Prayer was the glue that enabled my freedom.
—James Foley, American journalist assassinated in Syria on August 19, 2014
NICOLAS DIAT: How would you define the word “faith”?
ROBERT CARDINAL SARAH: Faith is like the response of an engaged couple. By their “yes”, which will involve their whole lives, two beings dedicate their love. This loving sentiment is based on a mutual faith that gives credit to the other and counts on his fidelity in the future. Thus the two become one flesh. In their love, each one humbles himself before the other, flourishes and grows in the other. “Love has grown in me”, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux used to say timidly and vigorously. In faith and love, God grows in me and lifts me up to him. But faith is also a gift from God, because man always responds freely to the call of heaven. This is not about some theoretical response, but about a personal experience of God, as he is.
In responding to God, we base our life on him, and the Father places his hope in us. God always wants to conform man to his image and likeness. It is important to understand that faith is a covenant of love that causes us to become one and the same being with the beloved person.
In his book The Sign of Jonas,1 Thomas Merton wondered whether it was possible to declare that “by Love, the soul receives the very ‘form’ of God.” In the language of Saint Bernard, this form, which we could associate with a divine likeness, is the identity for which we are created. And so we can say: “Caritas haec visio, haec similitudo est” (Charity is this vision, this sameness). Through love we have a direct resemblance to God, and through mystical love, we “see” him here below, in the sense that we already have the experience of God as he is in himself.
Faith is the most beautiful experience of God. One extraordinary example of this is given by Abraham. After hearing a call, he set out with confidence. We are the children of Abraham, our father in faith, and we belong to the lines of the spiritual descendants of the people of the Exodus, traveling through the desert. In the same way, Christians are also the children of Jesus’ disciples, those who followed him. Thus, faith can be defined as a spiritual walk that is led and guided solely by God’s voice. To put it differently, I would say that faith is adherence to a word that is known to come from a place farther on and higher than me. The whole Bible ceaselessly unfolds this providential gift.
Faith is also an act that gradually and definitively transforms us. Since Abraham had to agree to sacrifice his son Isaac, the son of the promise, faith is an act that makes us radically different. After the trial of the sacrifice of his son, neither Abraham nor Isaac was the same; Isaac was no longer the same son for Abraham. He had been given and commended to God; he became the sign of another filiation. Similarly, Abraham no longer lived merely as the man who had received a gift from God: the gift of his son Isaac. Now he was the one who had agreed to be dispossessed of this gift and to recover it as a spiritual heritage.
In fact, faith is always a Paschal journey in search of the Father’s will, in line with Abraham’s fidelity and obedience even to the altar on which he was to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Saint Paul defines faith as obedience to the Father (Rom 1:5; 16:25). Yet we must understand that our obedience can lead to the mountain of sacrifice. Thus, the journey of faith is the journey of man’s consent to God’s will. The Father’s commandments are always a charter for life that requires our loving consent. Faith consists of willing what God wills, loving what God loves, even if that leads us to the Cross.
We place our faith in Jesus Christ. We rely on him, because he is “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (Heb 12:2). Through him, we say “Amen” to God for his glory (2 Cor 1:20). The word amen, in Hebrew, refers to something firm and worthy of confidence. This word, therefore, expresses the response of man’s fidelity to God’s fidelity in Jesus Christ. We can rely on God as though on a rock, with the conviction and assurance that, even though it is situated on the edge of an abyss, it will not crumble. In a relationship of faith, God is my stronghold, my fortress, and my rock.
Faith does not presuppose any guarantees. The believer walks in the dark, like a pilgrim seeking the light. What he knows he knows only in the half-light of evening, walking with the help of a cognitio vespertina and not yet of a cognitio matutina, a knowledge of clear vision, according to the beautiful terminology of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas.
If I may refer to a very suggestive medieval etymology, I cannot forget that the verb to believe, credere, supposedly meant also cor-dare, “to give one’s heart” and to place it unconditionally into the hands of an Other.
