Contemplation Corner: faith and hope and love for all things are engendered in the soul

“For the religious [person] is forever bringing all affairs of the first level down into the Light, holding them there in the Presence, reseeing them and the whole of the world of men and things in a new and overturning way, and responding to them in spontaneous, incisive, and simple ways of love and faith. Facts remain facts, when brought into the Presence in the deeper level, but their value, their significance, is wholly realigned. Much apparent wheat becomes utter chaff, and some chaff becomes wheat….For faith and hope and love for all things are engendered in the soul, as we practice their submission and our own to the Light Within, as we humbly see all things, even darkly and as through a glass, yet through the eye of God.” -Thomas Kelly (A Testament of Devotion).

by Pastor Donnie Brooks
Marcellus United Methodist Church
pastordonnieb@outlook.com

   Seeing things as they are is one of the most difficult things for me to apprehend. Why, one might ask? Well, on the one hand, not too different from Kelly, I’m a philosophical sort of person. That’s my default. On the other hand, also like Kelly, I’m “religious person.” I like the “facts”, but even more than the “facts.” There is no such thing as “raw data” as the famous Jesuit Catholic philosopher and theologian, Bernard Lonergan, would maintain. “Just the facts, mam/sir” may not be as accurate as we might like. We experience things, understand things, make judgments on things and make decisions about what to do with the above. That is “knowledge.” It requires a lot of deep and broad levels of awareness and critical comprehension and reflection.

   So, I’m torn. As a philosopher I need the facts to be reasonable and justifiable “facts”. So, religiously, I am aware that religious facts are on an altogether different playing field. But even so, these facts should and necessarily go through the same gamut as the knowledge that Lonergan speaks of. The richness of truth in one sphere is matched, too, by the richness of the world seen through religious eyes. Not antithetical to the truths of the world, perhaps, but fulfilling them and going alongside of them.

   What I struggle with, then, if you’re still curious as to why I may have not spelled it out directly, is that the “religious person” is often quite gullible and subject to manipulation. This is why Karl Marx called religion and “opiate”. It is also why Freud called it a “comforting illusion”. Also, perhaps, why Nietzsche, another “masters of suspicion” (as the late, Paul Ricoeur, French philosopher and theologian, called them), called them followers of a “slave-morality.” To me, however, it isn’t that we see something different or something illusory but that we see what is differently.

We might see a world full of pain not as a world to despair over, but a world to hope for and to participate and work towards its healing and transformation. The “Lord’s Prayer” or “Our Father” is prayed, not to be lost in illusion but to hope for and work towards transformation of a world to be in that light. Yes, for “kingdom on earth be as it is in heaven.” We see it now as it should be and as, we hope, it will be one day.

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