Vigils Reading

PATIENCE WITH THE PROVISIONAL

By Fr Karl Rahner

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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.

We thirst for God, hope in him, hope that he will soon establish his

kingdom. He wills the unconditional, the radiant truth whose splendour 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

human beings 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 al those non-real words, human

beings, signs.

Then human beings who even in their purest religious feeling are sinners,

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 forces.

No, we are not spared it. We must have the patience of men and women 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 the voice of precursors simply

because it comes from the mouths of human beings; 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. The Church rightly tells to

prepare of this God the true way, the way of faith, of love, of humility, and the

way of patience with its unimpressive provisional messengers of 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.