I have long-planned to add Karl Rahner SJ to the website section–Thought Leaders. The challenge is that, for me, he is more than just a leader or a teacher. In retrospect I can see that he has been so much more—the primary influence, companion, challenger, and safeguard on my life journey. But how to write about him in a way that does him and his body of work at least some justice? Rahner authored or edited over 3,500 published works throughout his career. His collection of articles written for lay people, Theological Investigations, runs to 23 volumes. His intellect—stratospheric. His spirituality—deep and wide and full of affect.
After flailing around for the past few months, I decided to ask him, as an honored teacher, how to frame a discussion of how he is such a formative figure for me. Two books immediately came to mind:
- Encounters With Silence, written in 1938, when he was 34. Full of questions and longing.
- Love of Jesus and Love of Neighbor, written in 1982, when he was 78 (two years before he died) Hardly any questions; instead, clear teachings and heart-wrenching affirmations.
For him, 44 years between the two. For me, a span of 56 years that began in 1968, when I was 20 and discovered Encounters with Silence. Rahner addresses God as You throughout the book. I had never heard of such a thing; the Divine was He/Him. Third person. Someone talked about not to. Now here was this man addressing God in the second person—subject—I-You—as:
- God of My Life
- God of My Lord Jesus Christ
- God of My Prayer
- God of Knowledge
- God of Law
- God of My Daily Routine
- God of the Living
- God of My Brothers
- God of My Vocation
- God Who is to come
Of course, I knew I didn’t understand what he was trying to get at. Still, then and now, there is something so moving in the sheer nakedness as he pours out his soul. He asks so many questions, for example:
”It is also said that knowing is the most interior way of grasping and possessing anything. But actually it seems to me that knowing touches only the surface of things, that it fails to penetrate to the heart, to the depths of my being where I am most truly “I.”
Knowledge seems more like a kind of pain-killing drug that I have to take repeatedly against the boredom and desolation of my heart. And no matter how faithful I may be to it, it can never really cure me. All it can give me is words and concepts, which perform the middleman’s service of expressing and interpreting reality to me, but can never still my hearts craving for the reality itself, for true life and true possession. I shall never be cured until all reality comes streaming like an ecstatic, intoxicating melody into my heart…
…How can we approach the heart of all things, the true heart of reality? Not by knowledge alone, but by the full flower of knowledge, love. Only the experience of knowledge’s blooming into love has any power to work a transformation in me, in my very self. For it is only when I am fully present to an object that I am changed by meeting it. And it is only in love that I am fully present–not in bare knowing, but in the affection engendered by knowing.” (pg. 29-30)
Fifty-six years later I begin to appreciate his insight. I can see where knowledge has bloomed into love in my own life.
I wonder if Rahner ever encountered Emmanuel Levinas, a contemporary who wrote:
“There would be in dialogue, in the I-You, beyond the spirituality of knowledge that is filled by the world and in the world, the opening of transcendence.” Of God Who Comes to Mind (pg. 144)