The man who believes agrees, like Abraham, to become the prisoner of the invisible God; he agrees to let the Father possess him in obedient listening, docility of heart, and the lights of his intellect. His walk toward God is consent and abandonment, without expecting to benefit from reassuring guarantees. Saint Paul gave us this magnificent program: “I press on to make [the resurrection from the dead] my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Phil 3:12).
In April 2014, Pope Francis recalled in a homily that he gave at Saint Martha’s that “Christianity is not a philosophical doctrine, it is not a program of life that enables one to be well formed and to make peace. These are its consequences. The Cross is the mystery of the love of God who humbles himself. There is no Christianity without the Cross. There is no way for us to abandon sin unaided. Christ humbles himself to save us. And so just as in the desert sin was lifted up, here God made man was lifted up for us. And all of our sins were there. One cannot understand Christianity without understanding this profound humiliation of the Son of God, who humbled himself and made himself a servant unto death on the Cross. To serve.” The Holy Father added: “The heart of God’s salvation is his Son, who took upon himself our sins, our pride, our self-reliance, our vanity, our desire to be like God. A Christian who is not able to glory in Christ Crucified has not understood what it means to be Christian. Our wounds, those that sin leaves in us, are healed only through the Lord’s wounds, through the wounds of God made man who humbled himself, who emptied himself.”
I like this reflection by the pope very much, because it shows that faith is a commitment of our entire being. Faith taken to its ultimate degree is an absolute act of dispossession in God. On this earth, I think that the Carthusian monks, the sons of Saint Bruno, who place all their hope in God, are one of the finest examples of lives given entirely to God. In their hermitages, nothing matters anymore except divine hope.
How exactly can this hope be summoned up?
Hope is nothing other than Christian optimism. It allows man to remain firm in the faith, fully assured by God’s promises. In hope, God is the guarantor of my future and of my serene stability. Christians must always be optimistic and joyful; but this is an attitude that results from faith in the power of a God who never loses a battle so that man might experience peace and glory with him. Faith is the foundation of hope, a new dimension of man that leads him toward divinity. And so, in his Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul writes: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom 5:1-5).
Since our faith and our hope rest in God, we have nothing to fear. The Christian can say with assurance: “And now, Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you. . . . I am silent, I do not open my mouth; for it is you who have done it” (Ps 39:7, 9).
In 2007, in his encyclical Spe salvi, Benedict XVI wrote brilliantly about hope: “ ‘Hope’, in fact, is a key word in Biblical faith—so much so that in several passages the words ‘faith’ and ‘hope’ seem interchangeable. Thus the Letter to the Hebrews closely links the ‘fullness of faith’ (10:22) to ‘the confession of our hope without wavering’ (10:23). Likewise, when the First Letter of Peter exhorts Christians to be always ready to give an answer concerning the logos—the meaning and the reason—of their hope (cf. 3:15), ‘hope’ is equivalent to ‘faith’. We see how decisively the self-understanding of the early Christians was shaped by their having received the gift of a trustworthy hope, when we compare the Christian life with life prior to faith, or with the situation of the followers of other religions. Paul reminds the Ephesians that before their encounter with Christ they were ‘without hope and without God in the world’ (Eph 2:12). Of course he knew they had had gods, he knew they had had a religion, but their gods had proved questionable, and no hope emerged from their contradictory myths. Notwithstanding their gods, they were ‘without God’ and consequently found themselves in a dark world, facing a dark future. In nihil ab nihilo quam cito recidimus (How quickly we fall back from nothing to nothing): so says an epitaph of that period. In this phrase we see in no uncertain terms the point Paul was making. In the same vein he says to the Thessalonians: you must not ‘grieve as others do who have no hope’ (1 Thess 4:13). Here too we see as a distinguishing mark of Christians the fact that they have a future: it is not that they know the details of what awaits them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness. Only when the future is certain as a positive reality does it become possible to live the present as well. So now we can say: Christianity was not only ‘good news’—the communication of a hitherto unknown content. In our language we would say: the Christian message was not only ‘informative’ but ‘performative’. That means: the Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known—it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life” (SS 2).
Why, then, is Christian joy no longer understood?
