Flora Cantábrica

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Together with the atheists

The world today knows a new category of people: atheists in good faith, those who painfully experience the situation of God’s silence, who do not believe in God, but do not boast of it; rather they experience existential anguish and the lack of meaning at all; They also live in their own way, in a dark night of the spirit. In his novel “The Plague” Albert Camus called them “the saints without God.” Mystics exist primarily for themselves; They are the travel and table companions. Like Jesus, they “sat at the table of sinners and ate with them” (cf. Lk 15:2).

This explains the passion with which certain atheists, once converted, throw themselves into the writings of the mystics: Claudel, Bernanos, the two Maritains, L. Bloy, the writer J.K. Huysmans and many others to the writings of Angela de Foligno; T.S. Eliot to those of Giuliana of Norwich. They find there the same landscape they had left, but this time illuminated by the sun. Few know that the author of “Waiting for Godot”, Samuel Beckett, read Saint John of the Cross in his spare time.The word “atheist” can have an active meaning and a passive meaning. It can indicate one who rejects God, but also one who – at least it seems that way – is rejected by God. In the first case, it is an atheism of guilt (when it is not in good faith); in the second, of an atheism of punishment, or of atonement. In this last sense we can say that the mystics, in the night of the spirit, are the atheists, those without God and that Jesus, on the cross, was also an atheist, one without God.

Mother Teresa has words that no one would have suspected in her: “They say that the eternal punishment that souls suffer in hell is the loss of God… In my soul I experience precisely this terrible pain of damage, of God who does not love me, of God who is not God, of God who does not really exist. “Jesus, I beg you, forgive my blasphemies.” But he realizes the different nature – of solidarity and atonement – ​​of his a-theism: “I want to live in this world so far from God and that has turned its back on the light of Jesus, to help people carrying something of their sufferings.” The clearest revealer that this is an atheism of a very different nature is the unspeakable suffering it causes in mystics. Ordinary atheists do not torment themselves in this way for their atheism!

The mystics have reached a step of the world where the godless live; They have experienced the vertigo of falling down. Mother Teresa writes to her spiritual director: “I have been on the verge of saying No… I feel as if something one day or another is going to break in me.” “Pray for me, that I do not reject God at this hour. I don’t want to, but I’m afraid I can.»

This is why mystics are the evangelizing ideals in the postmodern world, where “etsi Deus non daretur” is lived as if God did not exist. They remind honest atheists that they are not “far from the kingdom of God”; that it would be enough for them to take a leap to find themselves on the shore of the mystics, going from nothing to everything.

Karl Rahner was right when he said: “The Christianity of the future will either be mystical or it will not be.” Padre Pio and Mother Teresa are the answer to this sign of the times. We must not waste the saints, reducing them to distributors of graces, or good examples.
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