The generation of the desert
Translated from
October 16, 2012
Benedict XVI recently used an image to underscore the stakes for the Christian faith today. tested by secularization. and the pilgrimage of the People of God to be undertaken in austerity and radical trust in God.
On Thursday, October 11, 2012, exactly 50 years after the Second Vatican Council opened, Benedict XVI - surrounded by Synodal Fathers who had come from the four corners of the globe to discuss the New Evangelization - in his homily inaugurating the Year of Faith, used the image of the desert to speak of the world today.
Not that of 1962, when Christianity - or at least, its values, especially in ethics - was still the background for common references. But that of 2012, when Christianity has seen its 'exculturation', to use a term by Danielle Hervieu-Leger, at least in the Middle East where it was born and in the Western world.
The desert image is powerful. Joseph Ratzinger, who knows the Bible intimately, knows exactly what he is doing in using the image. The desert is, first of all, the place where the people of Israel spent 40 years between Egypt - which had become their land of bondage - and the Promised Land. The story of a major trial in which God's faithfulness to his Chosen People was manifested.
This is what the Pope said:
Recent decades have seen the advance of a spiritual desertification. In the Council’s time it was already possible from a few tragic pages of history to know what a life or a world without God looked like, but now we see it every day around us. This void has spread.
The void? Some will object to what they would consider a very negative verdict by the Pope on the world that surrounds us. Has not the Western world been humming as never before with thousands of human initiatives? But Benedict XVI thinks that this creative frenzy or media noise cannot possibly represent nourishment or refreshment for contemporary man.
The Pope reprises the critique of secularization which marks the current assembly of the Bishops' Synod. Many of the Synodal Fathers have denounced the adversity represented by secularization, the absence of transcendence that flattens all perspective.
The general rapporteur of the Assembly, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, DC, has denounced the 'tsunami' of secularization that has swept up Christians in the West. Some have criticized his rhetoric, claiming it is easy for him to accuse. But they ignore that the American cardinal lashed out not so much as the 'world' that facilitates this secularization, as much as at the Christians themselves who have allowed themselves to be 'desecrated', unable to present any spiritual resistance.
It is nonetheless true that our world has desecrated even matter itself. Fifty years ago, it was still considered a transgression of the sacred to throw away bread (but also because the privations of war were still inscribed in the bodies of those who had undergone them), But today, those who have never known hunger do not see it as a problem at all.
And all those wheat fields we saw during our summer vacation this year, in which the grain had not even matured - their crops were probably sold beforehand by the farmers to big business and are already the subject of financial speculation on the commodities markets of the world even before they have been harvested.
Without being particularly 'reactionary', one can also note that this society of click and twit no longer predisposes our contemporaries to a capacity for reflection or even reading. But the Bible, for instance, is a book whose cultural and historical density must be penetrated, and no one can know it intimately without a minimum of intellectual investment.
Secularization is not just an ideological universe that has rejected transcendence voluntarily, but it is primarily a way of life that affects all Westerners and from which Christians cannot extract themselves so easily.
Nevertheless, Benedict XVI does not condemn:
But it is in starting from the experience of this desert, from this void, that we can again discover the joy of believing, its vital importance for us, men and women. In the desert we rediscover the value of what is essential for living; thus in today’s world there are innumerable signs, often expressed implicitly or negatively, of the thirst for God, for the ultimate meaning of life. And in the desert, people of faith are needed who, with their own lives, point out the way to the Promised Land and keep hope alive. Living faith opens the heart to the grace of God which frees us from pessimism. Today, more than ever, evangelizing means witnessing to the new life, transformed by God, and thus showing the path..
In other words, believers - having understood that secularized society is a garden titillating with promises of happiness that can become a desert for the spirit - would be able to perceive with urgency the reality of the faith, its hope for the Promised Land and its trust in God.
The desert is a place of extreme trial and temptation. It was in the Judean desert that Christ was tempted by Satan, an echo of the temptations in the Sinai. Spiritual poverty and aridity, the fear of death, are quite real today among the Christian people of the West, in the face of the numerical decline of Christian communities and a shortage of priests.
Thus the temptation is strong to look for blame outside ourselves. One points the finger at the Church hierarchy - a very French reflex - for its incapacity to 'adapt'. But the infamous 'incurie
de la Curie' (the unconcern of the Curia) is evident at all levels, often nearest to us, in our dioceses, parishes and our 'catho' movements, many dominated by power games and inertia.
The temptation is equally great to lament a mythified past - the 'integristes' (traditionalists) nostalgic for a 'pure' Church, and the progressivists bemoaning a Church that has been 'halted in its tracks' after Vatican II, because 'conservatives have regained the upper hand'.
