196 KARL RAHNER to knowledge that is blind to values can bring about. But we can't deal further with all that here. T am going to stop talking about the patience that we must have today when confronted with how our knowledge is lim- ited. I hope I have not with all this overtaxed your patience It scems to me that precisely the progress in all dimensions of knowledge that we are experiencing today makes individuals feel more and more that they don’t know much and can’t over come the inadequacy in their knowledge. They feel denied the cestatic happiness that came in earlier ages when new know!- edge was acquired; at the same time, they don’t feel entitled to commit intellectual suicide. And so they feel that, as if in a time of winter, they must have patience with themselves. ‘The same qualities of gentle acceptance that some problems cannot be solved comes through our second extract from Mein Problem, in which Rabner tries to answer a sensitive and gen- ‘erous young man obviously shaken by what he has experienced when visiting an old people's home. THANKING GOD WHEN THERE’S SO MUCH PAIN? Dear Fr. Rahner: es ¥m especially proud to have the chance of writing to you because justin the last few months (since I've been involved a bit with what's going on in Church and been reading some theological stuff) I've heen hearing and reading a lot about you, and thus know how im portant you are for the Church and for believers. So obviously | was really happy about your visit and the Mass you did with us—and havea (for me) special bond with you because 1am the young person to whom you gave the opera ticket. Thank you very much indeed! Church, Creativity, and Process 197 Our youth club has got a kind of “voluntary service group” in which I've got fully involved, What | do there is basically quite simple, | don’t need to do anything else except care for an old person who is on their own in a home, for example, by visiting that person once a week | found this meeting with old people a great challenge, because up til now fve hardly ever had anything to do with old people ( see my grandparents at most three times a year because they live really far away ‘Wve been churned up by this meeting the whole year and quite bothered with it: very often it made me think and (even more often} ‘ask questions: is opened my eyes. The frst time | went there with 2 Jot of idealism —I wanted to give these people a change, someone fo talk to, a bit of energy and happiness. But this idealism soon got sat con: the whole climate and atmosphere there was teribly depressing Not one of them could care less. Even when | tried to make some cone laugh, | just got looked at blankly. The whole home is just an ‘enormous dumping ground: you're just @ number among the four thousand others they've got there. Fora year I've been visiting a certain Mrs. M. She's neatly elghtys she's been in the home for six years and spends almost the whole time in bed because her legs are paralyzed. That said, in her own way she’s sill one of the fittest people in her ward. At the start | was always disappointed at how little my visit seemed to do for het. Her reaction was always something between suspicious and indifferent, But as | Kept the contact going and our relationship be- ‘came deeper, something else struck me: that she (and probably most of the others too) was so embittered at what was going on there land also because of her age and especially because of her incred- by great personal suffering. This embitteredness was also why they had so many rows with each other ~ often childish ones. And also wihy patients who had been in beds next to each other hardly ever spoke to each other any more because they were suspicious, One198 KARL RAHNER result ofthis embitteredness was that they often looked so dreadfully couldn’teareless to outsiders The same evening | go on to a prayer group. We sing lots of nice songs about God's closeness and God's love — and lots of people also give thanks for something or other that has happened during the day. But I find thanks very difficult. Of course | can give thanks for my life too— I'm doing really well. But how can I really be grateful when I'm always inevitably thinking about the question that this old lady put to me (and she's got a lot of faith}: “Why have | got to suffer all this, when I've really tried my whole life long to live in the way God wants me to? Why doesn’t God let me die —| want an end to this whole life.” ‘Once all this was particularly heavy. Between the old people's home and the prayer group I looked quickly at the news on TV: once again an earthquake had led to a huge loss of life. After that | just couldn't join in the singing: all this stuff seemed of course very nice, Just like a dream, but in the end Just the Image of our own wishes, a pious pretend world, Fr, Rahner, 'd like to ask you to help me sort out this conti Best wishes Alex Dear Alex: First of all, I find it really good that you go and visit this old people’s home and find out about what human life can sink to while most people your age protect themselves from that. You won't always be able to work in an old person's home like this, but you are now doing something that is really Christian and are learning a great deal from it that will help you live an adult Christian life. Of course I can't write about all the problems of these homes where so many old people are crammed in. But precisely when there are things like this that shouldn't happen, and when you realize that there’s nothing you can do to change them, then e Church, Creativity, and Process 199 you need to do some thinking and sort out how we as Chris- tians can come to terms with this kind of thing in life that we can’t understand —things that are