IPLW-Faith, “The Five Passages of Faith,” pp. 57-60
Is it Possible to Live This Way? Vol. 1 Faith
With this section we begin the second chapter of the book Is is Possible to Live This Way? An Unusual Approach to Christian Experience, Vol. 1: Faith. This chapter is called “Freedom” and will explore Msgr. Giussani’s understanding of what human freedom is really all about, and how faith — properly understood — is necessary for freedom. He begins the chapter with a quick review of what he calls the Five Passages of Faith. Since I have not been the best at making these posts in a timely fashion, as I had hoped, it would probably be best if I reviewed these Passages as well.
First, Faith is a fact, it is a fact that takes the form of an event, and this event has the form of an encounter. It is an encounter with another person that gives you something of a shock that causes you to discover something new. Personally, this is the most exciting insight for me. Being that I spent half my life as a student and academic, I often fell into the trap of thinking that I could reason my way to the truth. Rather the truth is something that must be discovered in a determined moment. We are “surprised by truth.” Why? Because ultimately Truth is a Person, Jesus Christ, and discovering truth is a gift that we receive from God. It happens in our encounter with Jesus.
Looking back, I am amazed that I am involved in the Movement of Communion and Liberation. When I first met Luca and Daniel, the first two people in the Movement I met, while I enjoyed their company and our time together, I really did not “understand” what Communion and Liberation was about. There was a lot of talk of “method” but I did not understand what they meant by that. Yet in my encounter with those two people, I recognized that truth was there and I wanted to follow it.
This leads to the second Passage of Faith. This encounter is exceptional. In a sense, we have many encounters everyday. We say hello to many different people. But those “meetings” with others are usually very ordinary. The encounter that leads to Faith is exceptional. What makes something exceptional? When it corresponds to the deepest longs/desires of our heart. As I mentioned above, when I first met Luca and Daniel, I did not really understand (with my intellect) what they were talking about, but I knew that I had these very strong desires, the desire for God, and I recognized that they were talking about that, and journeying towards God, and I knew I wanted to go with them. Go back to the example that Msgr. Giussani refers to over and over again, the encounter that Andrew and John had with Jesus, as described in the first couple of chapters of John’s Gospel. Andrew and John were devout Jews. They prayed and reflected deeply on the Scriptures. They knew and embraced their deep desires for the Divine. It is what first drew them to the preaching of John the Baptist, and when they heard him say about Jesus, “Behold the Lamb of God,” they knew that they had to follow Jesus. At the end of that first day with Jesus, when they responded to His invitation to “come and see,” they didn’t really understand what He was talking about. They did not know that He was God in the Flesh. However, they recognized that His words spoke to their heart, to their ultimate desires, so they knew they had to follow Him.
This exceptionality of the encounter creates wonder, the third Passage of Faith. Wonder is an excitation of not just the emotions, or even the intellect, but an excitation of the soul, of our spirit. This excitation, this wonder leads to the forth Passage of Faith, the secret question. Who is this man? Is it possible to live this way? How can this happen?
The fifth and final Passage of Faith points to us. It is where it becomes our responsibility to act. Up to this point it has all been grace, but now we need to decide to act. Will we bow our heads and follow, or will we turn away? It requires a fully human act, since the exceptionality of the encounter touches the core of our heart, our being. This is where our freedom comes in. Andrew and John did not understand fully with their intellects what Jesus was saying to them, but they recognized the correspondence between what He was saying and the desires of their hearts. In their freedom they chose to follow Jesus. In my encounter with Luca and Daniel, I did not understand all that they were talking about, but I recognized the correspondence with what my heart was searching for, and so I literally, after about a month passed, decided that I needed to continue my companionship with them so I called and set up another time to get together with them, which lead to a commitment to do “School of Community” (which I had no idea what that was) together each week.
It might seem that after such an exceptional encounter that we really do not have the freedom not to follow, but we only need to look at the Gospel for evidence to the contrary. In the 6th chapter of St. John’s Gospel, after Jesus gives the beautiful “Bread of Life discourse” when He says that He will give us His flesh to eat and His blood to drink, it says that many of those who followed Him followed Him no more (John 6:66; incidentally, the only passage in the New Testament where the chapter and verse numbers are 666). Of course there were also those, who like St. Peter, responded to Jesus’ question of whether they would also leave Him, with “Lord, where would we go? You alone have the words of eternal life.” Or after Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, while many were astonished and praised God, others ran off to plot His death. Clearly, our human freedom is being exercised, and to the full, when we have such an exceptional encounter.
How could people walk away from an exceptional encounter? It is unreasonable to not follow that which corresponds to the deepest desires of our heart, so how is it that some people in their freedom do just that? It is because of their preconceptions. They have become so attached to a particular position, belief, feeling, whatever, that they refuse to see the evidence, and no longer see the truth. Louis Pasteur faced this when he talked about microbes as the cause of many diseases. It was his fellow scientists who rejected him and even tried to have him committed to an insane asylum (who could believe in something they could not see?). For them to accept Dr. Pasteur’s theory would cause them to toss out much of what they believed. (I can’t help to think that something like this might be happening with Intelligent Design’s challenge to Darwinian evolution. While clearly there is evidence of an evolutionary process, Darwin’s followers are seeking to make God’s work in creation irrelevant, or just to deny God — a journey that Darwin himself made, from being a believer to becoming an agnostic, to finally rejecting the idea of God completely. Intelligent Design, while acknowledging the evolutionary process in many things, points to examples of “irreducible complexity” which cannot be explained by random evolutionary processes, and indicating an Intelligence acting. It is not Creationism.)
Lent is a time to look at what preconceptions we have in our lives that keep us from searching for the Truth. These are the real scandals in our lives. By becoming aware of our preconceptions we can in freedom decide to let go of them, and this frees us to pursue the truth.
