Meeting 1 - Question to Myself¶
Tips for the Animator¶
During the first meeting, we will try to talk with the participants about faith in a theoretical way. Let’s emphasize the exchange of opinions so that the participants comment on and discuss the presented theses and texts.
The outline contains a significant number of examples and fragments. Not all need to be listed. Some points can be skipped or only discussed with the group. The most important parts of the meeting are highlighted.
Goals¶
The goal of today’s meeting is to realize what faith is in a general, conceptual sense. We will try to see where it comes from, what it really is. This is a purely theoretical, hypothetical meeting, with as little reference to oneself as possible.
To Know, To Believe, To Believe In¶
Let’s start by considering the statement of St. Thomas Aquinas
To accept the truth of the sentence: “God exists” is one thing, but to believe in God is something completely different.
—St. Thomas Aquinas
Let the participants write on a piece of paper with a drawn table how, in their opinion, these two statements differ. For example:
“God exists” |
Believe in God |
|---|---|
|
|
The effect of this should be the statement:
One can accept the existence of God without any reservations, and at the same time be a non-believer.
—St. Thomas Aquinas
As help, I recall the consideration of Fr. Jacek Salij.
One can of course give other examples, it is important that the participants themselves come to these conclusions. Absolutely do not just read this to them!
Let’s look at this distinction in the perspective of the relationship between me and you. If you are my spouse, father or mother, child or friend, student or superior, your existence is, after all, something obvious to me. But at the same time I can believe in you or not believe, just as you in me, and my faith in you can mean two different things. If something bad happened to you, for example, you fell into alcoholism or became morally deregulated, my faith in you means that I do not consider you a completely lost person; even against human hope, I will mobilize and sacrifice myself to help you get on the straight path.
My faith in you can also take another form. I consider you a particularly wise, good, strong, experienced person etc., and this gives me a spark of hope in a situation that overwhelms me. Let’s assume that I am an alcoholic and my numerous attempts to break out of this addiction have failed. But here I see (initially with disbelief) that you believed in my healing, you spare no strength to help me, and you do it very wisely. I slowly begin to believe in you, I grab the hand you offered me, and what was impossible until recently becomes more and more a reality: I have alcohol slavery behind me. Of course, I can also react differently to your faith in me. I can ignore your efforts, even if they are wise and full of true kindness, and not believe in you at all. Then my situation is still hopeless, as it was.
—Fr. Jacek Salij
Living Faith. Paradoxes of Atheism.¶
First, let’s read such a sentence. Perhaps we will agree with it or not – it will be an introduction to our further conversation.
Undoubtedly, the vast majority of what is called conversation between people today should be more accurately described, in the exact sense of the word, as chatter. In general, people do not really speak to themselves; everyone, although turned to the other, speaks in reality to a fictional instance whose existence is exhausted in listening to him.
—Martin Buber
It is worth asking yourself a question about the quality of our meetings (any). Try to find such real conversations/meetings in your life. It is worth writing them down on a piece of paper (everyone for themselves).
Do we have experiences of such a real meeting with another person?
Can we share in what circumstances it was?
A meeting is a gift. Something absolutely amazing. If we have few entries on our cards, we understand it perfectly because we probably “miss” a real conversation. If our cards are filled, we probably experienced it and value these moments.
Today, the aim is not only to “disenchant” interpersonal contacts – with which one could even agree – but also to radically demystify them. What is personal, constantly close to mystery, once the basis of the quietest raptures, is being leveled.
—Martin Buber
Do we agree with this sentence? Do we “miss” such a real conversation/meeting? Can we lack it?
Did we thank someone for the meeting? Is it not so that we did not express our gratitude for the conversation to many people?
Resolution: A great opportunity to “thank” for this “miracle of meeting” the people who appeared in our lives is tomorrow’s Eucharist! Let this be the first fruit of this meeting (if anyone wants) – to offer tomorrow’s Eucharist for their intention.
Features of a True Meeting¶
(This point, like the next one, can only be signaled, it does not need to be discussed in full. However, it is worth the participants knowing the “paradoxes” of atheism. Even if the animator gives a mini-lecture.)
When we have already reached these conclusions, let’s consider the sentence: “One can accept the existence of God without any reservations, and at the same time be a non-believer”, that is, what atheism really is.
God is often spoken of as an abstract, distant being. Such a God detached from man, having nothing to do with him, is a dead God. This is how the Enlightenment understood God.