For Saint Paul, joy is the distinctive mark of the Christian. Recall how he liked to exhort the Christians by telling them: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let all men know your forbearance. . . . Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Phil 4:4-6). Without prayer there is no true joy. Similarly, Paul exclaimed: “Christ is proclaimed; and in that I rejoice. Yes, and I shall rejoice. For I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance” (Phil 1:18-19). Prayer is the source of our joy and serenity because it unites us to God, who is our strength. A sad man is not a disciple of Christ. Someone who relies on his own strength is always saddened when it declines. In contrast, a believer cannot be in sorrow because his joy comes from God alone. But spiritual joy depends on the Cross. By beginning to forget ourselves for the Love of God, we find him, at least obscurely. And since God is our joy, this joy is proportionate to our self-denial and union with him.
Jesus himself invites us to live a life full of generosity, a life of giving but also of joy. Pope Francis speaks a lot about the simple happiness of the Gospel. In his apostolic exhortation Evangeliigaudium, “The Joy of the Gospel”, he writes: “With Christ joy is constantly born anew” (EG 1). The Holy Father correctly points out that it is necessary to pray daily so as not to lose this sweet fullness. The many demands of the world can torment Christian joy. One can even say that worldly happiness cannot understand Christian joy. We must be happy to follow Christ in all circumstances. The battle always proves to be rough, for there is no lack of sufferings. A smile does not come naturally when we face suffering and disappointment. If God truly possesses us, if Christ abides in us, joy always returns.
Indeed, joy cannot be forced; it springs spontaneously from an interior source that is God. His love constantly leads to true happiness. Thus, the peoples of the rich nations that have abandoned God are always sad, whereas the poor nations of believers radiate a true joy; they have nothing, but God is a constant light for them because he dwells in their hearts. I was able to observe this again during my last trip to the Philippines, with the pope, in January 2015.
Similarly, many observers tend to emphasize that Francis has placed his pontificate under the key word of mercy. What do you think?
According to the etymology, mercy, misericordia, is casting one’s heart upon someone else’s misery, loving the other in the midst of his misery. But before flooding us with its benevolence, mercy demands truth, justice, and repentance. In God, mercy will become “forgiveness”. Thus we are at the center of the Gospel message.
Forgiveness is the most striking face of God’s love for mankind. Thus Saint Peter asked Jesus: “ ‘Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven’ ” (Mt 18:21-22). In other words, tirelessly.
Indeed, we must love as God loves. God knows man’s failures and great weaknesses, but he casts his Heart upon our misery. God rejoices to forgive us. Forgiveness is beginning again to love with more gratuitousness and generosity when love has been badly hurt.
Without God’s grace, unless we fix our eyes on the crucifix, from which we hear the voice of Jesus praying for his executioners, and unless we open our flawed hearts to graft them onto the pierced Heart of the One who comes to consume our sins with the fire of his overflowing love, it will be difficult for us to forgive, because this act requires us to give in abundance. It is necessary to be overflowing with love, it is necessary to have a superabundant love in order to attain the truth of forgiveness. The best imitation of Jesus is forgiveness. In the Gospel, the prodigal son, the adulterous woman, Mary Magdalen, are marvelous examples of forgiveness given to us by Christ to imitate.
God is forgiveness, love, and mercy; the radical newness of Christianity is found here and nowhere else. Men must forgive as God himself forgives, tirelessly. We were made by God, and it is enough for us to remember our divine origins in order to comply easily with his will, which asks us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect in his mercy. Forgiveness always allows man to be recreated, for this is an opportunity that has come from heaven. . . .
Who is this God of forgiveness?
The Book of Jonah declares that this God is “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in mercy, [who repents] of evil” (Jon 4:2).
As for Jeremiah, he reveals to us a God trembling with tenderness for Ephraim: “Is Ephraim my dear Son? Is he my darling child? For as often as I speak against him, I do remember him still. Therefore my heart yearns for him; I will surely have mercy on him, says the Lord” (Jer 31:20).
The prophet Isaiah puts it this way: God has carved us on the palms of his hands. The Father surpasses and overwhelms the tenderness of all the mothers in the world: “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have graven you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me” (Is 49:15-16).
