Que serait la
foi si Dieu ne s’adressait pas à nous ? Il n’y aurait pas de foi chrétienne
si l’initiative ne venait de Dieu. Avec Jésus et le peuple Juif, ce n’est pas
l’homme qui cherche à plaire à Dieu, à se le concilier ou à éviter ses fureurs.
C’est lui qui a souci de nous, qui est pris aux tripes par nos vies. « Quelle
grande nation a des dieux qui s’approchent d'elle comme le Seigneur notre Dieu
le fait chaque fois que nous l'appelons ? » (Dt 4, 7) « Ce n'est
pas nous qui avons aimé Dieu, c’est lui qui nous a aimés et qui a envoyé son
Fils. » (1 Jn 4, 10)
Il
importe donc de pouvoir entendre Dieu, de l’entendre pour pouvoir lui répondre.
Nous le savons tous, Dieu, cependant, ne parle pas. Il ne parle pas comme nous
parlons. Et si les Ecritures le mettent en scène comme un locuteur, chacun sait
que l’on ne peut pas prendre leurs récits au premier degré. (Dieu n’appelle pas
comme cela est raconté de Samuel ou d’Abraham, par exemple.)
Il est
évident que la parole de Dieu ne s’entend pas. Le psaume le dit :
« Pas de parole dans ce récit, pas de voix qui s’entende. » (Ps 19,
4) La parole ne s’entend pas, mais elle s’écoute ou se regarde. Il faut être
attentif. On ne risque pas d’écouter si l’on est toujours dans le bruit, les
décibels ou les activités qui obstruent les sens. Le prologue de la règle de
saint Benoît nous invite : « Ecoute mon fils, tends l’oreille de ton
cœur. »
Suffira-t-il
d’ouvrir les Ecritures ? Ne sont-elles pas la parole de Dieu ? Elles
en sont plutôt le support. C’est en les lisant, les étudiant, les méditant,
seul ou à plusieurs, toujours en Eglise, que s’élève d’elles une parole dont
elles ne sont que la trace. Les Ecritures, pour les Juifs comme pour les
chrétiens, ne sont pas une parole dictée. Elles réclament un double travail
interprétatif, et du texte et de nos vies. Il convient de les lire comme si
elles racontaient nos histoires. C’est bien pour cela qu’elles sont pleines de
violence, de rêves, de fantasmes, mais aussi de réalisme, de douceur et de
consolation.
Si l’homme
est à l’image de Dieu, si ce monde est sa création, alors la trace de son
passage s’y trouve aussi. De la société et la vie des hommes, des « signes
des temps » et du grand livre de la nature, des joies et des peines, des
espoirs et des angoisses s’élèvent une parole de Dieu pour qui voudra bien
lire. Par nos vies, sans même parler, nous pouvons dire sa parole. N’est-ce pas
ce que nous constatons évidemment dans la vie de certains, pas seulement les
saints, mais croyants ou non, chrétiens ou non, qui ouvrent le monde à la vie ?
On pourra ne
rien entendre à tout cela. Commet la vie des hommes parlerait-elle de
Dieu ? Comment ces Ecritures d’un autre temps parleraient-elles de
Dieu ? Entre ceux qui prennent la Bible pour un coup de fil du divin et
ceux qui la méprisent comme sornette et superstition, le chemin est étroit.
Pour écouter la parole, il faut s’engager. C’est un peu comme avec les nouveau-nés.
Vous ne pouvez les comprendre si vous ne vous livrez pas à l’aventure d’une
communication qui s’élabore à être pratiquée.
Pour écouter
la parole de Dieu, il faut s’engager. Effectivement Dieu ne parle pas. Mais si
nous essayons de vivre comme Jésus, de le suivre, alors les Ecritures racontent
notre histoire, alors il est la parole que Dieu nous adresse. Jean de la Croix expliquait
le silence de Dieu aujourd’hui par le fait que Dieu n’avait plus rien à dire puisqu’il
nous avait tout dit en son fils. Pas sûr ! Lorsque ce que l’on a à dire c’est l’amour, il
faut toujours le redire. Que seraient nos amours et amitiés si elles ne se
disaient pas, ne prenaient le temps de se redire ?
Faire comme
Jésus, le suivre, c’est répondre à son appel. Et si nous répondons, c’est qu’il
y a une parole, la sienne, qui appelle. C’est en répondant par toute notre vie
à l’appel de Dieu à vivre comme son fils que l’on écoute sa parole, non comme
un message envoyé par sms ou coup de tonnerre, téléphone de l’au-delà ou
ventriloquie divine. Toute la vie, toute vie parle de Dieu pour qui sait, avec
et pour les autres, faire de ce qui arrive l’occasion d’une suite du Christ,
d’une réponse à son appel à le suivre.
Translation from Jean-François Garneau.
How to hear the word of God?