Contact with such a God was impossible. Nietzsche will express this emphatically in his famous statement “God is dead”. What does this statement really mean? What consequences does it bring?
Let’s try to ask the participants about this. How do they understand it.
Order and meaning are from God, and if indeed God died, then we vainly persuade ourselves that meaning can survive; indifferent vacuum sucks us out and annihilates, nothing of our life and toil will survive, no trace will remain of us in the senseless dance of atoms, the universe wants nothing, strives for nothing, cares about nothing, neither rewards nor punishes. He who says that there is no God and it is merry, lies to himself.
—Leszek Kołakowski
Nietzsche caught atheists – not only his contemporaries – in inconsistency. They were not able to really do without a good Father, they denied his existence only seemingly. Either they gave him only other names – nature, reason, progress, science, historical laws, social justice – or they quickly seated someone else on the abandoned throne and ordered this something to play the role of the former god. After Nietzsche, one can no longer play hide-and-seek with God: one must either choose life in absurdity, without claim to complaints and grievances, or confess trust in meaning, whether in the form of a hymn of praise in honor of the good and beauty of life, or in the form of protest in moments when evil, absurdity and pain obscure this meaning which we demand and which we constantly seek.
—Fr. Tomasz Halik
So to be an atheist is not to believe in anything or anyone. It means surrendering to chaos. Going beyond this level means leaving atheism.
Distant God¶
But this is still not the end of our path to faith. If we put something else on God’s throne, or God will be an inaccessible god, an absolute, something distant, we still cannot talk about faith in the Christian sense. One can accept the truth of the sentence: “God exists”, and still be unbelieving.
Questions of Faith¶
What really causes a person to become a believer, that his faith is alive?
Let the participants from this part of the meeting (it may be the only part of this meeting after reading the fragments of Kołakowski and Thomas Aquinas) try to ask a question that leads to God; a question that gives birth to living faith.
Let’s devote a significant part of time to this part, considering and discussing the questions raised by the participants.
Of course, these cannot be questions like does God exist?, because see Thomas Aquinas etc.
The following story can be cited here:
A certain enlightened man of great learning, having heard of the Rabbi of Berdychiv, decided to visit him in order to – as was his custom – hold a dispute with him and annihilate the backward arguments with which the tzadik proved the rightness of his faith. When he entered the room, he saw the rabbi, with a book in his hand, walking around the room, seized with delight and immersed in thought. He didn’t even pay attention to the newcomer. Finally he stopped and said: “But maybe it is true.” The scholar controlled himself with difficulty – his knees were trembling, so terrible was the appearance of the tzadik and so terrible sounded his simple saying. But Rabbi Levi Yitzchok turned to him and slowly began to speak: “My son, the scholars of the Scripture with whom you argued, talked to you in vain; leaving you laughed at their words. They could not lay God and His Kingdom on the table for you and I cannot do it either. But think, my son: maybe it is true.” The Enlightened one gathered all his power to answer: but the word “maybe”, which constantly sounded in his ears, broke his resistance.
The basic question of faith is “maybe”. It expresses its essence: constant tension, uncertainty, this constant paradox of the inability to say something “objective”. The world of faith is a world of constant “maybe”.
Man as a Question to Himself¶
Let’s consider the question asked by St. Augustine, the fundamental question of his faith (in the context of point 4):
Who do you love when you love your God?
Christian faith is what is deeper. God does not reside “opposite”, “above”, but “inside”. Therefore, the question that gives birth to faith is a question about man himself, about his conduct. It is a question about oneself.
Man, who desired to understand himself, to finally find his own face one day, to see his essence, to know his soul, the secrets of his identity: if you really searched humbly and thoroughly, you found much more by this – you found the face of God.
—St. Augustine
Faith is discovering the depth of oneself, it is finding one’s own identity, one’s own consciousness, placing oneself in relation to reality. Faith is finally the involvement of the whole self, a total turn towards this reality. Faith is conversion. It is a question about oneself, one must become “a question to oneself”. A question which contains uncertainty, instability etc.
What Is Faith?¶
Let’s try to arrange a “definition of faith resulting from this meeting at the end, or maybe more determine what it is and who a believer is.
Sample “definition” (worth reading at the end, because it is very interesting):
Faith always contains something of a great adventure, a leap and a jump, because it is always a risk that one accepts as real and basic what is not directly seen
—Joseph Ratzinger