Friday, May 29, 2020

In Praise of Hiddenness: ON THE PARADOX OF CONCEALMENT: by a Camaldolese Hermit



In Communist countries not so long ago, the media never reported earthquakes, floods, train wrecks, disasters of all kinds, and other tragedies. Such occurrences were considered as the negation of the then prevailing dogma according to which the Soviet man must of necessity control all the events of the planet. The ideal of such a society being success, and a today always more glorious than yesterday, all disasters must therefore be concealed, denied. Catastrophes occur only in capitalist countries.

Now the society in which we live is in fact dominated by this same idol of success, of perpetual youth, of obligatory efficiency. Human pride, which tries strenuously to do without God and His laws, is unable to give meaning to earthly distresses and even simply to admit them. Among us, it is true that we are informed of our ordeals either by word of mouth, or by the press, radio, and television, but inevitably with indignation, protests, and accusations.

In short, the setback should not have occurred, and that is why we immediately look for the culprits that caused it. If something goes awry, then certainly somebody did not do his duty and should be condemned. For instance, it is even difficult to admit that an earthquake could not be foreseen and avoided. Why did not those responsible arrange everything so as to exclude all damage of goods and persons? Likewise, regarding the recent bad floods. A number of mayors and magistrates expect proceedings to start against them. . . It is certainly true that sometimes one sins by omission, but it seems that this clumsy search for culprits in all our misfortunes often has this strange idea as its underlying motive: man must be the absolute master of all, even of nature itself. To admit that certain calamities are natural and inevitable would be to agree that the human condition is fragile and, in the final reckoning, a state of death.

In the past, the faithful Christian accepted mishaps, seeing in trials a means God makes use of to punish us for our aberrations or to purify us and to prepare us for eternity. Today, a disaster is not seen at all as a challenge to faith or as a stimulus to abandon ourselves into God's hands, but rather just as a provocation to anger. Now anger supposes an enemy to shoot at, to unload on. Man's failure is a scandal and unacceptable. From the moment man wants to free himself from God, without really having the power, he needs to feel himself a victor. Success is for him more necessary than the air he breathes. He knows well, however, that "success" is not a name of God — at least not of the God of Christian revelation. But as in every error there is a grain of truth, so when the hour arrives that will put an end to history and reveal the Kingdom of God in all its grandeur, when at last the new heavens and the new earth will appear, it is then that we will be able to say that God's name is Victory.

The idolatry of success in our wounded humanity reveals itself in the great illusion that tries to mask the enormous defeat called death. The human victories of science and technology vanish with this defeat, this last enemy that will be overcome by the resurrection of Christ.

The desire for success inscribed in the depths of our being is certainly not at all condemnable in itself, for it is the natural object of all we undertake, even if it is not always attained. Success in our existence represents, without a doubt, a true value, a good that we call "merit" in our Christian tradition. We have “to merit" heaven even though, in reality, it is a question of a gratuitous gift of God. But personal success is altogether compatible with material failure; the sick, the unfortunate, the handicapped can have a greater dignity, merit, and moral worth than the worth of celebrities written up in widely circulated newspapers. It is man's lot to live with failure, but likewise to lay hold of suffering and to use it as raw material for his human and divine success, his merit, his salvation, and his glory.

Yet the temptation certainly exists among us to want to establish God's Kingdom already on this earth. This is precisely, mark well, the temptation that Jesus repulsed in the desert at the beginning of His public ministry and preaching of the Gospel: "The Kingdom of God will not be realized through a historic triumph resulting from an ever-increasing ascendancy, but rather by God's victory over the ultimate unchaining of evil, which will make His Bride descend from heaven."  This is our hope.

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