Today’s readings: 1 Kings 19, 9.11-13; Romans 9 , 1-5; Matthew 14, 22-33.
God’s presence is a poetic experience, it is gentle and graceful and cannot be subjected to preconceived religious ideas. When we perceive God as speaking mainly through tragedies or gloom, that is more superstition than true religion. That is exactly the opposite of how true Christian spirituality discerns the divine. Today’s Scriptures show that there is so much that needs to be recovered for religion to be authentic. The prophets of old were mainly in crisis whenever religion abandoned itself to idolatry and reduced itself to superstition.
In the second reading, St Paul laments that religion can easily lose connection with its source of energy. For him, the passion for others comes first to the extent that for the love of his brothers he was ready to renounce to his love for Christ. This reminds us of Simone Weil, a Jew like Paul, who at the time of the holocaust refused to be baptised in solidarity with what the Jews were going through in the concentration camps.
The gloom encircling Elijah’s life and his prophetic commitment, made him find refuge in a cave from where, though, the Lord calls him to go out on the mountain in order to meet Him. Symbolically, the cave may stand for the introvert attitude that our Christianity very often assumes in the face of crises.
What could be more foolish for the Church, itself under duress, than to be busy issuing anathemas? As Walter Brueggemann writes in his book Out of Babylon, it is in the nature of the poetic to permit other voices to stand alongside.
It is from this self-defeating attitude that in our time, Pope Francis with insistence invites the Church to “go forth”. His words are very significant: “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security”.
In the first reading, Elijah was in anguish and fear, fleeing Jesabel, foremost enemy of God’s prophets. Francis’ concern in this day and age is “with a Church caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures”. The Church can easily become its own enemy, neutralising the unpredictable power of God’s word.
The cave mentality secludes believers from the world and alienates us from what people really long for and from the Church people really need. God is unpredictable because He is creative and innovative. He escapes our closed-circuit formulas of doctrine and practice. New challenges call for new solutions. In the face of the empires dominating politics and everyday life, we cannot afford to project an impotent religion.
We live in times of great displacement. There is geographical displacement of entire peoples and communities living scattered with no homeland. And there is existential displacement, which at some time or other we all experience in the sadness, mental anguish or the feeling of being lost and confused that many a time leave us breathless.
We all cry in our needs, just as Elijah, St Paul and the disciples are depicted as doing in today’s readings. Crying in need is natural. But the force of hoping and dreaming, of clinging to what ultimately can save us is something that does not come only from within ourselves.
We need to hear voices of hope, we long for ‘I have a dream’ political strategies and speeches even if they seldom feature. But the real tragedy comes when even within our faith communities we experience a void of meaning, we celebrate liturgies empty of the power to transform and which many a time fail to facilitate the experience of the divine.
Elijah was expecting God to speak out from the stereotypes of religious practice. But God manifests Himself on a different wavelength. It is the gentle breeze that opens Elijah’s eyes to God’s presence. In the gospel, Jesus’ presence instils courage and dispels the fear of the distressed disciples in the midst of the tempest.
We badly need a religion which, rather than being prohibitive by imposition, provides the sacred spaces in our daily lives where we can be touched by the divine gently and passionately.