Realities that are Unseen
I.
Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of realities that are unseen (Hebrews 11: 1-2).
This verse from the Letter to the Hebrews caught my attention recently as I was doing my lectio divina. When I read scripture slowly and prayerfully there’s no telling what the Holy Spirit might make me notice. Passages that I have read many times before suddenly seem to start dancing on the page, saying “Look at me!” A single sentence, or even a single word of a biblical text, can open up new worlds and keep me thinking and praying for a long time: days, weeks, years.
So what was it about this line from Hebrews that stopped me? Well, in a way, the line felt not ‘wrong’ exactly, but there seemed to be a contradiction in it. More thought, more prayerful silence helped me to pinpoint the cause of my unease. It came from the way I tend to think of the notion of faith. I was surprised that Hebrews seemed to be saying that faith could ‘guarantee’ or ‘prove’ spiritual realities. Guarantee? Prove? Those words seemed too empirical, if you will. Is faith about what can be proved and guaranteed? Faith, I’ve tended to assume, steps in where guarantees and proofs walk out. Faith is what you have when you hit against deep religious mysteries that no human mind can fully grasp. God is Trinity, for example. No matter how long I ponder this, I will never understand how God is three Persons in one Nature. But I have faith that it is true. The Incarnation. Jesus is both God and man. Unfathomable on the intellectual level. But I have faith in its truth. There are vital elements of our religion that cannot be proved in the way we might prove a scientific reality, or, say, a mathematical construct, or prove something that can be known by the senses. How does the concept of proof fit with the concept of faith? I puzzled over this. I reread the text:
Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of realities that are unseen (Hebrews 11: 1-2).
I’d like to invite you to stop reading now for a day or so in order to ponder this text and these questions. Perhaps you have other questions. Perhaps you have answers. The Holy Spirit may lead your meditation down a different path. Explore it. Then come back and we will continue our reflection.
II.
Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of realities that are unseen (Hebrews 11: 1-2).
We’re looking at the relationship between the notion of religious faith and the notion of “proving” unseen realities – it all seemed problematic for me when I first read the verse from Hebrews given above. “We’re not meant to prove anything; we’re meant to consent to mystery,” I ranted. Then, I remembered that frequently when I am doing my lectio, a problem surfaces within the text that seems unsolvable at first. But after I spend time with the scripture passage, reading and praying, the problem resolves by means of a sort of journey I take into the text, led by the Holy Spirit. In this case, I now found that the journey involved pondering the words at the end of the quotation given here: ‘realities that are unseen.’ I didn’t know why at that point, but those words seemed important and I kept repeating them slowly in my thoughts, There is, I find, a balm in this, almost as though my mind craves the nourishment that the words give even before it is able to penetrate to their deeper meaning. ‘Realities that are unseen.’ As I repeated these words, I began to reflect that unseen realities are not easy to live with, especially for us in our day. We’re so scientifically minded. For us, the word ‘reality’ applies mainly to what can be seen or touched or heard; we talk about ‘evidence-based medicine,’ for example: we need evidence that we can actually observe in order to decide on the right medicine. So, the senses determine what we consider to be reality most of the time. What is unseen can make us uncomfortable. We often decide therefore that unseen things don’t exist.
Then it occurred to me that we do live with some unseen realities—constantly and fairly comfortably. They don’t always discommode us. Take love, for instance. Love itself is unseen but we know with every fibre of our being that it is real. While we know that love is forever seeking to give evidence of its existence through words and actions that are self-giving, even self-sacrificial, we also know that underneath these see-able expressions of love, on a level that is unseen, love exists as a reality.
Faith, I reflected, is like that. In fact, it is extremely like love, I realised, and is inseparable from love. Indeed, it is informed by love. My problem with the scriptural text from Hebrews began to ease as I reflected that although faith is certainly about consenting to the truth of theological propositions that are too mysterious to grasp fully, faith is primarily a loving relationship with the unseen God. I mentally rewrote the passage from Hebrews: “Only a loving relationship with the unseen God can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of realities that are unseen.” I felt that I was moving closer to an understanding of this text.
Let’s stay with these ideas for the day and find out what they evoke in us. I hope you will come back tomorrow for the continuation of our reflection.
III.
Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of realities that are unseen (Hebrews 11: 1-2).
In our reflection on this passage from Hebrews, we have been pondering the phrase, ‘realities that are unseen’ in light of our desire to understand nature of faith. We ended yesterday with the realisation that faith and love are inseparable realities and that faith itself is a loving relationship with God. As I absorbed this thought I was reminded that our God always takes the initiative in the faith-relationship and expresses his love for us, even his ‘faith’ in us, first, before we make a move towards him, and he does this in ways that make the unseen realities more see-able.
