Week 32 Monday (Year 1)

Readings: Wisdom 1:1-7; Psalm 138 (139); Luke 17:1-6

The most striking image in today's readings is that of the believer saying to a mulberry tree, 'be uprooted and planted in the sea' and it obeys him. But why would anybody want to do such a thing? What would be the purpose of such an action? Does it not seem like some kind of arbitrary display of power, some kind of supernatural magic for no clear reason other than showing off?

It brings to mind a phrase which echoes along the corridors of the Christian tradition, 'credo quia absurdum', 'I believe because it is absurd'. There is a strong modern prejudice that faith is absurd, that it is irrational, that it is in fact the very opposite of reason, of mature rationality, and of all reasonableness. Faith means accepting things as true which are absurd and irrational, and accepting them for reasons that therefore remain obscure and unknowable: on the basis of some authority or tradition telling people that this is what they ought to believe.

Along that road - if we were to embrace it seriously as a starting point for thinking about faith - lie the dangers of fideism with its extremes of fundamentalism and fanaticism, things we would not want ourselves to be found embracing.

Dominicans will tend to think of their traditions about faith as quite different from this. Faith is rational. Faith and reason, far from being opposed, are in fact the two wings of a joint search for wisdom, the wing of scientific and philosophical searching for truth on one side, and the wing of faith with the intellectual pondering that goes with it and that we call theology on the other. We believe because it is reasonable to do so. We accept things because they are credible.

But along that road - if we are not careful - lie other dangers. In our efforts to be rational we could become rationalistic. It would mean reducing our faith, its possibilities and its reach, to what can be managed by our own minds. It would close the door to anything entering that would be beyond the boundaries of what we've known already. It would thereby exclude the God of surprises from our lives. We would not expect anything to happen that has not already happened before. We would not allow anything into our consideration that has not proved itself at the bar of human reason. If such 'rational faith' did not become in effect a practical agnosticism or atheism it would certainly shrink the world to our size.

We live and move between these two dangers, fideism on one side and rationalism on the other. Being a person of faith grounds us in this creation and in the gift of reason with which we are equipped to understand and manage the creation. But it also keeps us open to newness and creativity, to things that might at first seem absurd but which show themselves to be reasonable when the criterion of reason we apply is God as He has revealed himself, God as we believe Him to be.

In fact we have an even more absurd scenario presented in today's gospel which the light of faith illuminates more clearly for us. A person offends another person seven times in the same day about the same matter. Seven times he returns to the person to ask forgiveness and seven times the person forgives him. It seems he is ready to forgive an eighth time if it is necessary. Now by all the criteria of human relating that we know from our experience, that is simply absurd. But it is what we have come to expect of God. And so it becomes reasonable in the world of faith that people should treat each other in that way because it is the way in which they have been treated by God. If I have forgiven you then you also should forgive one another ... and seventy times seven.

So do not be distracted by the absurdity of a mulberry tree making its way to the ocean. Rather be distracted and amazed by the space, the freedom and the new possibility that is introduced to human relations when people forgive, and go on forgiving, each other.