What would be the point of having faith in God if God did not speak to
us? After all would there not be no Christian faith at all if the
initiative had not come from God Himself? For with Jesus (as for the
Jewish people, by the way) it is not man who seeks to please God, to
obtain His favours or to avoid His fury. It is He who cares for us
first, who is taken to the guts [miseri-cordia] by our lives. "What
other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the
Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to him? " (Deut 4: 7) "For this
is the nature of God's love: That we did not love Him first, but that
He loved us first and sent to us his Son as an atoning sacrifice for the
sins, in us, that He wanted to redeem..." (1 John 4: 10)
It is
therefore important to be able to hear God, to hear Him in order to
answer Him. [To pray a God who would not have spoken first, in the hope
of tapping into His magical powers, for instance, would be to pray a God
that is not the Christian God.] And yet, once all of this is said, we
also all know that God, in a way, does not speak at all. He does not
speak, at least, in the way that we do. And if the Scriptures cast Him
in the guise of a character within the various biblical stories,
everyone knows that you can not take those stories to the first degree.
(God does not really speak in the way that He is told to have spoken to
Samuel or to Abraham, for instance.)
It is obvious that [in the
sense at least that fundamentalists attach to the word "hear"] the word
of God cannot be heard. The psalm says it best: 1 "The heavens declare
the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
2 Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
3 AND YET THEY HAVE NO SPEECH AN USE NO WORDS:
NO SOUND IS HEARD FROM THEM..
4 Which does not prevent their voice to reach to the extremities of all the earth,
their words to the ends of all worlds." (Ps 19: 1-4)
The word of God can be listened to, but it cannot be heard or seen,
properly speaking. We must therefore pay a special sort of attention to
hear it, so to speak. We do not risk of listening to it if we are
constantly busy and drowned in noises, decibels or activities that
obstruct the senses needed to grasp it. Thus it is with reason that the
prologue to the RULE of St. Benedict' invites us to listen in this very
special sort of fashion: "Prick up your ears, my son, stretch out the
ear of your heart."
Will it suffice then to simply open the Good
Book haphazardly and read? Won’t we find there the very word of God? Yet
those words are only a support. It is by reading Scriptures, to be
sure, by studying them and by meditating on them alone or, preferably
still, with others (always as a Church, always as a community of
believers) that an unspoken word will start to arise from the words
written in Scriptures, and of which those words from Scriptures are
nothing but a mere trace. Scriptures, for both Jews and Christians, are
not dictated words. They demand a twin labour of interpretation, both of
the text itself and of our lives as we are in the process of
interpreting them. They should be read as if they were telling us our
very own stories. That's why they are full of violence, dreams,
fantasies, but also filled with realism, sweetness and consolation.
If man is created, as they say, in the image of God, if this world is
His creation, then the trace of His passage is there too. From the
society and the lives of men, from the so-called "signs of the times",
from the great book of nature, and from the joys and sorrows and the
hopes and the anxieties of it all there arise a word, spoken by that
ever mysterous entity from within our very depths which we call "our
God" for those ready to pay careful attention. In any event, is not what
we just described what we repeatedly witness whenever we are struck
with the lives of those who, saints or not, Christians or not, suddenly
manage to inspire us as if they had heard something we had not, and thus
opened to us new paths for our lives to be lived?
One can turn a
deaf hear to all that. How can our current lives attest in any way to
the presence of a thing called God? How could scriptures from a bygone
age still speak to us of something so absolutely relevant for our time
that we might as well call them the very voice of God? Between those
who take the Bible as a litteral phone call from heaven and those who
despise it as mere nonsense and superstition, the path is narrow. It is
yet the one we need to take if we want to listen to His word. It's a bit
like with newborns. You won’t be able to understand them unless you
engage with them in the adventure of a communication which will only
start to make sense the minute you start practising it [something which
Wittgenstein would call a language game].
To listen to the word
of God, it is necessary to commit oneself to that language game that is
prayerful meditation. Indeed, God does not speak. But if we try to live
like Jesus and to "follow" Him, then Scriptures start to tell us our
own stories, and He becomes the very word that God speaks to us. John of
the Cross explained the silence of God today by the fact that God had
nothing more to say since He had told us everything in His Son. I’m not
sure at all that I agree with that! When what we have to say to one
another is the love we have for each other, we must always be ready to
say it again, and again, and again. What would be our loves and
friendships if they did not feel the need tell themselves anew, again
and again, and sort of lovers of friends would we be if we did not take
the time it takes to tell our grateful loves for the very existence of
each other time and again?
To do as Jesus did and to follow Him,
this is to answer his call. And if we answer that call, that means that
there has been a word spoken to us, that call, the very word that is
calling on us to follow it. It is by answering that call to live like
His Son that we, in effect, start to listen to God's word, and therefore
to hear it. And the perceiving (hearing, seeing, becoming conscious)
does not occur to us like it would in the case of a message sent by SMS
or in the case of the proverbial divine thunderclap, that is: as some
sort of phone call from some afterlife or as some divine ventriloquism
from some sort of pantheist universe. All of the lives of any one of us
speaks the very word that is God for those of us who know how to
transform what’s happening to them as yet another opportunity to follow
Christ and yet another opportunity to answer His call to follow Him.
