As a theologian and a faith person, insights on faith and hope in God have become my second nature. I love it. It gives me a lens through which I can see the world and make meaning of it. But there is also another way of speaking of faith and hope in God. This one only occurs at the crossroads of life where faith and hope lack words. They embody a turn to the radicality of life. What do you do when, as a creature of language, you lack the ability to speak, or words become an alien to your psyche? At the crossroads of life, faith and hope become an embodiment of being in the world where meaning cannot be envisioned or even imagined. Must one despair or must one keep going?
Despair is easy. After all, it gives a type of finality to a life that has become trans-linguistic because it defies the ability to be spoken of through the use of language. Despair gives credibility to the absurdity of nihilism. In despair, God is simply erased and become the completely unknown God. But God is trans-unknowing. God is transcendence that demands encounter of life. Through the encounter, one comes to know God as a benevolent and loving God.
To keep going does not mean that one knows where the journey is taking one to. It simply means that the innate energy in faith and hope, which is resilience is activated. The activation of resilience is exactly what happened to Jesus on his way to Golgotha. As he came to his own crossroads of life, where faith and hope must either be embraced or rejected, he chose to embrace them even in their hollowness. Too often, we humans are too quick to want to fill up faith and hope because we do not know what to do with their hollowness. But Jesus taught us that it is okay to embrace them even when they have been emptied of meaning. Only through their emptying can we find true meaning in them because the meaning of faith and hope is different for each of us, and it is conditioned to meet our own destinies and relationship with God. It is at the crossroads of our respective lives that we find the true meaning of faith and hope for us.
A theologian who gets this and has gone through their own crossroads of life becomes a vehicle of theology that defies words. They become embodied theology of God where God uses their entire being as the creative Logos that is now the epiphany for the times. This is exactly what martyrdom is all about. The martyrs embody a crossroad of life where their faith and hope in God is trans-logical and stripped of the pleasant words of comfort. In their desperation and anxiety before the forces of evil that are intending to bring about their death, faith and hope become sources of a new meaning and understanding of God and themselves through the ritualization of resilience. Only in resilience can faith and hope have meaning. Without resilience, they are simply words and lead to intellectual masturbation and nothing more.
It is only at the crossroads of life where faith and hope become ritualized through resilience can Christian discipleship have any meaning. In fact, the power of discipleship in Christ is found at the ritualization of resilience. This is the fuel of salvation. It is the paschal candle of life which anchors the Easter faith to the Good Friday hope.
I must say this though, that no one should ever wish on another this type of experience. No one should ever hasten another to get to their crossroads of life. We will each get there at God’s own time. To force it on another is to do unimaginable violence to their being. Only in the journey through life can one arrive at their crossroads when God has prepared the environment, the person, and the tools for the retrieval and embrace of resilience. When you go through your crossroads, you come out a being that has already started being oriented towards your own eschaton. As I read the lives of the saints, I notice this fact in each of them. When they get to their own crossroads, their lives begin to reflect deeper meanings and a type of orientation towards God that defies the distractions of language. I am conscious of Teresa of the Little Flower as I write these words. Her own crossroads allowed her to find her vocation to be a mystic of the little things in life. On a final note, just like the Little Flower, may each of us find our own resilience in our embrace of faith and hope in Christ.
Reflection on April 3, 2024.
Simon Aihiokhai Blogs 