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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 30, 2004
The gift of tongues
I am a man of little faith but everything I know comes by the little faith I have. This is something one may realize as one grows older and one's illusions begin to peel away. Realities and facts grow clearer with discernment; paradoxically the clearer as they seem to get away from us. Especially one's illusions about oneself fall away. The belief in our own virtue being about the hardest thing to part with together with the hollow comfort that came from believing that one could be "in charge" -- could be the author of his own fortune and destiny. We are not alone. We did not give birth to ourselves and from the beginning we did not belong to ourselves alone. We did not invent our language our society or our food. Our talents are innate and must be discovered; and likewise our limitations. We did not choose whom we would meet nor what opportunities would be set before us. Every day something happens that we could never have predicted. Before everything that we appear to choose there is a universe of contingencies over which we have never had any influence let alone control. We are not even able to judge or determine the consequences of our own actions beyond their immediate effects. Each of us has the equivalent of a little miner's lamp to light our passage and prevent us from egregious stumbling; but beyond that shaft there is darkness in space and time. We cannot see around corners. We cannot predict all the variables for long. We cannot see what will change or even what has already changed beyond our immediate sight. We did not make our own eyes for that matter and in the end we cannot save our own lives. And so far as we believe anything to be true it is not made by us but given to us. For what is good true beautiful are things which lie outside and if there is any resonance within our own souls it is because we have been reached by something that can only be the light of grace. The seer and the seen are acting at a distance. I stand in the rays of a sun that is burning at a distance of a hundred million miles. Yet it is on my skin. And I am touched by a Love that is burning with a power greater than all the stars at a distance beyond imagining. Both I and my neighbours. We have gifts both given and taken away. Every material thing will dissolve in our hands or in the hands of some unknown successor. (The sun itself must burn out eventually.) And what does not dissolve we can never own for it lies behind and beyond what is touchable. "The soul's dark cottage batter'd and decay'd / Lets in new light through chinks that time has made in the words of Edmund Waller, an English poet of the 17th century. In the inspired phrase of a contemporary pop artist, There is a crack a crack in everything: / That's how the light gets in." What is faith? -- I have often asked myself. What is the meaning of that extraordinary word the Jews introduced into ancient history and which Christians have been playing with through twenty centuries? It is a good question for today the 1 971st anniversary of the Pentecost -- of that mysteriously explosive "faith event" that was reported 50 days after Christ' s Resurrection when the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles and they "spake in tongues" understood by all around them. It is the anniversary of the foundation of the Church the moment of the divine instruction to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth (at a time before any of it had been written down) -- to go to do it Now. I think faith is the word that describes the reception of grace. It is like the sun on our skin; the certain knowledge of something infinitely distant. It is the refracted light with which we discern the world if we have eyes. (And even the blind know the sun's rays and can "feel" the line of the horizon and the presence of objects outlined by the sun.) It is the light by which we read into books and into nature. In particular the Scriptures make little sense until this light is cast upon them. But by the light of only a little faith they begin to speak even through us. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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