Most notably, God’s loving initiative was see-able when he sent his Son into the world. This was an historical, therefore see-able, event on one level. But I reflected further that there were people during Jesus’ lifetime who did not “see.” Jesus’ enemies were among those. What was lacking was that quality of love-filled faith. There were others who wanted to see, yet felt frustrated by their lack of ability to do so: the Lord’s disciple, Philip, for example, came out with the poignant words, ‘Lord, show us the Father and we will be satisfied’. And Jesus answered, ‘The one who sees me sees the Father’ (see Jn. 14:8,9). I can understand Philip’s perplexity. Much later, after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit, surely, understanding was given to Philip, as it is offered to us. With over two thousand years of Christianity to draw on, we are perhaps in an even better position than Philip was to know that Jesus himself is the proof of realities that are unseen: if we look at him with the eyes of love-filled faith the unseen Father becomes see-able.
My difficulties with the text from Hebrews began to ease further; I began to appreciate more deeply that the ‘unseen realities’ of our faith are actually not all that unseen for those with the openness that comes from faith and love. They have been given to us, they have been proved through Jesus and through the sacred texts of the New Testament that make him known to us. Therefore, our faith is a response to what God has given us first. We do not have to concoct faith out of nothing and live it in a void. Something’s offered to us by God first. It is not fully see-able through the senses but it is understood through the same capacity we have to recognise love. Faith is a response to the loving out-reach of God to us.
Let’s leave our reflection there for a day. I invite you perhaps to consider the ways in which God has offered something to you. I hope you will be back tomorrow as we continue.
IV.
Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of realities that are unseen (Hebrews 11: 1-2).
As I ponder this wonderful line from the Letter to the Hebrews and dwell with it, I begin to relearn what faith is about, what the word means. I think back to the time in my life when faith came alive for me. It happened over a period of some months when I was a very young adult. There were stages to this, and the first was that it gradually came home to me that I didn’t know whether I believed in God or not—indeed, I wasn’t even sure what it meant to say that I was a Christian. I saw that although I was attending church on Sundays I did so only because as an infant I had been carried to church, and ever since then I had not been given a choice in the matter. But I could see clearly by that time that this was not good enough. ‘Either figure out what this church business is all about,’ I said to myself, ‘or give it up. But don’t go on like this, going to church as if you were a believer when you are actually clueless.’ So I decided to give my religion one last chance. (Actually, I had never even given it a first chance, but in my habitual arrogance I was not really thinking clearly). Thus the second stage in my relationship to faith began: I undertook to study the tenets of Catholic belief and to explore what it really meant to be a follower of Christ.
I can see now that this undertaking was itself prompted by God because otherwise it wouldn’t even have occurred to me: there was little true religious belief present in my heart. Indeed, my ‘faith’ at that time, was faith in the mores and (false) promises of fulfilment offered by our secular culture. My faith was also faith in myself, rather than in God. But there was at least a pinch of true faith mixed in with the false; I did, after all, give some sort of homage to the idea that ‘this church business’ might have something worthwhile to offer and I would do well to have a look and see if I could find it. But, at bottom, I must confess, I thought that my study would end with me dusting off my hands and becoming a completely secular non-believer, pursuing, as did so many of my peers, the allurements of pleasure and materialism which popular culture’s media-driven propaganda constantly advertised.
But the Lord had something else in mind, clearly, and he who takes the initiative in love, also responds to our smallest overture (and my overture was extremely small) with an overwhelming display of love. As my study of Christianity continued, some of my smug self-reliance began to give way. I began to face how deeply needy I was on the spiritual level, and how much I needed God. And this, in turn, led me into to a deep interior relationship with the Lord. A whole world was opening up. I found that ‘the existence of realities that are unseen’ were beginning—most wonderfully—to be proved to me. The God, whom I barely knew, treated me like the prodigal daughter and ran to meet me with lavish experiences of joy. At length, not only did I begin to practice my faith with conviction, I also developed an intense desire to give myself to the Lord fully. And that was the genesis of my vocation to be Benedictine nun. Decades have passed since I professed vows as a nun, and it is even more obvious to me today than on my profession day that the unseen realities are the most real realities that exist.
Let’s pause here for another day. Have there been occasions when the unseen realities have revealed to you that they are unequivocally real?
V.
My lectio questions were quickly turning into reasons for joy by now. These reflections reaffirmed that faith—this love-relationship with the unseen God—does indeed guarantee the deepest blessings. Faith is not merely a default setting for the times when the great mysteries of religion loom large. Faith is an all-the-time setting. Faith has positive content: it is the up-and-running relationship between God the Father and me—God, who is wholly mysterious in essence, but who is infinitely and infallibly real, infinitely and infallibly “there,” holding out the blessings that we hope for.
Through this lectio journey, I rediscovered that faith is also the word we use to talk about our relationship with God’s Son, Jesus Christ, who really was seen in his lifetime and now, through the Gospel, shows me the way to the Father and challenges me to see him, that I may see the Father; faith is the word used to talk about the mission of the Church as the mediator of Christ to me in her teaching authority, in the sacraments, and in the union of believers when they gather in his name for liturgy and prayer, and among whom Jesus promises to be, and is, present. Finally, faith is something for which I thank God because the word means that God has me and I have him in a relationship of love. Faith, inseparable from love, does guarantee all blessings; it is about the unseen realities, it reveals the existence of them, and has proved to me that they are real.
Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of realities that are unseen (Hebrews 11: 1-2).