Alone into the Dark?

No one who has heard Nuala O'Faolain's recent interview with Marian Finucane on RTE radio or read the transcript of their conversation will have been left unmoved by the writer's tragic predicament. She is dying of cancer and, faced by that terrible, unconquerable fact, she described in most graphic terms her impotence, her wretchedness, her regrets and, finally, her despair.

It is remarkable that she should seek to communicate with the Irish public about her experience in the time that she has left with us.  What can we learn from what she says? Listening to her we are reminded of the irreducible nature of human desire. We have a question (a need, an entreaty) within us about our lives, our origin and our destiny, which demands an answer. Indeed, we are this question.  And this question, like all questions, has an answer. What, remotely, might be the basis for the conventional idea that the answer to the wonder that is human life might be a void, an abyss, a dark, empty place? Surely, such a hypothesis is at the extreme end of pessimism, unsupported by the cumulative empirical evidence of even the most limited or difficult of life experiences? Why, in a time of unprecedented blessings and privilege have our cultures conjured up such a desperate scenario as the putative outcome of human existence?

We, followers of Christ through the concrete experience of the Christian community, believe that the Mystery took mercy upon us and became flesh and presented Himself as the answer to Death, to the dramatic finality of things. We feel very close to Nuala in her heartfelt desire that life go on, that no one be forgotten about, that love, beauty, knowledge go on and never die. We also find ourselves asking "am I a testimony to this desire, where I am today?" We say to Nuala: “Why, gazing at the wonder of the gift that has been your life, would you imagine that a hair on your head remains uncounted?”

We live in times when the public language has booby-trapped the very concepts most essential to our survival. Our culture holds its unbelief to the fore like a shield, and manages in its language to disable the very words with the power to save us. To speak of Jesus Christ, even where His word is most desperately required, is to risk misunderstanding, hostility and ridicule, to utter the very message of salvation into an enveloping fog of prejudice and pessimism.

But Christ is the one and only answer to the stark witness of Nuala O’Faolain, a witness that is as much that of her age as of her own, much-valued, public voice. She has another voice, no less potent or truthful, as have we all.

Christ came into the world to put an end to Death. To be open to this possibility is the summit of reason. Either this is true for us - and this requires a daily verification - or Christ is a mere consolation, and is ultimately, tragically, useless. We accept that many in the modern world, who reject Christ or gloss over Him in pursuit of a more “rational” hypothesis, are in some degree reacting to an overly simplified version of His teaching, as well as employing a limited concept of reason to investigate the possibilities of existence. Both these phenomena are products of flawed humanity’s tendency to reduce the Mysterious to manageable concepts. But the Mystery is a paradox that at once embraces us and retreats from our attempts to capture or comprehend it. It is knowable only in the simplicity of being, in surrender to the ferment of life in the knowledge of being safe.

There is a thin but definite line between life as drama and life as tragedy.  The difference can often be in a slightly-altered perspective. Am I merely an accident of biology or part of something transcendent, something that pre-existed my earthly life and will go on for always?  Even the most pessimistic among us admit to the continuation of love; but of what does this essence comprise? Surely it has its roots in something given, something additional, something “transcendent”.

What is decisive for us who follow Christ is the recognition of a Presence in our lives - a Presence that accompanies us every step of our earthly journey, even through the valley of Death itself. For us, that Presence is a "You" - someone you may bump into or encounter along the way. Just as it was for John and Andrew two millennia ago, we have the opportunity to ask with wonder "Who is this man Jesus of Nazareth?" And what, other than a self-denying pessimism, could have convinced us that the account handed to us through history, verified along the way by countless human beings much like ourselves, is not the most persuasive evidence the meaning of human existence? How, driven by the deepest desires of the human heart, can we reject such a miraculous incidence of correspondence, of harmony between the question of the human heart and the answers contained in the Gospels?

The only possible reason is: because we do not think ourselves worthy.

There is one further wonder: it does not matter, for He thinks us worthy.

To verify that this is true we need to be simple, that is to rediscover our authentic selves beyond the babble of the common mind, to let the human heart with all its needs and questions launch us forward in the verification of an hypothesis about life - that of the possibility of an impossible correspondence with our desires. It requires, yes, a leap of faith, but as Oscar Wilde said: “You can only believe in what is incredible”.  The answer to the Mystery of life can surely not be straightforward, but will inevitably strike us as exceptional. This exceptionality in the Christian story, which our culture presents as evidence of implausibility, is, on the contrary, indicative of Truth.

To become open to the Truth about ourselves and about reality, we need to remove ourselves from the common mindset of conventional culture, to render ourselves available to what is Mysterious. And for this it is necessary for us to separate ourselves from public thought, public language, to retreat into the recesses of our own human hearts, to seek out the innermost desires of the human condition. This is a decision we can take, but the process is not, beyond that point, to be governed by human will. Once I decide to submit myself to the undertaking, the rest is done for and to me. What is required is a kind of surrender, which enables Reality to re-integrate me into its mysterious Way. What is to be lost, except pride and a pointless certitude, and how small a price is this for the recovery of all that I am?

And what if this modest price were to be demanded for just one day? - a single day of a skeptical life in which doubt and pessimism might be suspended? - even by way of a scientific experiment? - and the consequences noted and absorbed? We cannot promise that the full Truth will reveal itself in that 24 hours of earthly time, but we can say that the process will not leave the human being unmoved, unaffected, unaltered by the influence of the Mysterious. We can promise that such an exercise, conducted in openness and honesty, will be sufficient to open a new way of seeing that perceives not darkness but at least the possibility of Eternal Light.

Communion and Liberation, Ireland, May 2008