Faith in Space
Like it or not, we are distant from each other. Even to those with whom we are closest, there is a distance. The question is: why is there this distance even between those with whom we share the greatest intimacy?
The other question is why Christians should care about these spaces.
The reason is that these questions go to the heart about what it means to be in communion, which as the late Avery Dulles put it in his Models of the Church, expresses the deep reality about what it means to be a member of the Church.
It is here that an interview with Eric Jacobsen on Mars Hill Audio Journal becomes relevant. In that interview, editor Ken Myers hinted that, in light of the frenetic and hypermobile society we live in, it is impossible to form real community without any reference to geography. In other words, communion between persons becomes impossible when community is separated from concrete practices in real space and time.
In a similar fashion Lumen Fidei, the first encyclical released in the pontificate of Francis, has suggested that it is impossible to speak of a genuine Christian faith without linking it to geography and space. This is because faith is not about theories and precepts. Rather, they are the secondary elements of a more primal reality, the deepening of a communion between persons, between yourself and the Triune God.
Just to prove the point, the encyclical begins with the assertion that faith is not to be found within the isolated individual. Rather, as the encyclical makes explicit in paragraph 4:
Faith is born of an encounter with the living God who calls us and reveals his love, a love which precedes us and upon which we can lean for security and for building our lives
Because of this essentially interpersonal encounter, a space must necessarily exist between the person of faith, and the God who gives faith to the believer. It is a space then that must be traversed by the person of faith.
This is why the encyclical considers it significant that the story of faith begins with Abraham’s response to God. That response is not an assent to doctrines. Primarily, that response is a leaving of his own town towards a promised distant country. While we constantly speak of the light of faith as if it is a cognitive insight that comes like a bolt of mental lightning, Lumen Fidei explicitly mentions in paragraph 9: Faith sees insofar as it journeys.
This intimate link between faith and space opens up a very fruitful avenue of theological inquiry, for it resists certain conceptions of faith that link fidelity with individual thought stricken from practice (in particular liturgy).
In addition, the matrix that the encyclical makes between faith, seeing, relation and journey, would also provide an important foundation into the central role of mystery in future discourses on faith, in a way that critiques any association of faith with full comprehension (in terms of epistemology) or full articulation (in terms of its content).
At the same time, Christians must acknowledge that the demand that we traverse of this space will be a source of struggle, for the traversing of space throws up obstacles that neat, untextured concepts do not. Pastorally, it could risk comparing oneself with others to see if our faith is “going further” than others.
It is here that Francis’ constant refrain of “accompaniment” with those that struggle becomes pertinent. It is not an indulging of another’s weakness, but becoming an instrument of God’s raising up of those that are bowed down. This is not a celebration of your faith being better than others, because who knows, you might one day be needing accompaniment yourself as we move through this vale back to the Father.
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