Rahner and Francis

The great 20th century theologian, Karl Rahner, faced a dilemma. How do we know and speak of God once we accept that knowledge is suffused even in part with subjectivity, bias and the ever present reality of distortion? Is the knowledge of God possible after Cartesian doubt and the Kantian split between reason and faith? How do we know God; where do we find God?

I have spent some time tonight listening to Richard Lennan discourse on Rahner as "the theologian of grace." One has to stand in awe of both the genius and the courage of Rahner's thought. One has to be grateful for the elegance of Rahner's insight that God is the Vorgrif (horizon) of every act of thinking, willing and knowing -- that what we are reaching for in every thought, in the very act of thinking, is the fullness of being itself. It is never enough for us as humans to be satisfied with the limited and partial. We want the fullness and the abundance that stands as background to everything we muse and wonder about.

And it is the generosity of God to be the mystery that unfolds and reveals Itself to us in the smallest and most insignificant moments of living. That is what Rahner was trying to express for a world weary with the horrific spectacle of its violence and wars. He wanted to assure us that God can be known, more precisely God can be experienced, in the ordinary canons of every day life.

Is it too much of a stretch to draw a line from Francis to Rahner? Didn't Francis also fall in awe before the wonder of a God who revealed "Himself" elegantly and eloquently in the humblest realities of living? One of our amazing staff members spoke of this today as the Franciscan belief in "extraordinary goodness." God radiates extraordinary goodness and calls us to it, as well.

Where Rahner and Francis intersect is at the point of humility. God reveals majestic goodness in humility, God's power in powerlessness, and God's fullness in emptiness.

One can only be grateful to those great and humble people of faith who unpacked the beauty of God -- Francis, Bonaventure, Clare, Rahner and Lennan. They speak of the absolute beauty of the divine, because of the love and extraordinary goodness they have experienced in the Christ.

Look at the ordinary. Let it reveal itself as it truly is -- suffused with extraordinary goodness that is endowed and given by the graciousness of the Christ, the Logos of God.