My wife and I have been reading Karl Rahner’s Everyday Faith before bed. Last night’s entry struck me as something that comes up here at Vox Nova on occasion. That, combined with the Advent theme, convinced me to share the whole thing with you here:
Patience with the Provisional (John 1:19-28)
Once again the Baptist stands before us in our advent longing and expectation. The question is put to him: What are you really doing, if you are not the real, expected Messiah? That is a language we can understand only too well. The people of advent, of waiting for God, of burning longing for the eternal, can be overcome by the most terrible and dangerous impatience that there is, a religious radicalism which has the appearance of being glorious and sublime but in reality is the contrary of the truly advent attitude.
Man thirsts for God, hopes in him, hopes that he will soon establish his Kingdom. He wills the unconditional, the radiant truth whose splendor at once burns every doubt from the mind, the radical goodness which would destroy all fear that goodness itself is only a form of self-seeking. But only precursors ever come; only beginnings are made; messengers come but always with God’s truth still in merely human words which obscure it. Those messengers of God are only men with human traits and sometimes inhuman ones. All that ever happens are God’s saving deeds (called sacraments) in human ceremonies. All these provisional things simply continue to proclaim that they themselves are not the reality. The reality is merely hidden there in all those non-real words, human beings, signs.
Then man, who even in his purest religious feeling is a sinner, may lose patience. What are you doing in religion, you human beings, words, signs, if you are after all not the reality, not the unveiled God immediately present? Then the impatient think that this God may perhaps be found outside the human beings, the words and the signs of the Church: in nature, in the infinity of their own heart, in political projects to establish for ever by force here and now the Kingdom of God. Or somewhere else. But in the end these impatient people realize, very often too late, that they have wandered into the wilderness of their own empty hearts where the devils dwell, not God; into the loveless desert of a blind and cruel nature which is only benevolent on Sunday afternoons; into the arid wasteland of the world where the waters of ideals ooze away the farther one advances; into the desolate wilderness of a politics which brings about not the Kingdom of God but simply the tyranny of naked force.
No, we are not spared it. We have to hear the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, even if it confesses: It is not I. We must have the patience of men of advent. The Church is only the voice of one crying in the wilderness, announcing that the final radiant Kingdom of God is still coming and that when God wills, not when it suits us. We cannot try to ignore that voice simply because it comes from the mouths of men; we cannot disregard the messenger of the Church because he too is not worthy to loosen the shoelaces of the Lord whose forerunner he is, or because he cannot call down fire from heaven like Elijah. For it is still advent. The Church itself is still an advent Church; for we are still waiting for him who is to come in the unveiled radiance of unconditional Godhead with the eternal Kingdom. And that Church rightly tells the impatient who want to see God directly here and now: Prepare for this God the true way, the way of faith, of love, of humility, and the way of patience with its unimpressive provisional messengers and their poor words and small signs. For then God will certainly come. He only comes to those who in patience love his forerunners and the provisional. The Pharisees of the gospel, however, who rejected the forerunner of the Messiah because he was not the definitive reality, did not recognize him who was the definitive reality either.
Brett Salkeld is a doctoral student in theology at Regis College in Toronto. He is a father of two (so far) and husband of one.
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