Finally, Jesus reveals a God whose love is unfathomable. When his prodigal children return home, he gives them a lengthy embrace and restores to them their dignity as children of heaven.
God is good and beautiful, and his creatures are all in his image; Genesis, with its account of the beginning of the world, is magnificently imbued with God’s beauty. This beauty shines for man. God does nothing for himself; all creation is designed for his offspring.
God’s beauty, which is reflected in creation but can be destroyed by man, can always be reborn thanks to forgiveness. If man rejects forgiveness, he detaches himself from God and falls into a subhuman life dominated by ugliness, lying, and evil. If he accepts forgiveness, good is reborn.
How are we to understand the quest for universality that runs through the entire history of Christianity?
Man always seeks to be in a group larger than himself, so as to strengthen and develop his life. Now, from her origins, the Church has wished to include everyone in this great community of the baptized which was willed by God. She wants to gather them into a common dignity, the same destiny. In this, the Bride of Christ magnificently echoes a quest that is inherent in man himself. This is always about a desire for enrichment by turning to the other. The Holy Spirit unites and gives rise to distinct charisms: there is diversity in this unity. The other is always a treasure offered to me by God in order to enrich my humanity and to help me to grow in my own vocation. I in turn, however poor I may be, owe it to myself to promote the riches and unique qualities of the other. I, too, am a gift—as modest as it may be—for the other. We form one human family, each one contributing his own richness, in a marvelous mosaic of cultures and traditions. There are treasures of mankind that are not empty words.
Moreover, the universal must not destroy the particular identity. Over the centuries, the Church has taken care to give a dominant place to local expressions. The finest example of this has been the specific liturgical rites, such as the Ambrosian Rite, the Lyonese Rite, or the Mozarabic Rite.
The Church is one and different at each place on earth.
Today, for many Christians, it is sometimes difficult to have confidence in the future. . . .
In Christian life doubts sometimes arise, but confidence always returns. The best synonym for the word “confidence” is the word “faith”! Indeed, confidence is the best sign that man is turned toward God. His Word cannot deceive me or lead me astray. A Christian’s confidence consists of abandoning himself totally to the eternal fidelity of Christ. Today some French literature is haunted by the problem of transparency; it seems that everything has to be transparent in order for there to be sincerity. But true transparency is Christ. Confidence is born of this light of truth that is never spent. Circumstances can become difficult, winds may buffet our life, and storms may destroy our human landmarks, but Jesus remains with us always: “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green” (Jer 17:7-8).
In her meditations, Saint Teresa of Avila wrote some magnificent lines on true confidence in the Son of God: “Let nothing trouble you, let nothing scare you, all is fleeting, God alone is unchanging. Patience everything obtains. Who possesses God nothing wants. God alone suffices.”2
The nuns, by their pure, demanding way of life, show an everlasting hope in the Word of God. They possess abundantly the simple, beautiful, exemplary confidence of little children. They have confidence because God alone truly suffices for them. They know that God will not deceive them. The key to such great self-denial in everyday life is confidence, prayer, and absolute love for God. Love is a fire; this blaze inflames them with a desire that is not immediately directed toward action but, rather, toward God alone.
The entire life of nuns is dedicated to prayer. But how can prayer be defined precisely?
If man does not have a well, he cannot draw water. Similarly, without prayer, man becomes arid, because he no longer has depth or an interior life or a fountain to irrigate his soul. Prayer opens onto a limitless oasis. It does not consist fundamentally of speaking with God. Of course, it is normal that two friends should want to talk so as to get to know each other. From this perspective, Moses is a good example: he spoke with God in a sublime face-to-face conversation; the Old Testament tells us that when he emerged from these intimate dialogues, his face shone. We cannot really meet God without his light shining upon us. Through prayer we allow God to engrave on our face the splendor of his Face.
In fact, prayer ultimately consists of being silent so as to listen to God, who speaks to us, and so as to hear the Holy Spirit, who speaks in us. I think it is important to say that we do not know how to pray alone and cannot do so: the Holy Spirit is the one who prays in us and for us. Saint Paul tells us: “It is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” He continues: “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8:16, 26).
