The paradox of Faith: Being Loved into an Ever-Deepening Hunger for God

[[Sister Laurel, thanks for your posts on "being full of oneself" and dealing with that. I was thinking about what you have said about being loving and allowing ourselves to be loved as the way to deal with the problem of being full of ourselves. I appreciated the focus you gave to paradox in what you wrote. . . . . I agree there is a paradox involved in the fact that trying to empty ourselves really leads to a greater focus on ourselves. I am thinking that one particular instance of this is when someone begins to focus on their own imperfections and proclaims themselves as sinners! . . . It is paradoxical that when some religious people begin to speak publicly about their sin or overall sinfulness, they become more and more full of themselves, more and more in need of the love of God that is the only thing that can save anyone at all from themselves.  . . . Do you understand what I am saying here? I think it really calls for all of the things you wrote about recently, and particularly, spiritual direction.]]

Thanks for writing and especially for specifying as you do the problem of proclaiming one's sinfulness and the way this tends to lead to even greater "being full of oneself"!! I agree completely and think you have said this very well. Your comments lead me first of all to consider the way the Catholic Church handles personal sin. We do that in secret and in absolute confidence. Yes, we confess to others because we really do need to say it out loud and within the church community, not least to see it clearly ourselves, but we do not shout it from the rooftops or reveal it publicly. 

Doing this is not only not ordinarily helpful, but, as you note, it can all too easily become a form of being full of and even a proclamation of self! Even in public liturgies, though we confess many times that we are sinners and need the mercy of God, the focus is never on public confession; instead, it is on God's love and welcome of the sinner as well as on the commonality of our identities as sinners with other sinners. But our sins per se are a private matter and, generally speaking, we keep this private except with our spiritual director or perhaps a therapist or really good friend. There is a certain degree of discretion required to be reverent in this matter. To do otherwise risks very real self-aggrandizement in regard to our relationship with God and self.

The same thing happens with the intimate moments we have with God in prayer, for instance. Our prayer is also a private matter and the NT says as much, [[When you pray, go into your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.]] The question this raises is an important one, namely, do we want a relationship with God, or do we want to be known as someone who claims to have or wants to be known as having a relationship with God? One of these is worthy of us (and of God), and one of these is not. This part of the situation is not paradoxical. What is paradoxical is that the more one speaks of unusual or special prayer experiences, particularly when these are made to represent the ordinary way God comes to one, the less credible they become as instances of communication with the real God and the more they, at least apparently, reflect an overactive ego. After all, when God is trivialized in this way we neglect the fact that we are dealing with Mystery itself. Even if this is not true and one simply has a poor sense of boundaries, it is theologically unsound and pastorally ill-advised.

Again, though, I believe that the answer to the problem of ego and "being full of oneself" whenever we are speaking of loving God is to keep in mind the most basic paradox. We love God best and most truly when we allow God to love us. To love another is to want for them and to act in ways that allow them to be themselves as fully and truly as possible. With God who is Love (or, better, Love-in-act), for us to act in this way must mean that we allow God to love us as fully and truly as possible (which itself is dependent on God empowering us to do so). To speak of our loving God becomes quite difficult otherwise, and it would put the focus back on ourselves. This is why Tillich's definition of faith, for example, is so brilliant and sufficient. (Faith is "the state of being grasped by that which is an unconditional concern" ("Glaube ist das Ergriffensein von dem vas uns unbedingt Angeht") It is both paradoxical and focuses attention entirely on God and what God does. Even the term "ultimate (or unconditional) concern" (unbedingt Angeht) has to do with what we experience in light of being made for and grasped by God and God's promises --- for these really are our truest needs or "concerns" only because we are made for them by God.

Faith is a profoundly paradoxical reality; it is most really our own only to the extent it is God's "doing" within us.  I began struggling with this as an undergraduate theology student. At that time, in the midst of a discussion on grace, faith, and works, I asked if it wasn't the case that faith was a work. The professor explained the situation and concluded by saying that perhaps faith was the one "work" that was not our work at all. He did not go any further than that but left me with a puzzle I would need to figure out (he was a very fine teacher!). About a year later I was introduced to Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology and also his Dynamics of Faith. I finally began to understand how faith could be defined in terms of God's work in us and the trap of treating faith as something we did. Instead, faith is the state that results when we are grasped or taken hold of by God's Self and promises. God, quite literally "knows us" and we become the very imprint or image of God's knowing. 

Likewise, this produces in us a hunger for more. We desire or yearn to be united with God and thus, more fully and completely known by God (and also by others). Whenever we continue to allow ourselves to hunger in this way, and especially whenever we embrace whatever allows God to increase our hunger for Himself, we are acting in a way that is 1) contrary to egoism, 2) is inspired by God and 3) is the very form of suffering that Jesus plumbed the depths of himself in his life, passion, and death.

For me, this is the deepest paradox, namely, often, we know God best in our hunger and it is in the sharpening of our hunger that we know we have been drawn closer to God by Godself. As a hermit, I am coming to know that, on this side of death, the greatest consolation we can know is not so much that we are filled by God, but rather, that our hunger for God is developed, sharpened, and deepened. This profound hunger, however, can also be extremely painful since God is not only the ground and source of being, but of all meaning as well. To yearn for being and meaning and all these imply and require can lead us to the very brink of despair unless and until we realize that, paradoxically, this agonizing hunger for God is itself the deepest sign of God's presence and love we can know, entirely unadulterated as it is by egoism. Jesus' cry of abandonment, especially in the presence of so much other suffering, is at once the measure of his greatest hunger and a sign of God's undoubted love echoing within him.