When the French thinker Blaise Pascal confronted the short duration of his life, his being swallowed up in the eternity of times and engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which he was ignorant and which knew him not, he was frightened by the eternal silence of the infinite spaces that surrounded him.
The Wager
To overcome this darkness, Pascal then offered the Necessity of Wager, the solemn pledge to search for a structure of reality that includes ourselves and divinity; that simultaneously includes the little lonely “I” who is “swallowed up in eternal silence” and the Creator of the “infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant”.
Fides and Intellectus
Laying Pascal’s wager must inevitably begin with the intuitive experience of the Divine Ground of Being ‒ the Kingdom of God ‒ as real before the inquiry into the structure of reality has even begun. In the words of St. Augustine: “Fides quaerit, intellectus invenit”. Let faith – fides – lead the search so that our intellect – intellectus – may discover and explore the Divine Ground of Being.
The Kingdom of God
When the Pharisees asked Jesus Christ if He had any idea where we might find this Kingdom of God, He answered “the Kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall people say, Lo, here! Or There! For lo, the Kingdom of God is within you”. The Kingdom of God cannot be discovered outside oneself by following observable signs in the immensity of spaces. It is within us. It is the “place” where Christ and God share the same name: “I am”.
Christ’s Promise
During Christmas we celebrate the coming of Jesus Christ into the world. Why? Because at the end of his life, when he was “no more in the world” and “made his appearance unto God”, he prayed that those who are in the world “may be one … as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us”. The promise of Christ is that making Pascal’s wager will not be in vain because all Men can become conscious of and experience “I am” within themselves, so that, in the words of Christ, we “may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.”
Merry Christmas to all of you.
