I often wonder whether it was ever easier to believe in God at an earlier time than it is today. I think that this is a good question and I have never been able to arrive at an answer. For example, if I had lived in the middle ages when the church was the geographical center of every town (even in the larger towns Saints' Days were universally observed) and everything was basically marked with the Cross, faith could have been nothing more than the product of social conformity. Of course, in today's world this is not the case. Today, atheism is a plausible credo that one could live by. But I think that it is true, at least according to the evidence in the New Testament, that faith is never simple or easy. Faith is never like falling off of a log.

The Johanine writings regularly describe faith as a triumph, which means that faith only comes as a result of a struggle. And if you read Paul closely enough you come to understand that the struggle never ends, because as we live life keeps throwing up instances, events and objects which either obstruct faith or demand that faith take a new form. The classic instance of this is the figure of Elie Wiesel, the great Jewish writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, whose entire family was incinerated in the German death camps. He has written poignantly of his presence at the death of his father by starvation in one of the camps. After this horrible experience this fourteen-year-old, pious, Jewish Hasid became an atheist. But later, he became a believer again. I bring him up because it should be eminently clear that the faith of Elie Weisel today (he is still alive and was here at Western a couple of years ago) is certainly not the same faith that he had when he went into the death camps. All of this was stimulated in me by this famous first reading from Isaiah. It seems so simple: Isaiah sees God and all of a sudden he comes to a totally different understanding of himself and of his world. But reactively, we have to know that Isaiah was a believing Jew even before he had this experience, as was Peter in this strange passage from the Gospel of Luke.

What brought Peter to believe that he was sinful? Simply because they caught more fish? Given the way that Luke sets up his Gospel, the answer is no. This is evident because it is clear that Luke is very consciously echoing the event in Isaiah: the encounter with the Holy. This encounter only occurs on top of the platform of some kind of faith. You see, in a sense these readings are really not all that helpful! They are useful as a kind of model for illuminating what faith does - - it changes our understanding of ourselves and of the world we live in - - but these readings do not provide the impulse for us to begin believing in the first place. But, I believe there is an element from this vivid account in Isaiah that can be helpful in our search for faith.

I think very few of us can say that we have had a vision of God. But, I think that it is true that most of us have had what we might call an encounter with the "beautiful". And if you read The Tradition, one of Augustine's favourite ways of talking about God was as supreme beauty. The great Jonathan Edwards, the founder of the first Christian revivalist movement in the United States in the eighteenth century, always spoke of God as "the beautiful". You can even go back to Plato (where Augustine got his start too) who spoke of God as "the beautiful". What I am getting at is this: I believe that everybody has encountered, even in our highly pedestrian and commodified world where everything is bought and sold and everything has its price, an experience of grace. This is exactly what an encounter with the beautiful is all about.

The one scholar who has taken this Isaiah text and beaten it into eloquent shape is a German Scripture scholar named Rudolph Otto who wrote a book entitled "The Holy" at the beginning of this century. In this book, he says there are all kinds of parallels between the encounter with God as we get it here and the encounter with the beautiful. I just want to spend a couple of minutes talking about the nature of this encounter and state firstly that whether it is experienced through music, a piece of sculpture, a painting, the sun shining during these bleak winter days in Canada, or the faces of your children, one can be surprised by beauty in any number of places.

What is the first characteristic of such an encounter? It is totally unexpected. It is a gift, it happens. And even though I think we really do look at life (at least most of the time in today's world and maybe people always have) in terms of some kind of cost-benefit analysis, the encounter with the beautiful simply explodes this and discredits this way of constituting the world. There is a free lunch, and the free lunch is provided by the experience of the beautiful.

Another aspect of the so-called aesthetic experience is that it is absolutely non-coercive. It is utterly free. Nobody can thrust you before a painting and say, "Look at that. Isn't that beautiful?". No, they may illuminate aspects of a painting but nobody can extort the response to the beautiful. It is absolutely non-coercive.

I think another final aspect of the beautiful is based (although it is not the final aspect but will suffice for our purposes) on the fact that there is always a sense of dissatisfaction in the wake of the experience with the beautiful, because when we run into something that seems worthy simply on its own terms without making some kind of assessment of it - - simply its own worthiness accosting us - - once we move away from this, life does not look the same, human possibilities do not look the same. Is this an experience of God? No. But is it a movement to hope, a movement to desire that God exists? Yes it is. And maybe today in our heavily mechanized world where everything seems to be like so many gears meshing perfectly and running smoothly (of course, until it crashes, but we need not delve into this area) we still work on the illusion that we have this wonderfully, humanly constructed world of the Internet, e-mail and everything working so smoothly that there is no possibility for anything alien beyond us to break into this. We do not need to stand in a line at Canada Trust and hear "Well, our machines our down today. You'll have to come back later" to be aware of the fragility of this act of arrogance. This act of arrogance is based on our belief that we live in a self-made world, a self-constituted and a self-justifying world. Thus, when we come into the presence of the beautiful this all becomes radically relativized and we are put into a position to begin to really search for God, and I propose to you that this is what faith is. Faith is never the final and complete possession of God's faith is always the search for God. As Emmanuel Levinas puts it, "It is the desire for God". And even those great believers like Teresa of Avila who says that, "The desire for prayer is prayer itself", or to paraphrase her, the desire to believe in God is itself faith in God, exemplify this. Why did anybody get hit by Jesus? Because they had seen God better? No, I do not think so. They believed in Jesus because they saw a quality of life, a beauty of human existence that set into question their own lives and moved them beyond themselves to ask who they really were.

Finally, we are having this African art exhibit, as I suppose most of you know. The London Free Press really did get it right this time when they said, "It speaks to me". It does speak to me and I think if you spend some time around it, it will speak to you too. There is something stunning, indescribable and wonderful about these creations from people who do not speak our language, who do not look like most of us, who are alien in all kinds of ways, and yet who can communicate with us, who can and do, in fact, communicate with us. And so, I think that even these biblical texts can cast some kind of light on what we are doing in this African art exhibit. If it does do this then I think that this will bring us even closer to a form of Christian unity in which we can look at the world and say, "You are my brother. You are my sister, however different you look from me, however differently you act from the way that I act, however different your language, we really do belong together".

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Created: 30 Nov 1996
© Copyright: R. Trojcak, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002
London Ontario Canada
Last Update: September 05, 2005
Comments: rtrojcak@hotmail.com