In my room, I have a poster of a famous fresco known nowadays as the ‘School of Athens.’ Commissioned by the Vatican during the Renaissance, it depicts a large gathering of people, in this case some of the greatest non-Christian minds of the Western Tradition. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and others are all depicted there, discussing issues with one another. They are all gathered in a large and open building around a grand staircase. Near the bottom of the fresco there is a large stone block interrupting the flow of the stairs. Placed there later on in the history of the fresco, its meaning has been suggested by some to be a reference to Jesus Christ as the stone abandoned and made into a cornerstone.
Therefore, its [the stone's] value is for you who have faith, but for those without faith: ‘The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’ and ‘A stone that will make people stumble, and a rock that will make them fall.’ They stumble by disobeying the word, as is their destiny. (1 Peter 2: 7-8)
Jesus Christ as represented by this stone is something to be tripped over, something out of place, that seems unnecessary and unwelcome. Yet neither they nor anyone can get rid of this stone. This painting has always moved me, and it often made me wonder about the nature of my relationship to the Divine, and soon, I too began to wonder if I had put my faith in the same place these intellectuals have done within this fresco.
There is a great desire to push aside our faith in our modern day lives. Some even openly mock our faith directly. I have heard and read from many people, particularly among the young, that ‘it is easier to believe than to doubt.’ Usually the idea behind such sayings are that belief, particularly about those things within the religious or spiritual realm, are for those who are intellectually lazy, that they take the statements of religion at face value in order to avoid deep contemplation. This may be true of some, however those that would make such a claim show a tremendous ignorance of the life of the faithful, who are often racked by doubt for much of their lives. For example, it was reveled recently in her own writings, that throughout much of Mother Teresa’s life, even when she was doing some of her most spiritual and charitable work, that she was plagued by doubt.
Where is my faith? Even deep down … there is nothing but emptiness and darkness … If there be God-please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul.[1]
In the sixties, as a professor of theology, Joseph Ratzinger, who was later made Pope Benedict the XVIth, made a series of lectures about the nature of the Christian Faith which were eventually collected together into a book called ‘An Introduction to Christianity.’ In one particular section he talks about the inescapability of doubt, that those that believe wonder if God exists, and those that do not believe wonder if God may exist.
Just as the believer is choked by the salt water of doubt constantly washed into his mouth by the ocean of uncertainty the nonbeliever is troubled by doubts about his unbelief…Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; faith is present against doubt; for the other, through doubt and in the form of doubt. It is the basic pattern of man’s destiny only to be allowed to find the finality of his existence in this unceasing rivalry between doubt and belief, temptation and certainty.[2]
We cannot run from our faith, it calls us at all times, nor can we hide completely from unfaithfulness. We can escape neither God nor the Devil, stuck between the lines of both armies, we cannot escape the war, no matter what we believe. Where does that leave us? If we cannot ignore our faith, what then? Should we simply try to live our lives, and act without reveling of the turbulent conflict happening in our minds?
We must avoid the temptation, however great, of believing that our faith has no place in our daily lives. The teachings of Jesus Christ, as presented in the gospels and the letters of his apostles and disciples would seem to disagree with that notion. “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” (Matthew 13:44) No person would sell everything he has for something that is not worthwhile. Jesus is telling us of the tremendous value of the Kingdom of Heaven and our Faith.
In an attempt at peace, we may wish to push aside our faith, to cut up our souls so as not to force our faith on others. But that is not the nature of our humanity. When we do not give thought or care to our longing for the Divine, we feel something missing deep inside us, we feel a part of us is missing. This was the question dealt with in the first Ask Andie column in the first edition of our newspaper (the Immaculate Times). We cannot simply hide our faith from our daily actions and believe it doesn’t matter, no more than the man in the story below can hide his wealth and hope to keep it.
There was once a man, a miser, who had collected a lot of money over years, but he was still not content with this, so he collected all the money he had and melted it down into one solid gold bar. He then took the bar and buried it into the ground. At regular times, he would dig it up and stare at it, and it would bring him great joy, and then bury it once more and go on with his day. This did not go unnoticed by the townspeople, and soon enough a thief caught wind of this buried treasure. One day the thief waited around for the miser and watched where his treasure was buried, and when the miser finished staring at it and buried it once again, the thief made sure he remembered exactly where the gold was. The next time the miser came to look at his gold, he found it was gone. He ran to his neighbor crying out, in such deep pain, agonizing over the loss of his gold. His neighbor looked at him and said simply… “Don’t worry so much over your loss my friend; simply put a brick where you once had your gold, because even when you had your treasure it was only worth as much as that!”
Upon reading this story, many of us may simply laugh at the plight of this man, and condemn him for his utter foolishness. What value is money if you do not spend it, what good did it do him to simply stare at it from time to time? How many do the same thing with our desire to know the Divine, something far more valuable than gold or money. How many of us do the same thing as the man above does, simply burry God, hiding him in a hostile world. Of what use is God in our lives if we bury him in the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, exposing it on a weekly or yearly basis to give us the false sense of possession or love of him. If we can ask ourselves how rich was the miser if he buried his gold without ever spending it, can we not also ask how much faith we truly have if we only express our love of the Divine on a sporadic, secret and rare occasion?
We may think of our faith as something beyond this world, as something above the cares of our daily lives, but this is a deep misunderstanding about the nature of Faith. Faith is not the pinnacle or peak of our lives, but the keystone of it. Like the keystone of an arch, which is responsible for locking all the other stones in place, our desire for God is the part of our soul which holds us together. A longing for and deep contemplation of the Divine is the keystone of the Good Life, that idea that has been so long sought for throughout all of human history, in all places around the world. That important block in our lives, that keystone cannot be a buried like the gold of that man, because when it is, it is of as little value in our lives as gold was in the life of the miser. And we soon find that our lives, like an arch without a keystone, will soon be unable to stand. And just like that miser who has lost his gold, if we constantly bury our faith, we too might find that someday it will be gone, taken away by a thief much more dangerous that the one in our story.
Like gold, God and our love and desire for the Divine is only valuable when it is spent and shared among those around us, when it is used to not only to help others, but fuel our own search for the True nature and purpose of our lives. Beware of hiding our faith like the man in the story above, only looking at in on a weekly or yearly schedule. Remember that if you do that, you are burying the greatest treasure the world has ever known, and the very keystone to our happiness. If only those thinkers of the that fresco, School of Athens, could see that stone they stumble around, which they thought so interrupts their lives, is in fact the keystone of the Good Life they were so desperately seeking.[3]
[1] Teresa, Mother (2007). Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0385520379.
[2] Ratzinger, Joseph (Pope Benidict XVI), Introduction to Christianity, pg 45,47
[3] The original title of the fresco is not the School of Athens but Causarum Cognitio or Knowledge of Causes. They are the people and thinkers that have worked from that very human and childlike idea, they desire to know the causes of things. If one follows ask a question, the answer will lead to another question. Why is the sky blue? If that is answered, then one asked further why that is, and so on and so on till we come to the first cause, the thing that started it all. Some of them, such as Aristotle, Plotinus, and to a lesser degree Plato were able to follow that chain of causes to the idea of the Prime Mover or the First Cause. Even our secular scientists today follow the chain back to a first cause, that super particle before the big bang. There is a deep and innate desire in all of us, expressed almost immediately after words spring from our mouths, the question of why. This deep desire and longing for the first cause, the Divine, must hold a central place in our lives. It must form the keystone of our lives.
