Living God from within
Some years ago, the great German theologian, Karl Rahner, dared to affirm that the main and most pressing problem of the Church of our times is “spiritual mediocrity.” These are his words: the real problem of the Church is for it “to just go on along the usual roads of spiritual mediocrity with increasing resignation and monotony.”
The problem has only become more serious these last decades. The attempts to reinforce institutions, to safeguard the liturgy, to enforce orthodoxy have been of little use. The inner experience of God in the hearts of many Christians is being extinguished.
The modern society has put its bet on “what is on the outside.” Everything invites us to live from the outside. Everything pressures us to move in a hurry, without us hardly slowing down for anything or anybody. Peace no longer finds tiny gaps through which to enter our hearts. Almost always, we live life on its surface. We are forgetting what it is like to savor life from within. So that it may be human, our life needs one essential dimension, namely, interiority.
It is sad to notice that even in our Christians communities we do not know how to take care of and foster inner life. Many people do not know what silence of the heart is and are not taught to live faith from within. Deprived of inner experience, we survive forgetful of our soul: we hear words with our ears and utter prayers with our lips, but our hearts are absent.
Much is said about God in the Church, but where and when do we believers listen to the silent presence of God in the depth of our hearts? Where and when do we welcome deep within us the Spirit of the Risen One? When do we live in communion with the Mystery of God from within?
To welcome God’s Spirit means to stop speaking only with a God that we almost always place far from and outside of us, and to learn to listen to him in the silence of our hearts. It means to stop thinking of God with the head and to learn to perceive him in the very depths of our being.
This inner experience of God, real and concrete, transforms our faith. One is surprised how one can live without discovering this before. One now knows why it is possible to believe even in a secular culture. One deeply knows inner joy that is new and different. Without knowing some inner experience of the Mystery of God, even only in a humble and simple way, it seems to me it will be difficult to keep for a long time our faith in God in the midst of the turmoil and frivolity of modern life.
José Antonio Pagola
June 8, 2014
Pentecost (A)
John 20, 19-23