Keeping the faith

Today’s readings: Genesis 22, 1-2.9-13.15-18; Rom. 8, 31-34; Mk 9, 2-10.

Seeing God and hearing His voice are the two pillars that constitute our faith experiences and are at the same time what most challenges the keeping of our faith.

For the agnostic, on the one hand this may be totally misleading and radically false. For the mystic, on the other hand it is exactly what needs to be sought and grasped. But for the common people, it marks the daily struggle to discern God’s voice from others.

On this second Sunday of Lent the struggle to believe is iconically depicted in the experience of Abraham being asked by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, and that of the three disciples accompanying Jesus in the transfiguration event.

If Mount Moriah is shrouded in mystery, weighed down by an interiorly inquisitive yet obedient Abraham, Mount Tabor stands for light and clarity. The Greek Fathers’ understanding of the trans-figuration event is that what was revealed there was not only the glory of God but also what it means most fully to be human.

In the ancient world sacrifice was at the heart of all religious practice. In our modern sensibility, we find the language of sacrifice hard to digest. Reading today the account of Genesis where God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, we think it profoundly immoral and find it difficult to connect something of the sort with God.

In his book Fear and Trembling, Sören Kierkegaard describes the terrible strain Abraham must have gone through in his experience. He even goes so far as making Abraham imagine that it was the Tempter who, in a second instance, made him refrain from actually killing Isaac. Abraham struggled first to decipher whether it was authentically the voice of God asking him in the first place to sacrifice Isaac, and then if it was God asking him to refrain from doing it.

We feel exactly the same strain when trying to discern God’s voice from the voices we hear and the visions we may have.

Paradoxically, as it transpires from the Scriptures, a faith experience is always a partial though profound ‘seeing’ of God and a subsequent need to ‘veil’ or hide the entire experience.

What God asked of Abraham was not just the sacrifice of his son, but to kill the child that represented God’s promise that Abraham would be the father of a nation.

In the account from Mark of the transfiguration, there is an ascent to a high mountain, the covering of the mountain with a great cloud, a voice speaking from heaven, and the transfigured appearance of Jesus. What immediately precedes this account is Peter rebuking Jesus for predicting the suffering and death he must endure. Here, in what seems to be a reversal, Jesus shows his disciples a vision of his messianic glory to come.

Peter’s impulse is to preserve the experience artificially. But visions in life hardly have any permanence. What mostly characterises the two experiences of Abraham and of the three disciples of Jesus is that while in the former the doubtful questioning is transformed in adoration and promise of blessings, in the latter the vision is hidden, interrupted and shrouded again in doubtful discussion.

With Abraham in the land of Moriah, and Peter, James and John on the high mountain, we have the two ways of describing the mystery of God – the way of darkness and the way of light, the ambiguity of silence and the transparency of articulation. Silence and speech alternate and articulate our reaching out to the God we believe in and being touched by Him.

May we let God reach out to us in this Lenten season that again makes us face the desert in our lives. As Belden Lane writes in his book The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, perhaps it is always the case that “wilderness holds answers to more questions than we yet know how to ask”.