Of course, there is no doubt that men must speak to God, but true prayer leaves God free to come to us according to his will. We must know how to wait for him in silence. It is necessary to go on in silence, in resignation, and in confidence. To pray is to be able to be quiet for a long time; we are so often deaf, distracted by our words. . . . Unfortunately, we cannot take it for granted that we know how to listen to the Holy Spirit who prays in us. The more we persevere in silence, the greater chance we will have of hearing God’s whisper. Recall that for a long time the prophet Elijah remained hidden in a cave before hearing the soft whispering of heaven. Yes, I will say it again, prayer consists in the first place of remaining silent for a long time. We must often nestle close to the Virgin of silence to ask her to obtain for us the grace of loving silence and of interior virginity, in other words, a purity of heart and a willingness to listen that banishes any presence except God’s. The Holy Spirit is in us, but we are often filled with orchestras that drown out his voice. . . .
Prayer is a long time of desert and aridity when we want to go back to the easy joys of the world instead of waiting for God. When many thoughts distract us from God, it is important not to forget that the Holy Spirit is still present. The greatest saints themselves had doubts about their own prayer life, so severe was their dryness sometimes; Saint Thérèse of Lisieux even wondered whether she believed in the words that she recited in her daily prayers.
I think that prayer calls somehow for an absence of words, because the only language that God really hears is the silence of love. The contemplation of the saints is nourished exclusively by a face-to-face encounter with God in abandonment. There is no spiritual fruitfulness except in a virginal silence that is not mixed with too many words and interior noise. It is necessary to be able to strip oneself bare before God, without make-up. Prayer needs the honesty of a spotless soul. Virginity is the very essence of the absolute in which God keeps us.
God enveloped Moses’ poverty with his ineffable light. He unburdened his heart of all difficulties. Moses was stripped bare so as to hear truly the hope offered by God. True prayer leads to a sort of disappearance of our personal clutter.
When John Paul II prayed, he was submerged in God and seized by an invisible presence, like a rock that seemed totally foreign to what was going on around him. Karol Wojtyła was always on his knees before God, still, motionless, and as though dead in his silence before the majesty of his Father. In thinking of that saintly successor of Peter, I often recall this remark by John of the Cross in the Ascent of Mount Carmel: “All objects living in the soul—whether they be many or few, large or small—must die in order that the soul enter divine union.”3
God never communicates himself fully except to a heart that resembles the pure light of a summer morning full of beautiful promises.
I am not unaware of the fact that the body constantly draws us out of prayer. Man consists of imagination, too, which is skillful at taking us on long voyages far from God. . . .
And so, for a long time I have thought that prayer can take shape only in the night. In darkness, we are illumined only by God. Like Jacob, and after the example of monks, it is important to learn to pray in the middle of the night, while all creation is seeking sleep. Prayer at night plunges us back into the darkness of the death of Jesus Christ, which we commemorate during the ceremonies of the Paschal Vigil. Then, according to Thomas Merton in The Sign of Jonas, “darkness is like a font from which we shall ascend washed and illumined, to see one another now no longer separate but one in the Risen Christ.”4
Through prayer, man is recreated in the immensity of God; it is a small anticipation of eternity. Through prayer we resemble Christ, who loved to be recollected all night: “In these days he went out to the hills to pray; and all night he continued in prayer to God” (Lk 6:12).
To turn to another level, how would you define contemplation?
In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle speaks about it admirably. For him, contemplative activity is in itself the most exalted action of man on this earth. Thus contemplation is the exact opposite of practical activity; by definition, it is the most important moment in human life. He explains that the wisdom of a contemplative person includes marvelous pleasures, both by its purity and by its firmness. The wise man, even when left completely alone, can still devote himself to contemplation. The greater the wisdom, the more important is the place in life occupied by contemplation. Aristotle explains that the wise man has the duty to lead other persons to contemplative activity. He anticipates the Desert Fathers and all the contemplatives who decided to devote their lives to God, who is Wisdom and the source of all wisdom. Of course, the divine realities of which Aristotle speaks are quite far from our God and Christ. The philosopher merely calls his contemporaries to lift up their minds and hearts.
