{"id":54,"date":"2010-07-15T10:34:01","date_gmt":"2010-07-15T10:34:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ipsinaction.com\/ips\/?p=54"},"modified":"2024-06-20T15:43:46","modified_gmt":"2024-06-20T15:43:46","slug":"rahner-god-is-far-from-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/?p=54","title":{"rendered":"Rahner: God is Far From Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Allison R.<\/em><\/p>\n

Not long ago, Caravaggio\u2019s painting of the Supper at Emmaus was on display at the Art Institute.\u00a0 It is, at least to me, one of the most beautiful paintings in the world, because of the great truth in it.\u00a0 The disciples are reacting in astonishment to the risen Jesus as Jesus lifts his hand to bless the bread and the wine, while an innkeeper looks on in bewilderment.\u00a0 Jesus is looking down, and smiling a little, but very sadly.\u00a0 This is not surprising, since the next line of this story in Luke\u2019s Gospel is one of the saddest things I have ever read.\u00a0 It says, \u201cTheir eyes were opened, and they knew him, and he vanished from their sight.\u201d<\/p>\n

The writer of the Gospel strings these three movements breathlessly into one sentence, or at least most of the English translations do.\u00a0 Their eyes were opened, they knew him, and he vanished.\u00a0 As I once heard an old gentleman at my church observe with disgust about the preacher of a very short sermon, \u201cHe was over before he got started.\u201d<\/p>\n

But why?\u00a0 Why does he always seem to leave just when we start to recognize him?\u00a0 Why, in another story, wouldn\u2019t he let Mary Magdalene touch him or cling to him just when she seemed to need it the most?\u00a0 Why does it so often seem to be true that he is gone just when we<\/em> need him the most?\u00a0 If he gets lost in our daily lives at times, isn\u2019t it because he sometimes seems all too easy to lose?<\/p>\n

Karl Rahner writes beautifully of this experience in his essay \u201cGod Is Far From Us.\u201d\u00a0 He begins this essay by writing, \u201cWe suffer not only from lacking the contentment and the carefree security of life, not only from sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, but above all \u2013 dare we be bold to say how it really is? \u2013 we suffer because God <\/em>seems to be far from us\u201d (Rahner, p. 216).<\/p>\n

Our experience of life and the world, then, can unfortunately be a challenge to our experience of God.\u00a0 One part of the problem, according to Rahner\u2019s theology, is that although God is indeed present in our everyday lives, God is also absolute mystery.\u00a0 And our first impulse when faced with any mystery, especially in a society raised on Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, is to solve it.\u00a0 We expect there to be a cognitive solution to the problem of God\u2019s seeming absence, and there does not seem to be one.\u00a0 On the level of our experience and our cognition, God\u2019s presence or absence is just mystery.\u00a0 But if we consider it as freedom and as love, it becomes holy mystery, which is a very different experience.<\/p>\n

Holy mystery is the mystery that we don\u2019t get to solve, the mystery that is not there to be solved.\u00a0 It is not categorical knowledge, the kind that we\u2019re used to.\u00a0 We might say that in order to try to understand why God so often seems distant, we might need to begin seeing in a different way.\u00a0 Reasonably enough, because of our human experience and limitations, we expect becoming closer to God to mean gaining more knowledge about God.\u00a0 We want to know more and to learn more.\u00a0 But Rahner would say that becoming closer to God actually means becoming closer to mystery.<\/p>\n

Rahner would say that this holds true even after death.\u00a0 Most of us have probably imagined that after death, we will experience something rather like the climactic scene in a mystery novel, where everything is explained by the detective.\u00a0 It is finally revealed why everything was the way that it was.\u00a0 But Rahner does not believe that this is what we should expect.\u00a0 He does not even seem to say that we will be any closer to understanding God than we are now.\u00a0 We may be in union, or, as is often said, face to face with God, but that does not equal gaining any more cognitive knowledge.<\/p>\n

Rahner ends his essay on this subject by writing, \u201cOur poor heart, that now in Jesus Christ shares with him the night, which to the believer is nothing other than the darkness of God\u2019s boundless light, the darkness that dazzles the eyes, the heavenly night, when God is really born in our hearts\u201d (p. 220).\u00a0 Luke\u2019s Gospel says that Jesus vanished from the disciples\u2019 sight, but not that he vanished altogether.\u00a0 Was he really gone?\u00a0 In an essay about paintings of the resurrected Jesus, Anglican theologian John Drury writes that Mary Magdalene, when she is implored not to touch the resurrected Jesus, is learning how to love him in a different way.\u00a0 It is not the way of physical touch that she is used to, but it is not any less important.\u00a0 A Savior who cannot be touched, Drury says, is a Savior who can never be taken away.\u00a0 Rahner might agree that learning to find God is about learning to see, and to love, in a different way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Allison R. Not long ago, Caravaggio\u2019s painting of the Supper at Emmaus was on display at the Art Institute.\u00a0 It is, at least to me, one of the most beautiful paintings in the world, because of the great truth in it.\u00a0 The disciples are reacting in astonishment to the risen Jesus as Jesus lifts read more <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4671,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions\/4671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}