Not by words alone

Extract

Religious experience is thickly overlayed by theological speculation and the reality of God is further and further submerged beneath theories that fruitlessly attempt to forge a connection between the Invisible and ‘ordinary’ things, between ‘the living ascended glorified personal Christ and lifeless impersonal objects, bread and wine’, as it was put recently in this magazine. Making sense of this sort of discussion is often difficult, because what is actually disputed is the very experience that the doctrine was formulated to express, the experience of God’s presence in things, which, indeed, sinks beneath the weight of words spoken about it. We are increasingly left with the empty shell of a splendid worship from which God himself has retreated.

Of course, many aspects of our faith are well served by serious questioning, but that does not always entitle us to unrestrained reflection. Sometimes speculation obscures its object instead of clarifying it, and the mind creates for itself a vacuum where once there was the immediacy of response: for example, when we begin to believe that a demonstration is required to confirm a reality that can, in truth, only be encountered. Is it not a most peculiar ability of the mind, a strange inclination towards self-destruction, to wonder about the factuality of the world, to wonder about the reality of the forest, or the person we love, or the God we inescapably find in our path ? Perhaps the mightier the experience the less we feel able to cope and the more we feel called to doubt. By putting such things in question they are indeed rendered questionable, and we are confronted with the frustrating task of proving that there is a reality that corresponds to the ideas in our mind.