朋友们，今天的福音宣布圣神降临时会指引我们走向所有真理。我听过一个关于让-吕克·马里翁的故事，要是这个故事不是真的，也不应该是假的。在让-吕克·马里翁生动讲授笛卡尔的过程中，有位学生提出一个关于天主的尖锐问题。马里翁看着该学生说：“用一年时间参加主日弥撒，然后回来再问这个问题。”

 

马里翁的回答不是聪明的俏皮话。如果真正认识天主靠的是沉浸于圣神之中，那么这种认识就是整个生活方式的作用，这种生活方式包括祈祷、忘我、物质和精神上的慈善工作以及宽恕敌人。我们并非靠思考来理解天主，而是靠我们的生活方式。

 

多玛斯·阿奎那总是说他敏锐的思维在获取神学知识方面的重要性远远不及坚持不懈的祈祷。他对神圣奥秘的洞察力来自于他沉浸在圣神里的生活。因此，今天让我们祈祷：“降临于我吧，圣神，请降临于我！”

 

Friends, today’s Gospel declares that when the Spirit comes, he will guide us into all truth. There is a story I’ve heard about Jean-Luc Marion that, if it isn’t true, should be. In the midst of a lively lecture on Descartes, a student asked a pointed question about God. Marion looked at her and said, "Go to Sunday Mass for a year and then return and ask me that question again."

 

Marion’s response was not just a clever one-liner. If true knowledge of God depends upon immersion in the Holy Spirit, then that knowledge is a function of an entire form of life, involving prayer, self-denial, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, and the forgiveness of one’s enemies. We don’t think our way to an understanding of God so much as we live our way to it.

 

Thomas Aquinas always said that he owed his theology far more to the persistence of his prayer than to the acuity of his mind. His penetration of the divine mystery flowed from his life in the Holy Spirit. And so today we pray, "Come, Holy Spirit, come!"

 

2018-5-10

朋友们，在今天的福音中，耶稣升天到圣父那里去。我们基本上倾向以启蒙思想方式来理解耶稣升天，而不是以圣经方式——这引起了许多祸害。启蒙思想家对天堂和人间提出双重的理解。他们认为天主存在，但住在遥不可及的天堂，看着人间事态顺其自然地发展。

 

根据这种理解，耶稣升天意味着祂远走高飞、脱离人间、对我们不管不顾。但圣经的理解是：耶稣升天是为了直接周全地管理人间。所以我们的祷文是：“愿你的国来临；愿你的旨意奉行在人间，如同在天上。”

 

耶稣没有远走高飞，相反，可以说祂更深层次地进入这个世界。祂到了一个超脱宇宙却又对宇宙有种重大影响的维度里。

 

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus is taken up to his Father in heaven. We tend to read the Ascension along essentially Enlightenment lines, rather than biblical lines—and that causes a good deal of mischief. Enlightenment thinkers introduced a two-tier understanding of heaven and earth. They held that God exists, but that he lives in a distant realm called heaven, where he looks at the human project moving along, pretty much on its own steam, on earth.

 

On this Enlightenment reading, the Ascension means that Jesus goes up, up, and away, off to a distant and finally irrelevant place. But the biblical point is this: Jesus has gone to heaven so as to direct operations more fully here on earth. That’s why we pray, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

 

Jesus has not gone up, up, and away, but rather—if I can put it this way—more deeply into our world. He has gone to a dimension that transcends but impinges upon our universe.