This is not going to be an easy tune to sing. To begin with, it is not one of the currently popular numbers. Still less one of the older and more timeworn routines. But I see you are already suspicious. I do not dispute your perfect right to be so. You should be suspicious. That is the first thing I have to say. Not that you need me to say it. But perhaps I need myself to say it.
However, if you distrust the word "apologies" and if you think that I am trying to afflict you with apologetics, please set your mind at rest. By "apologies" I mean simply what the word says. I recognize that I have been standing on your foot, and I am now at last getting off it, with these few mumbled sentences. But you say, "Who is behind that pronoun when you say'!'? Do you mean 'the Believer'? Do you mean your Church? Do you mean the clergy? Do you mean your monastic Order? Or do you just mean yourself?”
Well, in the first place, I am not entitled to speak in anybody's name but my own. I am quite sure that what I want to say will not be endorsed by many of the clergy, and it certainly is not the official teaching of the Catholic Church. On the other hand, I take my own faith seriously and am not a priest for nothing. I would not say these things if I thought they were not in the deepest sense true to what I believe. At the same time I am conscious of the futility of being a
mere respectable and secure "Believer" with a capital "B."
I am apologizing to you for the inadequacy and impertinence of so much that has been inflicted on you in the name of religion, not only because it has embarrassed me, and others like me, but also because it seems to me to be a falsification of religious truth. At this point, let us get clear about your identity. You are, they say, an Unbeliever. On the other hand you are not a professional and militant Unbeliever. The militant Unbeliever is, in fact, a Believer-though perhaps a Believer-in-reverse. I will take care not to patronize you by seeming to doubt your unbelief-though technically it would be more accurate to say that you are a Non-Believer rather than an Unbeliever.
You are one who neither rejects belief nor accepts it. In fact you have given up thinking about it because the message of faith does not reach you, does not interest you, and seems to have nothing to do with you at all. Or if it does reach you and does seem somehow relevant to you, yet you do not believe that faith can be the acceptance of a divine revelation. The concept of revelation is, to you, meaningless. It is to you that I now say, with all the honesty at my command that I consider you a sorely affronted person. Believers have for centuries made a habit out of reviling and disparaging you.
Have they perhaps done this in order to fortify themselves against their own secret doubts? Do all these Believers believe in God, or are they more intent upon believing that they themselves are Believers? Are you-the Unbeliever more useful to them in this devout exercise than God himself? They not only claim to know all about you, they take it upon themselves to expose the hidden sins which (according to them) explain your unbelief. They exert themselves to make you insecure, to tell you how unhappy you are-as if you needed them to tell you, and as if they were any happier themselves! They weave a thousand myths about you, and having covered you with shame and discredit, they wonder why you do not run to them for comfort. Seeing their failure they try a different approach. Currently they are playing a game called "God Is Dead." But do not take this too seriously. This is only another deal in an ideological card game, and what they want, in the end, is the same thing as before: to get you into their churches. I confess I myself fail to see how the claim that "God is dead" is an argument for going to church.
At this point I am making a public renunciation, in my own name at least, of all tactical, clerical, apologetic designs upon the sincerity of your non-belief. I am not trying to tamper with your conscience. I am not insinuating that you have "spiritual problems" that I can detect and you cannot. On the contrary, I am writing this for one purpose only: to apologize for the fact that this kind of affront has been, and still is, daily and hourly perpetrated on you by a variety of Believers, some fanatical some reasonable, some clerical some lay, some religious some irreligious, some futuristic and some antique.
I think this apology is demanded by the respect I have for my own faith. If I, as a Christian, believe that my first duty is to love and respect my fellowman in his personal frailty and perplexity, in his unique hazard and his need for trust, then I think that the refusal to let him alone, the inability to entrust him to God and to his own conscience, and the insistence on rejecting him as a person until he agrees with me, is simply a sign that my own faith is inadequate.
Of course I believe in the importance of the Christian apostolate-as distinct from the itch to impose our own ideas on others. But let me be quite frank about it: the current fuss and shouting about whether or not God is dead, whether or not the Church (or Churches) can make the grade in twentieth-century society, whether or not the Church can regain the attention of modern man (either by guitar playing or liturgical gamesmanship), all seem to me to be rather
trivial and beside the point. Where authentic religious concern degenerates into salesmanship it becomes an affront to the honest perplexities of the vast majority of men. I think, frankly, that you are entitled to be left unbothered by the sheer triviality of so much image making and vaudeville.
This of course requires much more explanation than I can give it here. For instance, I do not intend to call into question the really serious attempts at religious renewal. If I doubted for a moment that Christianity was alive and developing I would not bother my head with it all. Yet at the same time I think a great deal of the fuss, argument, and publicity in which the renewal seeks to express itself, is at best ambiguous. Are the Believers trying to convince themselves of their singular importance by selling a new image of themselves?
I certainly do not feel that the question of religious renewal is as relevant to you as Church news releases imply. I appreciate your sometimes sympathetic curiosity, your cautious gestures of approval. Yet I think too many churchmen are still toying with the vain hope that-their various institutions are going to continue to play dominant roles in society. I rather doubt it! I think the existence of the Christian in the modern world is going to be more and more marginal. We are going to be "Diaspora" Christians in a frankly secular and non-believing society.
