RITE AND REASON:HOLY WEEK is a time for essentials, for getting back to basics. For many, it is a sacred time; a time to gather with fellow believers to contemplate the distinct and defining elements of a shared Christian identity and community.
Even for many of those who have long since discarded any visible trappings of their church affiliation, it is a special time; a time to spend with family and friends, to live what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the dearest freshness deep down things”.
Having said this, some readers might wonder why we now turn our thoughts to a theologian, the 25th anniversary of whose death occurred on March 30th last.
To read, however, even a small selection of the writing of Hopkins’s fellow Jesuit Karl Rahner on the Easter mysteries of life, death and resurrection is to be reminded of just how appropriate it is that we should remember him at this time.
Just six weeks before he died, Rahner delivered his last public lecture, entitled Experiences of a Catholic Theologian, at a conference in Freiburg held in honour of his 80th birthday. In the last section of this lecture, What Is To Come, Rahner offered a personal reflection on death and eternal life.
He is critical, in kindly terms, of talk of eternal life which makes it seem more like a continuation of what we are used to in this life. Such talk is “clothed too much with realities with which we are familiar”. It does not do justice to what he calls the “radical incomprehensibility” of it all.
We cannot, he insists, downgrade the direct vision of God in eternal life “to one pleasant activity alongside others”. If we have the courage to accept, in a spirit of faith and hope, “the immense terror that is death”, we can experience it as filled with “God’s all-absorbing and all-giving love”.
It is, as always for Rahner, a case of “both-and”; there is no escaping the terror for any of us. There is no resurrection without a cross.
In an earlier essay called Experiencing Easter, written in the mid-1960s, Rahner speaks of the need for each of us to reflect on our own Way of the Cross: "Today the Way of the Cross means calamity, cancer, divorce, war, being thrown on the scrapheap" – but it is still the same Way of the Cross "which leads by way of tribulation and much pain to final death".
The Easter experience is more than the sum of its parts. For Rahner, it is an encounter with the person of Jesus, with his love and fidelity as manifest finally and decisively in his total acceptance of the darkness of his death, even to the point of feeling abandoned by God.
Rahner describes Jesus as “an effective prototype for us all”: our life has a final and definitive meaning. It is capable of redemption, and this meaning has actually been realised in the first Easter experience of Jesus.
Rahner acknowledges the difficulty for many in believing explicitly and publicly in the resurrection of Jesus. He believes those who persist along their own Via Dolorosa, living in good conscience "as if" everything had meaning, are expressing their own resurrection faith.
The Way of the Cross has a 15th station, where all such take leave of the march of time and are gathered into God’s love, whether they have made a prior explicit act of faith or not.
Dr Pádraic Conway is a vice-president of UCD and director of the UCD International Centre for Newman Studies