SERVANTS OF AN ABSENT GOD

There is war, and it is said: “Men are evil” (and it is not hard to believe). There is a child dying, destroyed by illness, and the words die on the lips, while in the heart the question arises: “But where is God? Why does He allow all this?” In our society, greed reigns, and therefore violence and injustice, and the poorest are increasingly poorer, afflicted, and marginalized. “But why,” many ask, “doesn’t God intervene to defend them? Why does He abandon them to the bullies of history?” The absence of God puts the believer’s faith in crisis, and yet, if we open the Gospels, Jesus surprises us. Yes, that God who creates problems, says the rabbi of Nazareth, is a God who in His hiddenness gives man confidence. We read in Matthew 25:14:

For it will be like a man (the master) going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property.

If the master in the parable had not left, perhaps life would be safer. But this man, an icon of God, wants to be absent. Why? To leave the field of the world free and man can build himself responsibly within it. For this building, He leaves his possessions, generously hands them over so that they may bear fruit. Not only that. God wants to be absent so that man can choose Him not out of self-interest or fear, but driven by the awareness of the deep desire that flows through him. Furthermore, God is absent because He is the One who continually comes while man works on the great construction site of life. From this perspective, God appears closer and more supportive, and man no longer feels himself in the hands of dark and unknown forces. Furthermore, God can transform death (with its absurdity) into a new, resurrected life. A passage from Teilhard de Chardin is illuminating: “The great triumph of the Creator and the Redeemer consists, from our Christian perspective, in having transformed into an essential life-giving factor what, in itself, is a universal force of weakening and destruction (death). Precisely to penetrate us definitively, God must, in some way, dig within us, create a void, make a place for himself. (…) Death is charged with making the necessary passage. It will bring us to the organic state required for the divine Fire to rain down upon us. In this way, its ominous power of decomposition and dissolution will be harnessed for the most sublime operation of Life.” This is Who we await, this is Who awaits us at every moment and within everything we are given to experience. Somewhere, de Chardin writes, He “is at the tip of my pen, my pickaxe, my brush, my needle, – of my heart, of my thought. It is by bringing to the ultimate natural perfection the line, the stroke, the point to which I am dedicating myself, that I will grasp the ultimate Goal toward which my profound will tends.”

Commentary by b. Sandro Carotta, osb
Abbazia di Praglia (Italy)

Translation by f. Mark Hargreaves,
Prinknash Abbey