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Vigils Reading
April 7
THE LIFE THAT RISES
THROUGH DEATH
From “The Eternal Year” by Fr Karl Rahner2
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There is a distance of God that permeates the pious and the impious, that
perplexes the mind and unspeakably terrifies the heart. The pious do not like to
admit it, because they suppose that such a thing should not happen to them
(although the Lord himself cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me?”); and the others, the impious, draw false consequences from the admitted
facts… For when the bitter God-distance becomes a divine service, the fasting
season of the world changes into the fasting season of the Church.
The first thing we have to do is this: stand up and face this God-distance of
a choked-up heart. We have to resist the desire to run away from it either in
pious or in worldly business. We have to endure it without the narcotic of the
world, without the narcotic of sin or of obstinate despair. What God is really far
away from you in this emptiness of heart? Not the true and living God; for he is
precisely the intangible God, the nameless God; and that is why he can really be
the God of your measureless heart. Distant from you is only a God who does not
exist: a tangible God, a God of our small thoughts and our cheap, timid feelings,
a God of earthly security, a God whose concern is that the children don’t cry and
that philanthropy doesn’t fall into disillusion, a very venerable – idol! That is
what has become distant…
Do not be frightened over the loneliness and abandonment of your
interior dungeon, which seems to be so dead – like a grave. For if you stand firm
– this is already a wonder of grace – then you will suddenly perceive that your
grave-dungeon only blocks the futile finiteness; you will become aware that
your deadly void is only the breadth of God’s intimacy, that the silence is filled
up by a word without words, by the one who is above all name and is all in all.
That silence is God’s silence. It tells you that God is there.
That is the second thing you should do in your despair: notice that God is
there. Know with faith that he is with you. Perceive that for a long time now he
has been waiting for you in the deepest dungeon of your blocked-up heart, and
that for a long time he has been quietly listening to you, even though you, after
all the busy noise that we call our life, do not even let him get a word in edgewise,
and his words to the person-you-were-until-now seem only deadly silence. You
shall see that you by no means make a mistake if you give up your anxiety over
yourself and your life, that you by no means make a mistake if you relax your
hold on self, that you are by no means crushed with despair if once and for all
you despair of yourself, of your wisdom and strength, and of the false image of
God that is snatched away from you…
If we do this, then peace comes all by itself. Peace is the most genuine
activity: the silence that is filled with God’s word, the trust that is no longer
afraid, the sureness that no longer needs to be assured, and the strength that is
powerful in weakness – it is, then, the life that rises through death.
2 The Eternal Year, K. Rahner, Helicon: Baltimore MD 1964. pp 68ff.5