THE
BEDROCK OF RELIGION
The Story
On one occasion Mother Teresa
(now Blessed) was visiting a poverty-stricken village in South America. She was
by then quite famous, and in her entourage was a clutch of press
correspondents. As she approached the village perimeter the children ran out to
meet her, screaming with joy, kissing and tugging at her hands. The press
correspondents began quizzing each other about what the poor villagers would
ask of Mother: tin sheets for their shanty houses, second-hand clothes from
Germany, milk power that had become synonymous with Mother Teresa? Imagine
their surprise when the villages came out to greet her, arms outstretched, with
the plea: “Mother, give us God! Mother, give us God!”
Reflection
Like the elders of that
poverty-stricken village each one of us can say, “Mother, give me God. Give me
God!” I want God, I just want him; give me God. This is my ultimate desire, the
exhaustive, absolute, and eternal consummation. I am in God, and God is all in
all. He made me in order to possess me, as if he were incomplete without me.
What compelled God to create me? Was there a higher impulse than himself that
made him freely decide to create me? As there can be nothing higher than God,
that very impulse is God. That is why God is pure dynamic, unalloyed, limitless
power, creating without loss or diminution. This power is love, a concept that
is explanatory of the same reality. God=Power=Lover, creating me for himself.
Each one of us desires to measure up to the divine expectation, which is
possible by his mercy.
What is love? Love is the
effective desire for the good of the other. Every good is a participation of
the total good that is God, which explains why every being is good. And that is
also why my happiness is to be found, not in earthly or emotional pleasure, but
in the perfection of being. Good is what God has implanted in our being and not
anything that we can invent or fabricate. And since he has created us free we
can freely discover the good that God desires for us. Happy the man whose free
choice of the good in every circumstance coincides with God’s desire. Then he
is truly godly, godlike, a participant of the divine nature. From now on he
shares the divine impulse to create the good. Let goodness spread.
Philosophy of the Good
Man’s good, well-being and happiness consist in the
development and flourishing of the dynamic tendencies inscribed in his nature;
tendencies such as education and art, relationships and community, self-giving
and consummation. The activation of these dynamics are monitored by and swept
up into faith, divine faith, in fact, which is the objective fact of God’
self-giving to man and man’s acceptance. It is in the interplay of this mutual
surrender that the movement of man’s nature towards fulfilment can be achieved.
In this sense man’s nature is already stamped by the supernatural existential.
This, be it noted, is no claim on the supernatural as something earned or
deserved, but only a benchmark that a supreme gift is anticipated in hope,
animated by faith. From beginning to end and for all eternity man remains pure
receiver and God pure giver.
Characteristic of Human Nature
What is the essential
characteristic of human nature? In philosophy man is defined merely, though correctly,
as “rational animal.” Now when faith illumines and elevates human nature man
becomes that rational material that can be moulded and shaped in the hands of
God into a new being that is godlike and transcendent. Thus understood, by the act of natural
creation human nature is endowed by that quality without which it would be less
than human, a quality that specifies humanity itself, and that quality is the
radical intentionality towards total truth and total good, which we call God.
This characteristic is not something adventitious but it is given at creation
and is the most fundamental factor of human nature.
The very essence of man is
his hunger for God. Good put it there when he created man, and man is
unintelligible without it. This hunger is not merely an open capacity, nor even
a power that can grasp and possess God by its own potential. It can only wait
and pray and thirst for God to descend and give himself, and that by a
supremely free act. This divine descent activates and enables this capacity in
man to accept and retain the divine presence. Even though he created man in
such a way that man can be fulfilled only by him, yet God is no way constrained
to give himself to man. He is entirely free in this matter.
God is free to give, and man
is free to receive. Man is also free, by God’s gift, to refuse. Instead of
satisfying his hunger for God’s self-gift, as he was made to, he can attempt to
divert the radical intentionality by affirming and possessing things of
ephemeral value and thereby deny or frustrate the essential tendency towards
God. This spells misery for him, whereas he should have subsumed all creatures
and limited goods into the grand sweep of the radical intentionality; after
all, creatures are good in themselves by participation in the supreme good. The
secret of the good life is to learn how to assimilate all creatures and
situations into the grand procession to the divine realm. This is best done by
service to humanity and material creation.
Supernatural Faith
God created man in such a way
that man could receive, accept and rejoice in God’s free self-gift to him. One
can dare to say that God created man so that God could have faith in man. This
is why faith is supernatural inasmuch as God alone is capable of it. As soon as
man wakes up to God’s loving intent of self-giving and accepts the same, he in
turn makes an act of faith. Thus, man’s act of faith is secondary, yet
supernatural since it is empowered by divine faith (i.e. God’s act of faith in
him).
Bedrock of formal religions
This covenantal (not
contractual) relationship between God and man is the bedrock of all formal
religions with their accompaniments of rituals and hierarchies. Religious
fundamentalism, crusades and jihads are precipitated when the formal structures
slide away from the foundation common to all faiths. They need to be pulled
back on to their common foundation and so become houses built on rock, the
common substratum that does not distinguish between different rituals. Humanity
is a diverse community; diverse not only in terms of race, but also in terms of
language, culture and national ambition. This diversity is a source of
richness, as every drop of humanity reflects a Creator who has imprinted within
the hearts of all men and women, irrespective of the disparity, a “divine
character”. All the creatures of the one God should not be strangers or enemies
to each other without common ground whereon to show their friendship and the
peace between them. Diversity enhances the sublime nature of the unity.
Humanity comes to understand that what separates is as God given as what
unifies, and that what separates also serves the unity. A conscious agreement
to a set of beliefs by peoples as racially and culturally distinct as can be
empowers the agreed beliefs with a strength that transcends all possible
distinction.
The Church of Christ
It is on this foundational
rock that Jesus has built his church. Peter, “the rock”, stands for common
human nature. His church is the renewed humanity promised by God himself
through the prophets. This is how the treatise on ecclesiology begins.
Sacraments, liturgy, ritual, dogmas, hierarchy, paraliturgy, devotions and
novenas, charismatic conventions, pilgrimages and festivals; all these are
outcrops and supports of that most fundamental reality, namely, that man is
made for God. To be absorbed or lost in the symbols and supports is to miss the
reality.
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