Based on a chapter called the Final Judgement in Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini’ s book “Piccolo Manuale della Speranza – Vivere con Fiducia il Nostro Tempo” [A Small manual of Hope – Living our lives in Trust]. Giunti Editore S.p.A. Milano, 2012.
Journeys of anxieties of an era: secularism and the fatherless society.
The personal emancipation process from the father figure, that up to now we have only hinted at (see Rays of Hope: Journeys of Anxieties – part 1), has occurred over the last centuries even at societal level, changing the then current mentality and giving rise to the present secularism. The story is well known: The Enlightenment movement of the 18th century wanted to introduce an era centered on mature reason; an era where people had an internal locus of control, where people felt that they belonged in this world, an age in which everyone could live their own life in the way they choose.
This modern era’s ambition, which has inspired revolutions, has increasingly shown its deep-seated ambiguity. On one hand, the claim that human reason can explain anything has led to the development of standardization ideologies, with the consequence that anything that appears different, in beliefs, social condition, in race, in nations, has been forcefully eliminated – hence police states, extermination camps, ethnic cleansing etc. On the other hand, as if in revenge, the organized denial of dependence on Someone higher, has changed into a search for idols, that are poor “substitutes of the father”, that have morphed into the face representing the charismatic leader, the guiding political party, of progress etc.
It is a process that has had a dramatic twist in the explicit rejection of God, understood as Father and Lord. In this manner, organized atheism has developed, the other side of an effort towards total emancipation. Consequently, “the death of God” appeared to be a necessary condition for the liberty and glory on man. The aim was to get rid of God understood as despotic judge, or indifferent or inert opponent.
The tragic price paid for these modern reason’s pretensions emerged soon enough.
Two scholars start their book about our current age as follows: “The Enlightenment, in its wider sense of the idea of continuous progress, has always sought to allay people’s fear and to make them free. However, the world entirely illuminated sparkles in tragedy.”2 The ideology has devasted itself into the smoke of the incinerators of the concentration camps and in the genocides of the twentieth century. The society without fathers, produced by the tyrannical ambition of reason, ended up in widespread loneliness. The so-called “crises of the ideologies” and the rise of the “weak thought” 3 that characterize the end of the millennium, are the result of the failure of reason’s presumptions.
What is the meaning of this in concrete terms? The strong orientations given by meaning have fallen apart, there is a spread of a reactionary rejection of ideologies that convey certainties, there emerges a sense of discomfort and disorientation. A condition of “shipwreck with spectator” 4 appears to characterize the end of the period of opposing ideological blocks. Indifference, a lack of passion for the truth, the inability to have robust hope, has pushed many to shut themselves down within the narrow horizons of their individual interests or of those of their group. Fragmentation replaces totalitarian ideologies. 5The island replaces the forced standardization created by ideologies. The “weak thought” fearful of any sort of truth, emerges.
What has become of the father figure in these post-modern times? If ideology was meant to libertate man from dependence on his father so that he can become a fully emancipated adult, the “weak thought” that followed did not manage to resuscitate the figure of a trustworthy Other. The end of the fatherless society has not led to the return of the father figure. On the contrary, relativism6 that is spreading and filling the vacuum left by the abandoned ideologies of certainty, appears to make people even more closed in themselves and lonelier. The indifference to values, often masked by social climbing and the craze to spend one’s life chasing fleeting things, goes radically further than the “the killing of the father” sought after by the Enlightenment’s reason. The father is no longer a figure to fight or a despot to escape from but is now a figure devoid of any interest or any appeal. Ignoring the father is basically more tragic than fighting him to become free from him.
Hence, Relativism and indifference both also affect the experience of God as Father. “Weak thought” does not deny God. It does not need to. However, it empties the concept of any meaning and of any transcendental appeal. At best, God becomes a “decoration”7. A figure that fits in with the weakness ethic and with the continuing downward trend into no sense. It is a weak God that mirrors a man that is decadent and who abdicates his responsibility. One lives with him as if he were one of the many fetishes of life, without letting him touch or change you in any way. It is the condition that the parable of the merciful father expresses through the character represented by the elder son. He had stayed at home, but after living with his father for so many years, was still incapable of understanding the logic of his love and forgiveness. A prisoner of his loneliness and a slave to his interests (“… you never offered me so much as a kid for me to celebrate with my friends”. Lk 15,29), the elder son is no less distant from the father than the son who went away. Physical proximity is not the same thing as emotional intimacy. One can live at home with his father but ignore him by one’s actions. One can recommence talking about God, but never meet him, without having a deep and life-giving experience.
Up to here, we have tried to analyze the consequences of the “rejection of the father”, that emerges from secularism and of “weak thought”.
But what do we see of all this in the people that we meet in our daily lives? Certainly, we do not often meet these ideas lived in an organized and logical way. People normally live, without realizing it, in various cultural worlds. To a certain extent, at least in certain instances, deep down they are conscious of a fatherhood from above and recite Our Father with hope. Concurrently, they are also subconsciously diffident of the father, and they want to free themselves from a God that they perceive as Father-Master. People also accept the influences of the post- modern confusion, which are expressed not so much at a rationale level but rather in a feeling of general indifference, apathy, and mistrust of a higher-level truth, of a mad scramble against anything that is ephemeral. This last aspect explains why so many middle-aged persons have distanced themselves from the Church and, also the deep indifference and the bewilderment of youths.
However, we should take a further step. That is, we must examine ourselves and reinterpret the events that we have analyzed, not as part of history and culture of the last 3 centuries, but as part of our own life. It is asked of us by the 2 sons in the parable: to identify ourselves with the protagonists and saying to ourselves “You are that man!” 8 It is only by experiencing in ourselves the disgorgements of our time, becoming aware of them for better or for worse, that we would no longer look with detachment and superficiality at all those who struggle with their faith and Christian practice. We will not perceive them to be different from us, perhaps with feelings of discomfort and annoyance, but we will deem them to be companions on our journey, a part of our life, a mirror of our intimate thoughts, and we will say to ourselves and to them the true words that the Spirit whispers to us. In fact, the spirit of Jesus cries “Abba, Father” even in us men and women of this indifferent and distracted postmodern era. Those who can discern the voice of the Spirit are tasked with helping others perceive this voice too, because it still cries in our hearts even today.
Life as a journey towards the Father
How is the perception of the cry of the Spirit facilitated? How do we rediscover the Father’s face as the true, attractive face? How do we restore to our current time the joy of the ultimate reference point, loving and mysterious, the original womb in which to move and act, able to give life meaning? The two-fold analysis that we have sketched – the one that from the anxiety of the personal existence moves towards the Mother-Father figure in love and the one that understands the evolution of secularism as rejection of the father figure and which has degenerated into indifference – shows the inevitability of the choice to be made. When man withdraws in himself or expects to embrace the whole universe in the limited horizon of his projects, it is anxiety, no sense and loneliness that are the winners. When a person accepts to seek and to open himself to wider horizons, the Father figure will meet us halfway and will call us.
We are therefore invited to look at life and at history as a pilgrimage towards the Father: one does not live for death, but for life, and this culmination is connected to a Someone that comes to meet us halfway and guarantees our future with an alliance pact with him. Where there is an opening to the Other, who visits us and helps us out of our fears and selfishness to live for others and with others, are born covenants of peace, meetings with new people, dialogues that would otherwise be considered impossible. Life is a path towards a promised homeland, that approaches us as the holy mystery in which to trust ourselves and by which allow ourselves to be reached and saved.