The Risk of Fixation on Safety
O Lover,
On the penultimate Sunday of this church year the gospel reading was the parable of the talents (Mt 25:14-30). In contrast to a pair of servants who had doubled their five and two talents respectively, the third one, fearful of loss, buried and hid his single one. The basilica’s homilist, while empathetic of the latter’s angst of jeopardy regarding a single talent, emphasized that the life of faith is intrinsically costly and invariably entails risk.
This text has motivated me to revisit the query “whether change in the faith?” insofar as across my lifespan this may be my major struggle with risk. On the one hand, there is a strong impetus in institutional Christianity toward immutability and fixity, completeness and propositional specificity. As first a child and then a youth, I viewed (select) scriptures such as “Jesus Christ the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8) and“earnestly contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints“ (Jude 3) as characterizing the unchangeability of the Christian faith as such. Even more basically, the invariability of “the faith” was presumed to be rooted in You: unmoved mover, one with whom “there is no shadow of turning” (James 1:17), timeless infinitude in contrast to the vagaries of the finite. The principal dynamic of growth prevalent in the first half of my life seems to have consisted primarily of ever-greater conformity to the unchangeability of You and thus “the faith.” In retrospect, so much of this staticness tended to be arid and, well, unexploratory.
In contrast, a shift for me began incrementally in mid-life, perhaps first with the growing suspicion that the unchanging truths needed to be paired with a growing number of far more dynamic but neglected ones: the interface between cosmogenesis and spirituality; the fallacy of the sacred/profane distinction; the transcending of the cognitive/theological by the aesthetic/mystical; the priority of the experiential over the propositional; the longing for living immanence over distant transcendence; the crippling impact of confining You to the subject/object structure; the priority of You as Lover rather than judge. While in my later decades the Christ remained central for me, his core meaning would seismically shift from various substitutionary atonement theories to encompassing incarnation, from the removed god-man to transformative harbinger of all finite beloveds. First via thinking of the head (theology) and then engagement of the heart (mysticism), the faith as wondrous unfolding would supplant the immutable.
So why have I pressed on rather than prudently retreating into safety? Perhaps two things have transpired across the years. First, having found numerous images and theologies for You to be confining as my cosmos and consciousness opened, I gradually assented to Your expansiveness. Indeed, was it even possible to overdraw depictions of You, Ineffable One, Iconoclastic One? And if not, why the lingering fear of risk?
A second development has been a turn to the experiential (including the subjective). In my anecdotage I experience unprecedentedly the supplanting of a vacuous night sky by Your orchestrations of the spheres; I experience human love as harbinger of You who are Love (I Jn 4:8,16); I experience in music overtones of You who are Beauty Itself; I experience Your hope in Earth’s “dry and weary land without water” (Ps 63:1); I episodically experience my own Depth and Ground as . . . You. While amid my journey’s revolution I continue to unfold fewer and fewer of yore’s verities, I cannot but open and cleave to You in Your awesomeness more fiercely still. More than an ancient depositum, You, O Lover, are a wild and exploratory adventure! And despite still occasionally beset by hesitation, I cannot but forge on. I embrace the risk of the Indescribable You over some sure thing largely shaped by human contrivance. Rather than a construct of religious comfort, my agency opts for the wide-openness of You and Your transformative drama.
In conclusion, O Lover, I confess that the greatest risk of all may well be the fetish of immutability, safety and certitude, and most of the time it is one which I choose to reject.
