Renewal: In Dependence, I Begin

We began the year by focusing on our need to recognise that the arrival of the time appointed by God - the Kairos - is an unrepeatable moment and, being unrepeatable, is also a new beginning. We also looked at how this divine unrepeatability is at work even at the time when we are surrounded by the slings and arrows of the year to come that seem almost exactly like those that came the year before (and perhaps even the year before that).

In the second part of this series, we also looked at a key temptation that we face in difficulty, the temptation to take control and prove to the world that you do not need anyone to help you. We then saw how when we act on this drive to assert our independence, we paradoxically render ourselves vulnerable to do the very things we said we will not do, only over and over again.

In this post, we look at a posture to adopt that can set us on the path to genuine renewal.

In his Introduction to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger repeated a constant theme in this blog, that the Christian faith is not primarily an acceptance of a schema of claims. The Christian faith, Ratzinger says, is primarily about an encounter with the person of Jesus Christ. In Christ we see “the measure of my humanity” (56), and what is required is not submission to a rule, but a restoration of my humanity in Jesus Christ. This restoration, Ratzinger says, will entail asking us a question:

What kind of shift in being do I thus accomplish, what attitude to the business of being a man do I adopt? How deep does this process go? What estimate of reality as a whole does it involve? (56)

This shift in being is crucial here, for one does not become Christian just because one agrees to Christian ideas, but because that person has undergone a change in his own being by becoming enfolded into Christ’s body through baptism. To be a Christian is to put on Christ (Rom 13:14) and become a new creation, and so from the get go, renewal is built into the DNA of the Christian life.

As Ratzinger indicated, this change in being also entails an attitudinal change, or more accurately a change in posture towards reality. Luigi Giussani sums up this attitudinal change in his La Convenienza Umana della Fede. For Giussani, a change in being must come with a realisation that the Christian belongs to something greater. In Giussani’s words:

The awareness that our life depends on an other and exists in function of this other! Our life, when we get up in the morning and drink our coffee, when we roll up our sleeves to clean the house, when we go to work, whatever work it may be (there’s no difference), our life depends on something other, greater, avoidably greater, which it exists to serve (126-127).

The realisation of this dependence is not a humiliation, because that on which we depend is not a hulking authority that limits our opportunities. Rather, what we depend on is the Divine Word, which is a never ending source of new beginnings. Moreover, Giussani says in Generating Traces that the encounter with Christ is not simply a life changed, but is a “new beginning set in time” (46).

The extent to which we are experieincing Nietzsche’s recurrence of the same then, is the extent to which we have forgotten of this fundamental dependence, which Giussani assures, is a natural part of living on this side of death. However, the difficulties we face when we run up against this same thing over and over again is at the same time an invitation that God extends to us over and over again. It is an ever renewed invitation to remember our dependence on Him, and in so doing, it is an invitation to enter into the genuine renewal that only He can give.

Support Awkward Asian Theologian on Patreon, and help make a change to the theological web.