Excerpt: The Problem is for Our Memory of Christ to Grow, Nothing Else
The letter said in the beginning, “Feeling that I’m not and never will be
guaranteed in the perseverance of my faith [I could say vocation; it’s one and
the same] worries me; knowing that my freedom is and always will be able to
reject God worries me. At times I reproach myself for this as a residue of
rationalism.” Exactly! This is precisely the reason. “Rationalism” means that
man can claim to judge his own life and things from his own point of view, that
is, man who claims to be the measure of all things.
What determines
our life is the event of Christ; the event of the covenant is what gives
meaning to our life; what has happened to us determines the security, the
certainty, of our life. “Yes, but I can always reject what happened.” Will you
please understand the error of this objection? Because one must truly reject,
and this is a possibility only if one fails to remember, if one does not make
memory of the event!
So then,
abstractly speaking, from our point of view, the truth of these sentences,
these fears, these worries, depends on the fact that time and history,
vocational existence and history, as Saint Peter said, are given to us to
foster our freedom, to affirm our freedom, so that at the return of Christ our
adherence to the mystery of Christ will be “ours.” Time is what makes it ours;
in time it becomes ours, because this is the method that God has designated.
It’s not mechanical. It’s not immediate. It’s not instinctive. It’s not magic.
It’s in time. This is a given fact you can’t object to, no ifs, ands, or buts, because this is the way we are
made; every if, and, or but is pure
fantasy, a winged donkey flying in the sky from star to star. It’s pure fantasy;
no other creature made by God exists except this one. It is in time, in
vocational time, in existence, therefore, and in history, that the Resurrection
of Christ becomes ours. It is in time and history that slowly and mercifully
our disproportion, our distance is totally forgiven and conquered.
So then, since
it is in time that our freedom and our fragility are respectively affirmed and
saved—affirmed in the first and saved in the second—our concept, the way we
experience freedom and the way we perceive our fragility is something
perennially insecure in and of itself, and will remain so. But this is because
we look at our freedom and fragility—we have before our eyes our freedom and
fragility—as if they were something of ours, and we don’t look at our freedom
and fragility from God’s point of view. The first object is God, the mystery of
God, God who has given Himself to us, His mercy, the covenant. Outside this
object, all the rest is bewildering; it’s no longer right.
Therefore, the
certainty, and the elimination of this worry, the guarantee, as we said
earlier, the certainty in the faith, the guaranteed heart, is the presence of
the covenant. This is the first object, the object of our consciousness, in
light of which everything is clear. So you understand very well that existence
and history, no matter what vicissitude they happen in, are in certainty and
peace.
This is the
gift of Christ, peace, if we look at all things in Christ. Therefore, the
problem isn’t our freedom or our fragility—“Who knows if I will adhere or not?”—the
problem is for our memory of Christ to grow, nothing else.
