I Want You to Be

Tomáš Halík, Gerald Turner

Description

In his two previous books translated into English, Patience with God and Night of the Confessor, best-selling Czech author and theologian Tomáš Halík focused on the relationship between faith and hope. Now, in I Want You to Be, Halík examines the connection between faith and love, meditating on a statement attributed to St. Augustine—amo, volo ut sis, “I love you: I want you to be”—and its importance for contemporary Christian practice. Halík suggests that because God is not an object, love for him must be expressed through love of human beings. He calls for Christians to avoid isolating themselves from secular modernity and recommends instead that they embrace an active and loving engagement with nonbelievers through acts of servitude. At the same time, Halík critiques the drive for mere material success and suggests that love must become more than a private virtue in contemporary society. I Want You to Be considers the future of Western society, with its strong division between Christian and secular traditions, and recommends that Christians think of themselves as partners with nonbelievers. Halik’s distinctive style is to present profound insights on religious themes in an accessible way to a lay audience. As in previous books, this volume links spiritual and theological/philosophical topics with a tentative diagnosis of our times. This is theology written on one’s knees; Halik is as much a spiritual writer as a theologian. I Want You to Be will interest both general and scholarly readers interested in questions of secularism and Christianity in modern life.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Mysticism
• Philosophy
• Spirituality
• Religion
• Faith

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 août 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268100759
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

I WANT YOU TO BE
I Want You to Be
ON THE GOD OF LOVE
TOM HAL K
Translated by GERALD TURNER
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Published by the University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
Copyright 2016 by Tom Hal k
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hal k, Tom , author.
Title: I want you to be : on the God of love / Tom Hal k ; translated by Gerald Turner.
Other titles: Chci, abys byl. English
Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016020342 (print) | LCCN 2016019554 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268100742 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268100759 (epub) | ISBN 9780268100728 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Love-Religious aspects-Christianity. | God (Christianity)-Love. | Christianity and culture.
Classification: LCC BV4639 (print) | LCC BV4639 .H22513 2016 (ebook) | DDC 241/.4-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020342
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper) .
ISBN 9780268100759
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
As one of his many pupils,
I dedicate this book to the memory of
Dr. Josef Zv ina (1913-90),
Czech theologian and human rights advocate,
imprisoned by the Nazis and Communists,
author of The Theology of Agape ,
in gratitude to this teacher of faith,
love, and civic courage.
Amo: volo, ut sis (I love you: I want you to be) .
-attributed to St. Augustine
There is a certain relationship between love and the Divine . Love is indeed ecstasy, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving . But this process is always open-ended; love is never finished and complete; throughout life, it changes and matures, and thus remains faithful to itself .
-Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est
And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love .
-1 Cor. 13:13
Contents
1 - Love-Where from, and Where To
2 - Waiting for the Second Word
3 - Does Love Have Precedence over Faith?
4 - The Remoteness of God
5 - I Want You to Be
6 - The Closeness of God
7 - An Open Gate
8 - Narcissus s Deceptive Pool
9 - Is Tolerance Our Last Word?
10 - Loving One s Enemies
11 - Were There No Hell or Heaven
12 - Love the World?
13 - Stronger than Death
14 - Dance of Love
Notes
1

