Today’s meditation for the sixth week of Lent comes from Tomáš Halík’s Touch the Wounds. This excerpt explores the final days of Lent through both Christian and Jewish perspectives, focusing on the silence of Holy Saturday, and the act of speaking to God.
The words of Elie Wiesel, who returns continually in his novels and essays to the religious meaning of his own experience of Auschwitz (although on each occasion he comes to the conclusion that he cannot understand it), have a familiar ring and are a source of inspiration to the Christian who reflects on Jesus’s struggle in Gethsemane and on his cry on the cross, and God’s silence, the silence of Holy Saturday (and on everything foreshadowed and symbolized by those Easter themes). “I do not believe that we can talk about God; we can only—as Kafka said—talk to God. It depends on who is talking. What I try to do is speak to God. Even when I speak against God, I speak to God. And even if I am angry at God, I try to show God my anger. But even that is a profession, not a denial of God.” And one of the commentators on Wiesel’s writings comments: “To quarrel with God is to pay God the supreme compliment: it is to take God seriously. . . . To be indifferent to God is to pay God the supreme insult. It is to say that nothing of consequence is at stake. . . . There are a number of concerns that justify ‘the shout [that] becomes a prayer.’ When there is manifest evil in the world, the shout is morally necessary. . . . In defense of creation, on behalf of humanity—even for the sake of God may human contention against God be justified.”
Even when the veil of the Temple is torn, even when the Temple is burnt down and destroyed, even when God is silent, humans (not only in their loyal obedience but also in their questioning and anger) do not remain indifferent to God.