Today’s readings: Wisdom 6, 12-16; 1 Thessalonians 4, 13-18; Matthew 25, 1-13.
It is always worth asking whether faith has a future. Towards the end of each liturgical year, the concept of the future and the issue of the end of time surface and need to be addressed.
Faith is always looking forward. Paul in the second reading today speaks of “the trumpet of God”, which we normally take as metaphorically standing for some final summons at the end of time.
But God’s trumpet is a metaphor loaded with meaning and refers to God’s summons in time, not at the end of time.
The major question posed to us by today’s parable of the foolish and wise bridesmaids expecting the bridegroom is precisely what we are living for and what we expect from life. There is no ready-made and universally satisfying answer to be found in any catechism book for these questions.
The recent experience of the most turbulent of the synods of bishops in Rome has shown, among other things, that the Church badly needs to come to terms with the times we are living in. By contrast to a centralised theology of the Church and an autocratic vision of Church order, postmodern times demand a radically new approach if we really want to address meaningfully the question where the future of faith lies.
It is the way God speaks through people’s lives that we need to discern. Listening to God is an ongoing exercise on the part of whoever believes and it is a daunting task for whoever wants to take seriously the Christian life.
To listen to God we need wisdom. And in turn, listening to God makes us wise.
As Jesus indicates in Matthew’s parable, whether foolish or wise we are all in the same boat. We all have limited patience, we all get tired, nauseated and disheartened when we experience setbacks, especially when in the face of an institutionalised Church that seems hardly reformable we struggle to keep faith alive.
In Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett presents Vladimir and Estragon, the central figures on stage, as in a state of absolute dependency on a mysterious figure who may or may not exist. David Hay comments on this scene in his book Something There: “Those members of the audience who have the stamina to remain in their seats until the final curtain find out that nothing changes and Godot still hasn’t come”.
We all succumb many a time to the temptation, or at least the strong suspicion, that He will never come. The stamina we need is not just to remain seated and waiting. In the gospel parable this stamina is translated as wisdom and the lack of it is foolishness. Foolishness is not the condition of some but the condition in which even the wise are at times trapped.
Wisdom is the keyword to our ordinary life. It unites understanding with practice and engages the whole of life. Wisdom, as David Ford writes, is often thought of as a rather ‘cool’ concept, associated with slow deliberation and reflective distance. But the poetry of the first reading from the Book of Wisdom shows wisdom as passionate, opening up the heart for clear discernment, good judgement and right living.
In the midst of all that we long for and the demands that come from within us and from all around us, how are we to shape a wise life? ‘Fearing God’ is basic to wisdom in the Scriptures.
It is ‘right fear’, where what is mostly feared is damage through unwise behaviour.
The postmodern, as author Paul Lakeland rightly argues, calls on us to find this wisdom in small things, in unexpected places, in unlikely people. There it is where God continues to speak and reveal His own self as truly liberating. There is a mysticism of everyday life, expressed no better than in the final words of the curé in Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest, “Grace is everywhere”.