wrong, and can’t be just got sid of. But I don’t want to write about that now. If you think about Christ on the cross, then you've got the sharpest case of this basic problem there is in life, and also the real solution: 1's realistic and honest, and yet it also points us to a happy outcome, You're coming into contact with lots of old people in this ome — they are just old, and it may not be their fault they've become embittered, And — to put it bluntly — some of them are senile, Always remember that this kind of suffering and bitterness is certainly awful — but nevertheless, when they're ina state where personal guilt isn’t an issue for them anymore (and you don’t need to be frightened of claiming that), none of this bothers God: it will get sorted out in eternal life a lot more easily than what really is a matter of guilt and sin, and was done almost automatically when they were healthy. The ultimate problems are, after all, those of sin committed freely before God —and therefore also the suffering and unhappiness that comes from that. Christians too have a hard time understanding this and tak- ing it seriously, but that’s the way it is. But then you ask me how God could allow so much suffering of the kind you also experience so close at hand in this old people’s home. | once wrote an essay called “Why Can God Let Us Suffer?” This is a short letter, and I hope can just point you to that piece, which you should be able to get hold of in your parish? But even in that essay, I'm just answering your question — and the old lady's question —by saying that I don't have an answer. There are some half-answers that are all right as far as they go, but 20, Translated as “Why Does God Allow Us to Suller” (1973), in Theologica Ie. vestigations 19:194-208. One wonders how many pthes, even Jesuit oes, in the English-speaking word have a complete set of Ratner Theologica Investigations.200 KARL RAHNER- the whole question is unanswerable. We ate within the mystery past all grasp, which God is: there the answer is hidden from us, ‘And so, if we accept this suffering in hope, it’s only the particu: lar way in which we accept God's own self, God's own eternal past-all-praspness. I don’t know if you can perhaps begin to understand this at sixteen — but human beings are in fact incapable of heing wholly satisfied with what they can grasp and see their way round, however fine and beautiful this might be. And if we try to reach beyond this, we inevitably come up against the mystery of God. And then the question is whether we can summon up the rare courage of a love that is convinced of how love for a God whom we can no longer gtasp is the true and in the end the only real happiness for humanity. And then they need to bring this courage precisely to face the suffering there is in the world — obviously drawing on a power that comes only from God. If you recognize that these old, troubled, confined people in the home can’t manage anything like this anymore — what for ‘you with the idealism of youth doesn't seem so difficult —then remember too that these protests, complaints, rebellions, that seem to be present in these people at the end of their lives are no longer really personal actions for which these people will have to answer before God. If someone is stabbed, for example, with a red-hot poke then even the holiest individuals are just going to cry out and be in a terrible state. They can's think of God any more at that point: they're just devoured by their dreadful pain. These people worked out their love for God at earlier stages of their lives, at 1a time when they were free and able to take charge of them- selves, and at that point given themselves over to the mystery of God. And often itll be a bit like this with these old people, too. They can’t, pethaps, actually live out a personal relation- ship with God any more, butyve.can trust that they once did Church, Creativity, and Process 201 do-this, and thar this — what was properly theirs — has been accepted by God, IF ole! persons stil Pea or tier ray nd their freedom to work out a personal relationship with God right until they die— this can also happen and ir’s by no means rare—if they (as I know from one of the people in my commu- nity) can pray, “In the name of the Pather and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” and then die—then that’s wonderful and it's a grace of God. But if you find angry and embittered old people in the home who can't manage this any more — well then, i's still a tough experience that its hard to stomach, like all expe- riences of the suffering in che world that doesn’t make sense. But it’s also an experience that doesn’t need to shake you out of your basic Christian optimism. Such people have long ago been caught up in a love of God that is silent. Every good wish to you, and for what you do in the old people's home and in the parish. Yours Karl Rahner —Is Christian Life Possible Today? 29-35 Rahner's attempts to theologize about old age here remind us of the final unknown: death, The theme of death had marked Rab- ner's writing from the beginning —On the Theology of Death is one of his most significant shorter books. Rabner’s final public lecture of any substance took place in Freiburg, bis birthplace, in February 1984, marking bis eightieth birthday. He looked back on eighty years as a theologian, speaking of various things he had learned from his theological experience. He spoke of the principle of analogy; of grace as God's gift of selfs of the Igna- tian tradition; of the relationship between theology and other fields of knowledge as they grow exponentially. He concludes with a peroration about death and the afterlife. It centers on a simple question — “but bow, but how?” — answered by