30. Apostolate: Fishers of men

Returning one day from a meeting with a group of students, I asked myself the question: "What's the point?" I was measuring the distance between my ambitions and the results. I got lost in considerations about the fragility of human beings and the precariousness of our lives, the limitations of our intelligence and the narrowness of our horizons. The students in question, had a limited culture and a very elementary experience of human life, and - to offset perhaps their scientific aptitudes - a paucity of expression when it came to my favourite subjects, which are philosophical and religious. Am I so different stranger?

Why then do we have to criss-cross different interests, continuously reaching over frontiers: forcing literary subjects on those with a scientific bent, and wishing to share spiritual questionings with those who live differently? Would it not be simpler to go and live, reflect and develop that fundamental research with those who dedicate themselves wholly to it: a theological faculty for intellectual research, or a monastery for affective experience and aesthetic perfection?

That would be to forget what was always my deepest motivation, that which led me to become a preacher: not primarily to obtain results, (nor to change the world, nor to forge a career, nor to reform the Church), but to nourish a God-given contemplation of waiting for and desiring Him. "I will go before you into Galilee" proclaimed the Risen Christ.

I know Someone who goes before me along the highways, at the crossroads of human encounters, a deep-down presence who holds his Breath. Someone whom I know from experience and even as a Friend; someone... let us not be shy to express it - whose project I espouse, with its sufferings and its joys. In my modest way, and in the efforts I make at meeting the other person, I find encapsulated, summed up as it were, the affective movement underpinning that immense adventure which makes up creation, human history and eventually Revelation, with all its dramas, its mistakes and its divine moments.

When I arrive early at a conference hall, I have the feeling of being in front of the unknown, waiting for "I don't know what" to arrive, "I don't know how"! It's something completely different from teaching, and utterly different from a technique to be shared.

My intervention takes place outside school or social context. I say too much? Not enough? Go off on a tangent? I never come without being invited, even if by chance the invitation is taken for granted. I come as a water-diviner in search of a thirst often deeply buried and unaware of its need. It is only afterwards and when it has manifested itself, that one becomes conscious of an unidentified need. I come from elsewhere, inhabited by Another - -forgive the pretentiousness - my role is that of an Ambassador. St. Paul says the same thing, and reassures me that he shares the same megalomania.

In reality, it is I who am the beggar and questing...courage is required to make inroads, especially at first, when there is no particular social reason to ring a doorbell... "I'm a priest... just calling to know how you are and to introduce myself..." One is coming in the name of Another, hard to put a name on...often unknown! I come as a beggar, asking to be welcomed, aware that I may appear somewhat uncomfortable: the door opens, always on to the unknown!

I come in the name of Another, but also to meet this Other who goes ahead of me to this place. We have a tryst, and which of our hearts burns more ardently? The desire to meet God which awakens timidly in the human heart, is nothing compared to the impatient and devouring passion felt by God for us.

It often happens that on such visits, I get feelings of anguish and unease, a pathos of the living God: all that he has to accept in the line of latecomings and shortcomings, missed opportunities or blatant refusals, indifference and contempt, so that the seeds of real confidence may germinate in the human heart. And this allows me to accept - as though they were already inhabited - these spaces apparently empty, widely extended, together with collective evolutions and personal failures.

The arms of the living God - all powerful though He be - are tied. He has to wait a near eternity, before humanity arrives at a confident adult face to face encounter with Him; before men know the meaning of true liberty, so that beyond divisions and rejection, they can experience friendship in a trust that is lucid and freely chosen. A lot of time is required, as well as many failed attempts, mounds of corpses and irreparable destruction, in order that humanity as such, may come to realise the huge choice of initiatives available, and so that men may discover the extensive field of their liberty, and the unbelievable responsibility placed in their trust.

I am a contemplative, a passive witness before being an active one. If I dare to speak in the Name of God, even to the point of compromising Him, it is in the guise of an echo, because I accord its full weight to the alliance concluded between us.