I Want You to Be: On the God of Love - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Tomáš Halík is a Czech Roman Catholic priest, philosopher, theologian, and scholar. He is a professor of sociology at Charles University in Prague, pastor of the Academic Parish by St. Salvator Church in Prague, president of the Czech Christian Academy, and a winner of the Templeton Prize. His books, which are bestsellers in his own country, have been translated into nineteen languages and have received several literary prizes. He is the author of numerous books, including I Want You to Be: On the God of Love, winner of the Catholic Press Association Book Award in Theology and Foreword Reviews' INDIES Book of the Year Award in Philosophy.

Gerald Turner has translated numerous Czech authors, including Václav Havel, Ivan Klíma, and Ludvík Vaculík, among others. He received the US PEN Translation Award in 2004.

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In his two previous books translated into English, Patience with God and Night of the Confessor, best-selling Czech author and theologian Tomas Halik focused on the relationship between faith and hope. Now, in I Want You to Be, Halik examines the connection between faith and love, meditating on a statement attributed to St. Augustine--amo, volo ut sis, "I love you: I want you to be"--and its importance for contemporary Christian practice. Halik suggests that because God is not an object, love for him must be expressed through love of human beings. He calls for Christians to avoid isolating themselves from secular modernity and recommends instead that they embrace an active and loving engagement with nonbelievers through acts of servitude. At the same time, Halik critiques the drive for mere material success and suggests that love must become more than a private virtue in contemporary society. I Want You to Be considers the future of Western society, with its strong division between Christian and secular traditions, and recommends that Christians think of themselves as partners with nonbelievers.

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“I have often asked myself, but found no answer, / where gentleness and goodness come from / I still don’t know today, and now must go,” wrote Gottfried Benn. The authenticity and sadness of this verse is what captivates. Something profounder and more universal shines through the poet’s humble sincerity―a testimony about the times we live in. The constant flow into the sea of human knowledge simultaneously conceals and reveals that not-knowingness, the chasm of helplessness when we are confronted by the question of the ultimate where from that defies all attempts to name it.

In the first half of the twentieth century, against the background of all the horrors of war and genocide, the age-old question, Whence cometh evil?, was posed afresh with new urgency. It is quite possible that nowadays we have become so accustomed to evil, violence, and cynicism that we ask ourselves with surprise another question: Where do tenderness and goodness come from? What are they doing here in our cruel world? Do tenderness and goodness―like evil and violence―emerge from somewhere in the conditions of our world (do evil and good depend chiefly on how we organize society?) or from some still unexplored corners of our unconscious or complex processes in our brains? There are plenty of scientific studies about the psychoneurobiological processes that accompany all our emotions, and about the centers in the brain that are activated when we receive or show tenderness, and when we do good or people are good to us. I do not doubt that everything we feel and think first passes through countless portals of our “natural world” and is affected and influenced by our organism and our environment, and by the culture we are born into, including the language in which we think. After all, our bodies and our minds, our brains, and everything that happens in them are part of “the world” or “nature,” that intricate corridor through which the river of life flows. But where is the truly ultimate source?

Can we simply reject the ancient intuition that goodness and tenderness, the light and warmth of life that we almost hesitate by now to give the overworked name of “love,” enter our world―and hence our minds and behavior―not simply as a mere product of ourselves and our world, but as a gift, as a radically new quality, which rightly fills us again and again with amazement and gratitude? Isn’t the world itself a gift? Aren’t we a gift to ourselves? And isn’t this gift renewed over and over again and revived from that “therefrom” from which love springs? But if we go seeking that source beyond our world―outside―will we not miss the op- portunity to encounter it where we overlook it because it is so close, namely, inside?

Where do tenderness and kindness have their source? Do I know, perhaps? I have to admit that I don’t. All the answers that occur to me feel like a heavy curtain covering the open window of this question. There are some questions that are too good to spoil with answers, that should remain an open window. Such openness need not lead to resignation but to contemplation.

Those who are aware that the author is a theologian are by now possibly waiting impatiently for me to say at last that the answer to the question about the ultimate is God, of course. But the conviction has gradually matured within me that God approaches us more as a question than an answer. Maybe the one whom we mean by the word God is more present to us when we hesitate to say the word too hastily. Maybe he feels better with us in the open space of the question than in the constrictingly narrow gully of our answers, our definitive statements, our definitions and our notions. Let us treat his Holy Name with the greatest restraint and care.

Maybe the moments in history when polite or indifferent silence about God reigns in the world of academe are a precious opportunity for the theologian to make amends for the pious garrulousness of the previous epoch and return to what the holy teacher of the faith Thomas Aquinas emphasized at the beginning of his philosophical and theological investigations: God is not “evident.” Of ourselves we do not know what or who God is. Let us not fear vertigo when looking into the depths of the Unknown. Let us not fear the humble admission, “I don’t know.” After all, this is not the end but always a new beginning on the endless journey.

Besides, for faith (and also hope and love), for all these three forms of “patience with God,” with his hiddenness, “we don’t know” is not an insurmountable barrier.

(Excerpted from Chapter 1)