Patience with God The Story of Zacchaeus Continuing In Us

by HALIK, TOMAS

• ISBN13: 9780385524490
• ISBN10: 0385524498
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-04-14
• Publisher: Doubleday Religion

Summary

For all the debate about belief and nonbelief in today's worldand how everyone becomes pigeonholed by one or the otherTomas Halik teaches us that God requires us to persevere with our doubts, carry it in our hearts, and allow it to lead us to maturity. For Halik, patience is the main difference between faith and atheism. Faith, hope, and love are three aspects of patience in the face of God's silence, which atheists interpret as "the death of God" and it is not taken seriously enough by fundamentalism or the enthusiasm of "facile belief." Using the gospel story of Jesus' encounter with Zacchaeus, Halik issues an invitation to all people who stand (like Zacchaeus did) on the sidelinecurious but noncommittal. The fact that Jesus gravitated to the poor and the marginalized means and that he also has a special place in his heart for diligent seekers on the margins of the community of believers. A lively discussion of faith, PATIENCE WITH GOD will appeal to readers ofThe Holy LongingandThe Wounded Healer.

Author Biography

TOMÁŠ HALÍK worked as a psychotherapist during the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia while at the same time was secretly ordained as a Catholic priest and active in the underground church. Since the fall of the regime, he has served as General Secretary to the Czech Conference of Bishops and was an advisor to Václav Havel. He has lectured at many universities throughout the world and is currently a professor of philosophy and sociology at Charles University. His books, which are bestsellers in his own country, have been translated into many languages and have received several literary prizes.

Excerpts

CHAPTER 1
Addressing Zacchaeus


It was early morning and fresh snow lay in the streets of Prague. Everything was fairly fresh in those days--the mid-1990s. A few years earlier, the Communist regime had fallen in the course of the "Velvet Revolution," along with its monopoly of political and police power, and for the first time in decades genuine parliamentary democracy was restored. The church and the university once more enjoyed freedom. That turn of events wrought enormous changes in my life: during the 1970s, I had been secretly ordained abroad at a time of religious repression at home that had already lasted decades. Not even my mother, with whom I lived, was allowed to know I was a priest. For eleven years, I performed my priestly duties clandestinely in an "underground church." Now I was able to function openly, freely, as a priest, without any risk of repression, in the newly created university parish in the heart of Old Prague. After years during which I had to give lectures on philosophy solely as part of clandestine courses in private homes organized by the "flying university," could only publish in samizdat, I was able to return to the university, write for the newspapers, and publish books.
But on that particular winter morning I was headed, not for the church or the university, but for the parliament building. Among the novelties of those days was the custom, established a few years earlier, of inviting a member of the clergy to the parliament once a year, just before Christmas, to deliver a brief meditation to the assembled members of parliament and senators prior to the last sitting before the Christmas vacation.
Yes, everything was still fairly fresh and retained a whiff of newly won freedom. Yet a few years had passed since the "Velvet Revolution," and the first waves of euphoria and its heady confrontation with open spaces were things of the past. The initial illusions had evaporated, and many previously unsuspected problems and complications were appearing in public life. Gradually, something that psychiatrists call "agoraphobia" was creeping into society: a dread of open spaces, literally a fear of the marketplace. Almost everything imaginable was suddenly available on the market in goods and ideas--but many people were confused and puzzled by the enormous diversity of what was on offer and the necessity of making choices. Some of them got a headache from the sudden, blinding profusion of color, and now and then they even began to miss the black-and-white world of yesteryear--although in fact it had been tediously and boringly gray.
I concluded my words to the members of parliament and senators--most of whom had probably never held a Bible in their hands--with a reference to the scene from Luke's Gospel in which Jesus moves through the crowds in Jericho and unexpectedly addresses a chief tax collector who is secretly observing him from the branches of a fig tree.
I compared the story with the behavior of Christians in our country. When, after the fall of Communism, Christ's followers came out freely into the open after so many years, they noticed many people who applauded them and maybe a few who had previously shaken their fists at them. What they didn't notice, however, was that the trees all around them were full of Zacchaeuses--those who were unwilling or unable to join the throng of old or brand-new believers, but were neither indifferent nor hostile to them. Those Zacchaeuses were curious seekers, but at the same time they wanted to maintain a certain distance. That odd combination of inquisitiveness and expectation, interest and shyness, and sometimes, maybe, even a feeling of guilt and "inadequacy," kept them hidden in their fig trees.
By addressing Zacchaeus by name, Jesus emboldened him to come down from his hiding place. He surprised him by wanting to stay in his house even though He risked immediate slander a

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Excerpted from Patience with God: The Story of Zacchaeus Continuing in Us by Tomas Halik
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