Faith and Love, Inseparable

If you ever wonder about this thing called “love,” pretty certain that the thing must be at or near the top of value, of understanding, of making the most of relationship, religion, of life itself, The Act of Love by Rosemary Haughton might be of interest.

Faith and the “act of love” are inseparable. Faith opens onto a gap, thus making space for a commitment “beyond.” Faith thus serves to go on beyond a calcified, once living, now dead, grasp of the inarticulate, the human attempt to manage the Divine. Of course, the transcendent/manifest paradoxical reality, the pathway to God ever again draws into the wonder, extending the living experience of Love.

“The goal of Christian aspiration is God. The avowed aim of the historical Jesus, so far as we are able to discern him, was the revelation to men of the one he called his Father, and his own journey through life was a journey to the Father. The establishment of the Kingdom or ‘reign’ of God is the expected climax of human life and of the world itself, and this reign, fervently expected, is yet already present in the hearts of men by faith. But the very fact that it is by faith that men are called to enter the Kingdom shows that the notion of God implied is very different from that of the powerful, benevolent and wise director of the universe. The occurrence of faith is in the dislocation of ordinary experience, even religious experience. The entrance into faith is an entrance into darkness, an intellectual, emotional and moral blackout which results from the coincidence of two irreconcilable planes of experience. Therefore any God of whom one can form an idea, let alone an image, makes faith impossible. Such a God is an idol, and as such diverts attention from the demand of faith.

This is the point of the death-of-God type of theology, in spite of its obvious dangers as an excuse for the evasion of faith in another direction. The Nietzschean vision of man without God is not capable of providing a setting for faith, because faith requires for its fulfilment in love that element of always reaching further, beyond itself… in so far as the death of God is the death of an idol who protected people from the need for faith, it is necessary. Indeed it is not a new thing, but its necessity has been emphasized by every mystic from the author of the book of Revelation onwards.” (pp. 168-9)

As Haughton elaborates, this is the death and resurrection recurrent in daily walking, as human efforts to make concrete what cannot instead encounter renewal by grace: “The effort of the intellect to seize on the event of faith and make something of it leads directly back to the edge of the ‘gap’ and once again to the paradox of death and resurrection plunge the intellect into darkness and the presence [of the Guide] which is known too well to be grasped. So it goes on.” (p. 180)