But Benedict XVI underscores that a return to the objective content of the Conciliar texts would allow resistance to such a temptation.
Reference to the documents saves us from extremes of anachronistic nostalgia and running too far ahead, and allows what is new to be welcomed in a context of continuity. The Council did not formulate anything new in matters of faith, nor did it wish to replace what was ancient. Rather, it concerned itself with seeing that the same faith might continue to be lived in the present day, that it might remain a living faith in a world of change.
One does not survive in the desert unless one goes onward without being discouraged. If one stops, one dies. The Catholic Church is therefore called on to move on - it has no choice. The trials she undergoes are mysteriously allowed by God so that she can trust him more. The desert can be a divine lesson even when the travelers are in the red (relative to vocations, finances, galloping de-Christianization, media derision, etc).
And the desert represented by the secularized world is also, according to Benedict XVI, a place where those who believe in Christ and those who don't (or believe less than they did) can help each other. The former can help support the latter in the reality that is most lacking in our contemporaries, hope.
In the desert, people of faith are needed who, with their own lives, point out the way to the Promised Land and keep hope alive. Living faith opens the heart to the grace of God which frees us from pessimism. Today, more than ever, evangelizing means witnessing to the new life, transformed by God, and thus showing the path.
Therein one finds the essence of the New Evangelization and the Year of Faith: Christians must be signs as well as travelling companions for their thirsty and hungry contemporaries, leading them towards the oases of repose (better yet, to be the oases themselves - which is another way of saying that they must be saints).
The Pope evokes a form of wisdom in this respect:
The journey is a metaphor for life, and the wise wayfarer is one who has learned the art of living, and can share it with his brethren... This, then, is how we can picture the Year of Faith: a pilgrimage in the deserts of today’s world, taking with us only what is necessary: neither staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money, nor two tunics – as the Lord said to those he was sending out on mission (cf. Lk 9:3), but the Gospel and the faith of the Church, of which the Council documents are a luminous expression, as is the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published twenty years ago.
In his homily, the Pope refers to the crowds who continue to make the pilgrimage along the 'way of St. James' to the Apostle's shrine in Compostela.
The physical trials of a pilgrimage on foot evoke the need to find another relationship between the body and time, but it is also an experience of austerity, as one seeks to prove whether he can live without the comforts and security to which he has become accustomed.
It is also a way of learning to live depending on those who welcome us along the way, a metaphor for the Other, and therefore an experience of grace. (I take this reflection from the very beautiful book by François-Xavier Maigre,
Sur la trace de l’Archange (In the footsteps of the Archangel), where he narrates his family's pilgrimage to Mont St. Michel).
This call for austerity is very much the line of this Pontificate. Benedict XVI sees the Church as a creative minority. She must renounce any thought of dominating consciences and of excessive bureaucratization (a leitmotif with Joseph Ratzinger).
In the desert, one must get rid of unnecessary things that will keep one from going onward, from tiring oneself out in vain, and from collapsing under their weight. Don't pilgrims experience that they can well do without things that they can get rid of in order to travel more lightly?
The poverty of the Church is a condition for her survival. (The Pope said this a year ago to the Church in Germany, which is the richest in the world.) In the desert, one must learn to depend only on the grace of God, as the image of manna suggested. And this is received in prayer and silence. The Sinai desert was the place where God drew the people to him so that they would serve him.
Ultimately, the desert is the place where one learns to be 'a child'. Where one unlearns the slavery imposed (but also often delectable) by the Pharaoh (the Israelites grieved for the food they always had in Egypt) in order to receive from God the law of life which allows man to be free, which is to say, to be a child of God. There is no true freedom without filiation.
The reference to the body of Catholic doctrine is also a Pavlovian reflex with Joseph Ratzinger, once its formal custodian. Instead of and in the place of material realities, the Pope evokes the enormous doctrinal corpus of the Gospel and the Conciliar texts, not forgetting the 'foundation' provided by the Catechism of the Church.
Does this mean carrying all that load of reading on our backs? Not quite. Benedict XVI points out that in the desert, one needs a compass in order not to get lost, especially if one also wishes to be a guide for others.
Because the subjective reality of what one lives (trust in God, based on what he has already done for us, in terms of salvation and guidance) can never be separated from an objective reality: Biblical Revelation and Tradition refined over 2000 years, a doctrinal tradition lived and embodied by the saints - men and women in every age, of every condition and origin. A pilgrim crowd that we are invited to join. Brilliant stars in the heaven of Abraham.