Indeed, there is in man a sort of nostalgia for God’s company. We have within us a profound desire and a will to be face to face with divinity. On the Christian level, contemplation is actually an intimate conversation with God in silence and solitude. It is impossible in the agitation of the world, but even more so in the distractions of interior noise. The tumults that are most difficult to contain are still our own interior storms.
With Christ, contemplation resembles the joy of two lovers who look silently at each other. I often think of the little peasant who used to come each day to the church in Ars. He remained for a long time absolutely immobile in front of the tabernacle. One day, the saintly Curé asked him, “What are you doing there, dear friend?” He replied, “I look at him, and he looks at me.” The little peasant said nothing, because he had no need to speak in order to tell Christ that he loved him; in return, he had no need of any sign from the Son of God, because he knew that he was truly loved. In love, words are not necessary. The more dense the life of silence, the more alone the soul is with God. And the more virginal the soul, the more it withdraws from the agitated world.
Nevertheless, we must not think that it is possible to contemplate God only in the silence of a monastery, a church, or in the solitude of the desert. John Paul II exhorted Christians to be “contemplatives in action”. In the commentary on the Gospel of John by Saint Thomas Aquinas, there is a particularly illuminating passage. Jesus turns to Andrew and John, who have asked him: “Rabbi (which means Teacher), where are you staying?” And he answers: “Come and see.” Saint Thomas thus gives a mystical sense to words that actually mean that only an encounter and personal experience can enable us to know Christ. This experiential knowledge of God in us is the heart of contemplation. Christ’s sacred humanity is always the way by which to arrive at God: to allow him to speak in the silence, before the Blessed Sacrament, looking at a crucifix, in the presence of a sick person who is another Christ, Christ himself. Each soul, of course, has its path. John Paul II used to say that although sometimes he felt that the time was ripe for him to ask God for things, on other occasions that was not the case.
For Saint Thomas, practically speaking, there is no contradiction between contemplation and activity. Thus a monk can brave a spiritual storm in his cell or in the monastery church and find God again after working in the fields. . . . Sacrifice, obedience, mortification are capable of bringing him back to the Father. Intense intellectual or manual work purifies the mind of preoccupations that make conscious union with God impossible. “Ora et labora” sums up the two paths to contemplation offered not only to monks but to all disciples of Christ.
Contemplation leads us toward the divine in an irreversible movement. The man who contemplates and encounters his Creator will never be the same again; he may fall a hundred times, sin a hundred times, deny God a hundred times, but a part of his soul has already arrived in heaven definitively.
It would be regrettable if prayer turned into long, vague chatter that led us away from authentic contemplation. Garrulous prayer does not allow the soul to hear God. This is a danger of modern life, in which silence sometimes becomes disturbing. We ceaselessly need to hear the noise of the world: today logorrhea is a sort of imperative, and silence is considered a failure. . . .
Contemplation is a precious moment in the encounter between man and God. The battle continues, but that is the price of the superb victory.
This may be a challenge, but could you sum up in a few words the search for God of which you speak so often?
Psalm 42 says: “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?” I think that these verses express the desire that is permanently in the depths of our soul; man absolutely needs God, as a newborn needs his mother.
The Father made us for himself, but our heart is anxious, divided by a dull restlessness. In fact, it is simply waiting to rest in God; he alone can satisfy us. This is why, consciously or not, we are constantly in search of the Father.
We must not be afraid of seeking him always, because God is hidden by so many events in our life, so many temptations, so many false lights that blind us; we can easily lose him.
Nevertheless, the desire for God remains engraved on the heart of man. Yes, man was created by God, for God, and God never stops drawing him. Only in God will man find the truth and happiness that he feverishly seeks. Saint Augustine spoke magnificently about this passionate attraction of man toward the city of God and, in contrast, about all the perishable charms of the earthly city.
