterly human, because it leaves to us the full use of our senses and our intellect in arriving at a free decision, and utterly divine because it requires divine grace, too. For our leap in the dark takes us beyond the sphere of strictly human competence, above and beyond the limits to which sense and reason can bring us in our search for and understanding of truth. It requires divine grace to inflict the death to self that Faith brings about. It requires divine grace to enable us to embark upon a road of humility and self-sacrifice.
An act of Faith, therefore, entrusts us to a person. This is most obvious in regard to purely human Faith, the very foundation of our interpersonal relationships. Without it we could not live in a community. If we have been fortunate in our human relationships we know that Faith can be an exhilarating experience. Imagine what it is like to leap blindly into the dark, say off the edge of a cliff. What fear and panic can grip us at a time like that! But then how do we feel when a moment later we find we are caught and firmly supported in warm, loving arms. Really, there is no joy to match it. And that is a sample of what Faith in God does to us. It enables us to plunge blindly into the unknown, to risk our lives and to place our future in doubt, to relinquish our very selves. And then, we find it has placed us in the lap of God.
It would be well for us to try to bolster our Faith by looking at some of the examples given to us by the Church. It would be best for us to look at the father of all the Faithful, Abraham himself. By considering his Faith, we will see clearly that Faith is a leap in the dark, that it is an act by which we relinquish self completely and entrust ourselves entirely to another. We will see that it involves a going beyond human understanding and intelligence.
The Lord God directed Abraham to leave his homeland and his father’s house and to go into a land of which, as yet, he knew nothing. God said He would bless him, make of him a great people and promised further that in him all the nations of the earth would be blessed. The Lord God told him further, that whosoever blessed Abraham, him also would He, the Lord, bless. And whosoever cursed Abraham, him also He, the Lord, would curse. In effect, God was promising Abraham that He would identify him closely with Himself.
In this very first communication we can see that Abraham, in doing as the Lord had bidden, had to exercise true Faith. He was being truly human, and yet he was relinquishing and going beyond what is human. He was being human in evaluating the mystical experience in which he received the knowledge of God and from God. He had to make an act of supreme confidence in himself in deciding that his communication was really from above and beyond creation, that it really came from the personal God who governs the entire world, and particularly presides over the course of human events. And this act of faith came from a man whose people had no knowledge of the one true God, who hadn’t the slightest idea of a deity that was not identified with and therefore a part of the material universe. In addition to this, he had to believe that he could become a great people by severing all ties of blood, and to make the task more difficult, he was obliged to go into a foreign land where he could not depend upon national or ethnic ties and sympathies to assist him. In this, he surely needed special assistance from God. His getting well beyond human prudence indicates that his Faith was also divine.
But great as this initial act of Faith was, God subjected Abraham to further testing and trial, for He will have us well aware of what a risk and what a gamble true Faith involves. When Abraham complained that he had no son to be his heir, the Lord God promised him that his progeny would outnumber the stars in the sky and the grains of sand upon the seashore. And when Abraham had had a son by a slave woman, God specified that His promise would be fulfilled not in the son of the slave woman, but in the son his wife Sara, who was then well beyond childbearing age, would bring forth. And Abraham, too, was quite old, being then 99 years of age. Yet Abraham still believed. And as if this were not proof enough of Abraham’s total commitment to God, God gave him the test that went counter to all human prudence and expectations. God ordered him to destroy the very son through whom all the promises would be fulfilled. That is, God asked for the way back in sacrifice. How easy it would have been for Abraham to think that it was a dream, or perhaps self-deception or that his imagination was playing tricks upon him, yet he believed and prepared to obey, and it was the Lord Himself who stopped him at the last moment. It was then the Lord knew that Abraham loved Him more than he loved his own flesh and blood, more than he loved his own most cherished dreams.
My dear sisters in Christ, it is faith like unto Abraham’s
that is being asked of us. We who are
living under vows have transcended human prudence and have committed ourselves
totally to God. We share Abraham’s
desire to be a blessing for the rest of mankind. We desire to leave numerous progeny. We want them to possess a land, that is, we want them to be
completely at home and completely happy in human society, and we are
continually tempted to use human wisdom and prudence to bring these about. Our Faith, too, is going to be frequently
tested, and these tests will grow in difficulty until the time comes when we
will realize that we also are being asked to sacrifice our most cherished love,
the love that seems to be the fulfillment of all God’s promises to us. We will have to sacrifice something nearer
and dearer to us than our very selves.
And may God grant that it may be said of us what Scripture said of
Abraham: “They believed God, and it
was credited to them as justice!”
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