Love-Where from, and Where To

I have often asked myself, but found no answer, / where gentleness and goodness come from / I still don t know today, and now must go, wrote Gottfried Benn. 1 The authenticity and sadness of this verse is what captivates. Something profounder and more universal shines through the poet s humble sincerity-a testimony about the times we live in. The constant ow into the sea of human knowledge simultaneously conceals and reveals that notknowingness , the chasm of helplessness when we are confronted by the question of the ultimate where from that de es all attempts to name it.
In the rst half of the twentieth century, against the background of all the horrors of war and genocide, the age-old question, Whence cometh evil?, was posed afresh with new urgency. It is quite possible that nowadays we have become so accustomed to evil, violence, and cynicism that we ask ourselves with surprise another question: Where do tenderness and goodness come from? What are they doing here in our cruel world? Do tenderness and goodness-like evil and violence-emerge from somewhere in the conditions of our world (do evil and good depend chie y on how we organize society?) or from some still unexplored corners of our unconscious or complex processes in our brains? There are plenty of scienti c studies about the psychoneurobiological processes that accompany all our emotions, and about the centers in the brain that are activated when we receive or show tenderness, and when we do good or people are good to us. I do not doubt that everything we feel and think rst passes through countless portals of our natural world and is affected and in uenced by our organism and our environment, and by the culture we are born into, including the language in which we think. After all, our bodies and our minds, our brains, and everything that happens in them are part of the world or nature, that intricate corridor through which the river of life ows. But where is the truly ultimate source?
Can we simply reject the ancient intuition that goodness and tenderness, the light and warmth of life that we almost hesitate by now to give the overworked name of love, enter our world-and hence our minds and behavior-not simply as a mere product of ourselves and our world, but as a gift, as a radically new quality, which rightly lls us again and again with amazement and gratitude? Isn t the world itself a gift? Aren t we a gift to ourselves? And isn t this gift renewed over and over again and revived from that therefrom from which love springs? But if we go seeking that source beyond our world-outside-will we not miss the opportunity to encounter it where we overlook it because it is so close, namely, inside?
Where do tenderness and kindness have their source? Do I know, perhaps? I have to admit that I don t. All the answers that occur to me feel like a heavy curtain covering the open window of this question. There are some questions that are too good to spoil with answers, that should remain an open window. Such openness need not lead to resignation but to contemplation.
Those who are aware that the author is a theologian are by now possibly waiting impatiently for me to say at last that the answer to the question about the ultimate is God, of course. But the conviction has gradually matured within me that God approaches us more as a question than an answer. Maybe the one whom we mean by the word God is more present to us when we hesitate to say the word too hastily. Maybe he feels better with us in the open space of the question than in the constrictingly narrow gully of our answers, our de nitive statements, our de nitions and our notions. Let us treat his Holy Name with the greatest restraint and care.
Maybe the moments in history when polite or indifferent silence about God reigns in the world of academe are a precious opportunity for the theologian to make amends for the pious garrulousness of the previous epoch and return to what the holy teacher of the faith Thomas Aquinas emphasized at the beginning of his philosophical and theological investigations: God is not evident. Of ourselves we do not know what or who God is. Let us not fear vertigo when looking into the depths of the Unknown. Let us not fear the humble admission, I don t know. After all, this is not the end but always a new beginning on the endless journey.
Besides, for faith (and also hope and love), for all these three forms of patience with God, with his hiddenness, 2 we don t know is not an insurmountable barrier.

For many people around me the biblical statements about love (God is love; love the Lord your God with all your heart; God so loved the world; love your enemies) sound like phrases in an unfamiliar, incomprehensible, or long-forgotten language. Those people often consider themselves unbelievers (or at most people who believe differently than those who subscribe to Christianity or Judaism). In the world of the Bible, theology, and Christian faith, they are strangers. So it is not surprising that religious statements of that kind sound like music from distant worlds, or like the ruins of cities once inhabited by the generations of their ancestors.
And what about us? Let us not duck the question about how and to what extent those sentences are understood by us who declare our courage to continue to regard ourselves as Christians in this world. Those sentences are close to our hearts because we have heard them many times, but how do they tally with our experience, our everyday world?
This brings to mind the story of the young Jewish boy who enrolled in a rabbinical school against the wishes of his rich merchant father. When he came home for vacation his father welcomed him sarcastically: Well, my son, what have you managed to learn in the space of a whole year? The boy replied, I learned that the Lord our God is the only God. Outraged, the father grabbed one of his assistants by the shoulder: Isaac, do you know that the Lord is the only God? Of course, the simpleton replied. But his son exclaimed with passion, I know he heard it. But did he learn it?
In this book I want to give an account of what I have tried to learn, what I strive to understand more profoundly about those few seemingly simple biblical sentences about love. But I admit at the outset that regarding those statements about God s love, about love of God, and about love of one s enemies-which are by no means as plain as some might think-not to mention their translation into the language of our everyday experience, I am far from saying my last word. This book, like all my earlier ones, is also simply an interim report of my journey, and seeks to be an inspiration and encouragement for your journey, for your own courage to seek, rather than a set of rel