Man wishes for what is exceptional, which is God, but he has never really encountered him. In our time of religious indifference, the search is even more vital. For temporal things are in league with eternity. Although the aridity of the era seems frightening, we must not forget that the divine source is still more present than ever. Man may search without knowing why, or he may even reject the path toward God; but his quest exists in the depths of his soul. How can we reveal this interior thirst, so as to help mankind to go beyond the veil of sensible appearances?
I think that man will never be indifferent toward God. He can try to forget him, by following fashions or by an ideological mind-set. But this timid withdrawal is merely circumstantial. In this sense, atheism does not exist. Paradoxically, the very fact of not believing is already the declaration of a repressed faith.
The Church speaks about supernatural happiness. What does this expression mean?
For theologians, beatitude consists of seeing and possessing God. On earth we do not see God; we know that he exists, but we do not see him. According to Saint Thomas, the vision of God in heaven will be immediate.
On earth, we would like to love with all our heart, but we do not succeed. Why? Because we do not see God. In heaven, our souls will be silent, perfectly docile, and transparent to the light. The soul will be immobile. Man’s perpetual restlessness on earth leads him to pursue fleeting appearances. In heaven we will possess being.
The promise of a transformation and a resurrection does not cease to astonish even after more than two thousand years. It is certainly difficult to prepare on this earth for the true happiness of heaven. The only sure method is to remain united with God, who is present in our hearts. The vision of eternity is not given to us during our present life, but we have faith, which is a way of possessing in the darkness.
In this world, certainty about God’s perfection has to be enough for us. Saint Augustine is said to have expressed this sentiment in a famous, paradoxical formula: “My God, if you were to offer to change places, so that I would become God and You Augustine, I would say: No! I prefer that you be God and that I be Augustine or whatever, what does it matter? You are my happiness, and not me.”
Christians know that at the end of time Christ will come again in glory. According to the Bible, he will be escorted by all the angels, and all peoples will assemble before him. He will separate men as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place some on his right, to live with him in eternity, and the rest, who have chosen their position, will remain separated from his light. The earthly city is not our true homeland; it is a transitory moment. We are born to take a great journey toward the city of God and to become “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Eph 2:19).
Despite this sublime destination, we are called to be God’s artisans here below, so that some drops of eternity might descend even in this world. The vision of heaven cannot make us forget that we have to combat the powers of evil that search relentlessly to corrupt mankind, God’s creation. The kingdom of God must begin hic et nunc (here and now).
On earth we have the treasure of prayer, which is the language of heaven.
In this language, all the words translate only one thought, one truth that soon invades the soul and thoroughly imbues it so as to direct and ennoble it; Christ himself proclaims this truth: I am infinite love; all that is mine I give to you so that we may be one as the Father and the Son are one (see Jn 17:22-23).
The Latin proverb says: “Soli Deo.” Does this mean that God alone must always attract man?
Man must not be turned toward himself. Precisely the opposite orientation assures him of balance and life. Man must snatch himself away from himself. As long as he is locked into his ego, his own interior prison remains a veritable hell.
“God alone” is the open road by which we can escape from ourselves.
Only the thought of God can give us at the same time freedom and purity and the balance between the two. Not by taking other men as our model, even the best of them, will we know what we should do, but rather by turning to God; he is the one who will show us what sacrifices are demanded of us, and he alone will give us the strength to make them, too.
When we are in darkness and no longer manage to see God, not even the idea of him, we must have a bit of courage while patiently remaining turned toward him. In those somber hours, we advance more rapidly toward the goal. The “tunnels” of faith are shortcuts to God; to become distracted then is to lose great graces. Many saints have experienced this. . . .
If we are faithful in always directing our soul toward the divine light, we will become luminous in turn, as flowers take on a resemblance to the sun.
The normal orientation will produce order, balance, tranquility, and peace. Then, we will be on the way to sainthood, which consists of being more interested in God than in oneself and in living by his eternal beauty.
This is the spiritual testament of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who was able to write at the end of her life: “Make every effort to walk in the presence of God, to see God in everyone you meet. . . In the streets in particular, radiate the joy of belonging to God, of living with Him and being His.”5