As you see, I am apologizing because you have to suffer from our illusions. This does not make life very comfortable for you, particularly when, as may happen, you are yourself serious enough about "beliefs" to think twice about adopting one. You hesitate to believe without motives that seem to you to be really worthy of such a perilous commitment. Others are less scrupulous about it. They can have the luxury of peaceful consciences, at very low cost, and they can look down on you into the bargain. (What makes them so sure that they are God's good friends and you are not? Some theologians I know are beginning to speak differently. They are saying that you others may be closer to God and potentially more "believing" than many of us. This is not new either. Paul had something of the sort to say to the Athenians!)
Faith comes by hearing, says Saint Paul; but by hearing what? The cries of snake-handlers? The platitudes of the religious operator? One must first be able to listen to the inscrutable ground of his own being, and who am I to say that your reservations about religious commitment do not protect, in you, this kind of listening? The "absence of God" and the "silence of God" in the modern world are not only evident; they are facts of profound religious significance. What do these metaphorical expressions mean? They refer obviously to another metaphorical concept, that of "communication" between man and God. To say that "God is absent" and "God is silent" is to say that the familiar concept of "communication" between man and God has broken down. And if you are an Unbeliever it is often enough because such communication is, to you, incredible. We, on the other hand, have insisted more and more that communication with God was credible and was in fact taking place: when we spoke, God spoke. Unfortunately, the terms in which we have continued to say this did little to make the idea acceptable, or even conceivable, to you. We Believers keep insisting that we and God deal with each other morning, noon, and night over closed-circuit TV. These pious metaphors are permissible with certain reservations, but to try to force them on you can, sometimes border on blasphemous idiocy. Thus our very language itself (to many of us still adequate) has tended to become an important element in the "absence" and the "silence" of God. Does it occur to us that instead of revealing him we are hiding him? As a matter of fact, Vatican Council II formally admitted this. In the Constitution on the Church in the World we read that "Believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of atheism" when by their deficiencies “they must be said to conceal rather than reveal the authentic face of God and religion."
Whatever one may choose to make of this absence and this silence of God, they have to be accepted as primary religious facts of our time. There is no use trying to ignore them, to act as if they could not possibly have happened, or to blame them all on somebody else. Much as I might wish that all men shared my faith and I wish they did-there is no point in my sitting and dreaming about it, when in fact I live in a world in which God is silent, from which he is apparently absent, in which some of the latest routines designed to celebrate his presence only make the spiritual void all the more embarrassing.
To admit that this is a world to which God seems not to be speaking is not a renunciation of faith; it is a simple acceptance of an existential religious fact. It should not disconcert anyone who knows, from the Bible and from the mystics, that the silences of God are also messages with a definite import of their own. And this import is not necessarily reassuring.
One thing it may imply, for instance, is a judgment on the self-righteousness of those who trust in themselves because they are fully respectable and "established." It may imply a severe judgment of their complacent affirmations, and suggest that a great deal is instead being "said by God" in language that nobody can decode. Perhaps things that we badly need to know are being told us in new and disconcerting ways. Perhaps they are staring us in the face, and we
cannot see them. It is in such situations that the language of prophets speaks of the "silence of God."
To turn to such a world, in which every other voice but the voice of God is heard and merely to add one more voice to the general din-one's own is to neglect the ominous reality of a crisis that has perhaps become apocalyptic. In "turning to" this kind of world, I think the Catholic Church intends to respect the gravity of its predicament, and to do a little listening. There is certainly an enormous difference between the solemn anathemas of Vatican I and the more temperate and sympathetic appeals of Vatican II for dialogue.
My own peculiar task in my Church and in my world has been that of the solitary explorer who, instead of jumping on all the latest bandwagons at once, is bound to search the existential
depths of faith in its silences, in its ambiguities, and in those certainties which lie deeper than the bottom of anxiety. In these depths there are no easy answers, no pat solutions to anything.
Here one lives a kind of submarine life in which faith sometimes mysteriously takes on the aspect of doubt when, in fact, one has to doubt and reject conventional and superstitious surrogates that have taken the place of faith. On this level, the division between Believer and Unbeliever ceases to be so crystal clear. It is not that some are all right and others are
all wrong; all are bound to seek in honest perplexity. Everybody is an Unbeliever more or less!
Only when this fact is fully experienced, accepted, and lived with, does one become fit to hear the simple message of the Gospel-or of any other religious teaching. The religious problem of the twentieth century is not understandable if we regard it only as a problem of Unbelievers and of atheists. It is also and perhaps chiefly a problem of Believers. The faith that has grown cold is not only the faith that the Unbeliever has lost but the faith that the Believer has kept.
This faith has too often become rigid, or complex, sentimental, foolish, or impertinent. It has lost itself in imaginings and unrealities, dispersed itself in pontifical and organizational routines, or evaporated in activism and loose talk.
The most hopeful sign of religious renewal is the authentic sincerity and openness with which some Believers are beginning to recognize this. At the very moment when it would seem that they ought to gather for a fanatical last-ditch stand, these Believers are dropping their defensiveness, their defiance, and their mistrust. They are realizing that a faith that is afraid of other people is no faith at all. A faith that supports itself by condemning others is itself condemned by the Gospel.