What does a hurricane have to do with the Year of Faith?
Everything! And this because the event of the hurricane awakens us from the
boredom and monotony of quotidian boilerplate work- performance punctuated by
the trivial titillation of interconnected pseudo interpersonalism via hand-held
gagetry - to a sudden discovery of the
persons around you with whom you find that you really have something in
common: a hurricane.
The Year of Faith has been called to shake us out of the acedia
that has numbed us into being accustomed to the absence of Jesus Christ in this
parched eschatological desert that stretches from the Ascension to the Parousia
without a blip of intimacy with Him. Cardinal Ratzinger once asked: “However
did we arrive at that tedious and tedium-laden Christianity which we moderns
observe and, indeed, know from our own experience?[1]
Ultimately we have lost the experience of Christ, the personal intimacy with
Him, the internal reception of Him as Our Lady at the Annunciation. This must
be regained.
In both
cases, the “I” is unengaged. There is work, there are performances, there is
liturgy, there are prayers, there are plans of life, but the “I” is unengaged.
And when unengaged, joyless. There are
pleasures, there is happiness, but there is no joy. As Ratzinger commented in
the context of the nature of joy: “The
root of man’s joy is the harmony he enjoys with himself. He lives in this
affirmation. And only one who can accept himself can also accept the thou, can accept the world. The reason
why an individual cannot accept the thou,
cannot come to terms with him, is that he does not like his own I and, for that reason, cannot accept a thou.
“Something strange happens here.
We have seen that the inability to accept one’s I leads to the inability to accept a thou. But how does one go about affirming, assenting to, one’s I? The answer may perhaps be unexpected:
WE cannot do so by our own efforts alone. Of ourselves, we cannot come to terms
with ourselves. Our I becomes
acceptable to us only if it has first become acceptable to another I. We can love ourselves only if we have
first been loved by someone else. The life a mother gives to her child is not
just physical life; she gives total life when she takes the child’s tears and
turns them into smiles. It is only when life has been accepted and is perceived
as accepted that it becomes also acceptable. Man is that strange creature that
needs not just physical birth but also appreciation if he is to subsist. This
is the root of the phenomenon known as hospitalism. When the initial harmony of
our existence has been rejected, when that psycho-physical oneness has been
ruptured by which the ‘Yes, it is good that you alive’ sinks, with life itself,
deep into the core of the unconscious – then birth itself is interrupted;
existence itself is not completely established… If an individual is to accept
himself, someone must say to him: ‘It is good that you exist’ - must say it,
not with words, but with that act of the entire being that we call love. For it
is the way of love to will the other’s existence and, at the same time, to
bring that existence forth again. The key to the I lies with the thou; the
way to the thou leads through the I.”[2]
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