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Summer 2007. Restlessness
Table of Contents INTRODUCTION Jesus’ words in the Gospel of Luke—“do not be of anxious mind” (Lk 12:29)—have a particular resonance in an age that is at once fearful of death and “overwhelmed by the modern ideal of work and its totalitarian claims” (J. Pieper). At the same time, the seemingly endless resources of technology and the entertainment industry have effected a strange deadening of that desire or restlessness that makes us truly human—“our hearts are restless until they rest in you” (Augustine). The Summer, 2007 issue offers a reflection on these various meanings of Restlessness, from the anxious striving that marks our fallen nature to the ecstatic desire that images the divine giving and receiving of life within the Trinity. In “On Restlessness,” Antonio López argues that the root cause of the anxiety and restless striving that characterizes our technological culture is “a rejection of the primordial goodness of creation, and, hence, of its source, the Father.” Developing an insight of Maximus the Confessor, López suggests that “Christ’s final offer of himself to the Father at Gethsemane and Calvary is able to transform man’s restless existence into grateful reciprocation of the Father’s love because it is both a divine and a human ‘yes.’” True restlessness, then, “is eucharistic, filial existence because man’s life is taken up by Christ and brought into the divine triune love.” In “Freedom: The Serenity of Letting Go,” Jörg Splett reflects on the profound connection between play and freedom: “man is wholly human when he plays because in play he ‘realizes’ (both in the sense of discovers and actualizes) and witnesses to himself as a free being.” At the core of freedom, and thus at the core of true restlessness, is a call to let go of oneself. “To let oneself go by leaving behind the concrete troubles and fears of everyday life and entrusting oneself instead to this game [of liturgy] is to confirm and nourish man’s freedom and, in doing that, his humanity.” In “Restlessness and Anxiety: Toward a Christian Discernment,” Jacques Servais argues that indifference, lived as the disponibility of love, “excludes the restlessness and anxiety of the sinner, but it may include the anxiety of the believer, of the saint who, following his Lord, lives through grace a participation in common anxiety.” The deepest response to the anxiety of our age consists in entering into the joy of the Resurrection: “this joy, which has its source explicitly in the Lord (Phil 1:18, 25) is ready at every moment to receive the trials that are given to it for the benefit of the Body that is his Church.” In “'Continually Breathe Jesus Christ': Stillness and Watchfulness in the Philokalia,” Martin Laird presents the common teaching of Greek monastic authors on the relation between stillness, watchfulness, and the Jesus Prayer. “The Philokalia sees the life of stillness as a response to the Gospel’s call to discipleship, to rest in Jesus.” In the words of Evagrios, “the practice of stillness is full of joy and beauty; its yoke is easy and its burden light.” Does desire, in fact, seek a final destination; does the heart ultimately want to rest? In “Restlessness as an Image of God,” D. C. Schindler reflects on the relation between rest and restlessness, satiety and desire, in terms of classical beauty, the postmodern sublime, and Christian glory. “The trivializing of beauty that reduces it to the immediate gratification of superficial desire, and the supplanting of beauty, in reaction, by the sublime that contemptuously thwarts desire and renders it absurd, are arguably forms of implicit atheism.” “The inner form of genuinely restless desire,” Schindler concludes, “is the praise of God’s glory, a restful celebration that remains joyfully restless in its ‘inability’ fully to express either its gratitude or its eagerness to do the Father’s will.” In “Yahweh, the Trinity: The Old Testament Catechumenate (Part 2),” Giorgio Buccellati completes his argument that “the divine reality is, and has of course always been, intrinsically and essentially trinitarian, so that on some level this trinitarian dimension could not have escaped human perception.” By describing the varying perceptual ranges of the way in which the particularity of God was apprehended, Buccellati shows that “the Old Testament sense of Yahweh was, in its depth, profoundly trinitarian already. With Jesus, there came the full and living disclosure of a presence long since sensed and perceived, however dimly.” Finally, the present issue concludes with a reflection by Jacob Neusner, “Renewing Religious Disputation in Quest of Theological Truth: In Dialogue With Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth.” Written in response to Pope Benedict XVI’s lengthy engagement in Jesus of Nazareth of Neusner’s book A Rabbi Talks With Jesus, the article sets out from the observation that Judaeo-Christian dialogue as practiced in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries inherited too much of the Enlightenment’s indifference to the truth claims of religion. Seeking to renew authentic religious disputation, which will simultaneously help “Christians be better Christians” and “Jews be better Jews,” Neusner intends in his book and in the present article to clarify the differences between Christianity and Judaism by focusing particularly on the teachings of Jesus rather than on his status as the Messiah: “if I had been in the Land of Israel in the first century and present at the Sermon on the Mount, I would not have joined the circle of Jesus’ disciples. I would have dissented.” From within this framework of respectful, frank disagreement, Neusner welcomes Benedict’s own contribution toward the retrieval of reason in theology and looks forward to a “renewal of a two-thousand-year-old tradition of religious debate in the service of God’s truth.” NJH Go to Table of Contents. | |
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