At this point, let us recall our dominant metaphor: The contemporary soul wanders in a perpetual wasteland. As people of faith, as stated in our introduction, we cannot accept this metaphor at face-value and define as our lot a seemingly-endless wandering through the wasteland until admission to eternal life. Our life of faith must include the awareness that such eternal life begins now, not after death, and the fruits will be made apparent even in the barren panorama of our despondent landscape.

Let us bring to mind the Exodus of the Hebrews out of Egypt: they were to leave in haste their land of bondage, and so central is this fact that the central rite of the Jewish calendar was that of the Passover Feast—the leaving, the flight into the desert in which they were to receive their covenant with God. Due to their sin at the foot of Sinai, God saw fit to have the Israelites wander in the desert for forty years before entering the Promised Land—forty years being the time needed for all of the old generation to die off and the new generation to take over. Of particular interest is that the entire religious identity of the Jewish people surrounds, in a special way, the laws and prescriptions befitting a nomadic people. Even once they had entered Canaan, their dietary, ritual, and social laws remained intact. Though given their land, and though allowed to take residence in domestic homes, their identity as a nomadic people never left them. The yearly ascent to Jerusalem was one way of preserving this notion—a yearly pilgrimage taken by a people who, in their deepest identity, never ceased being pilgrims.

This may seem peculiar to many. The motif of perpetual wandering may appear at odds with a people whose status as God’s chosen people secured for them a particular homeland. It even seems strange given the controversies within Judaism surrounding the supposed general resurrection of the dead—some held to this belief, others did not. If they did not believe in a Heavenly destination, then to what end to they travel? Nevertheless, perhaps we can suggest that the Jewish people had to keep before their minds the sense that they were never truly at home; perhaps the characteristics of a nomadic people pointed to a deeper spiritual reality than a culture merely holding to its own traditions. We might even say that this quality of the Jewish religion was one of the means by which God prepared Israel to bear His Son, the Light of the World.

It is not too much of a stretch to suggest that, by virtue of her Jewish patrimony and her own status of being both in and not of the world, the Church too has much to profit from the image of a people constantly on pilgrimage. As people of faith, we can look to our surroundings—a veritable wasteland—and see in ourselves that primal icon of a nomadic people progressing, by the help of God, to the Promised Land. We cannot meet the challenges of such a vocation if we are not first deeply aware of the infinitely profound, incomparably wide abyss of mercy. We cannot tap into the recesses of faith and withstand the terrible vault of sin if we are not first able to peer into the healing, loving, unfathomably personal love of God.

The efficacy of faith derives from the fecundity of the Cross. The Cross is the complete revelation of God’s love, the utterly abundant pouring out of God’s mercy. If we are true to faith, we will know the Cross in our own personal lives, which relates in a deep and mysterious way to the life of the Church. When we long for Christ, we know the Cross, and such longing is a direct result of God’s mercy. It is the abyss of sin being subsumed in the abyss of faith, calling on the abyss of mercy.

This knowledge of God’s mercy will show for us—as it has in all ages past, in such a way as to reveal the Gospel as ever ancient and ever new—that, in the face of the horrible abyss of sin, we have no recourse to fear. We can realize along with the Psalmist, abyssus abyssum invocat: that the depths of human sin cry out to the depths of God’s mercy, and too, the depths of God’s mercy cry out to the depths of human sin. As people of faith, we are those who respond to the cry of God’s mercy while our own hearts, beset with sin, cry out too for God’s mercy. This cry manifests itself as a pain, a longing that comes to us as a sigh too deep for words, to paraphrase St. Paul.

It is precisely this cry from the sinful heart for mercy that places us in a position relative to our unbelieving brothers and sisters that we may suffer on behalf of them. Faith itself, which cries out to mercy amid its own darkness, offers itself vicariously on behalf of the faithless. The despondent soul, in realizing its own sinfulness and begging for mercy, can hear its own plight in the tattered souls that refuse to believe, and in solidarity with them, suffer in place of them. Perhaps the reverse is true as well—perhaps the broken souls in the world also see in themselves something of the darkness brought by faith, and long for theirs to be transformed accordingly without knowing the cause of their longing.

The contemporary soul wanders in a perpetual wasteland. As people of faith, this wandering is not without meaning: we fast, and we pray, and we intercede on behalf of the world. Here we witness the perpetual pilgrimage of the human heart throughout all of history, the pilgrimage that has its prototypical image in the Exodus of Israel. Sounding within the nomadic souls of a pilgrim people is the constant antiphonal progression of the abyss of mercy and the abyss of sin calling back and forth.

This outlook transforms the means by which people of faith relate to the modern world. For one, it eschews the suggestion that one should separate from it—otherwise, all people of faith would have to take up lives as monks and anchorites. Instead, it highlights the Christian vocation of serving as the light of the world. We enter into the darkness in order to bring light into the darkness.

To which darkness do we refer? Referring again to the work of St. John of the Cross, we mean in particular the darkness of faith. As Christians in the modern world, we must allow the suffering that comes to as in the form of faith to parallel the darkness that comes to the world as a result of sin. Though this includes the ordinary human forms of suffering, in a way, it goes beyond it. We are called to bear water precisely by our thirst.

Let us look to the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John: Christ asks the Samaritan woman for a drink, and surprised, she asks how a Jew could ask her for water. His response: If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him and he would have given you living water. He continues a few verses later: Whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

It is true, undeniably true, that the plight of the modern world is, as T.S. Eliot wrote, “Here is no water but only rock.” This is a world that has cut itself off from the spring of living water, Christ Himself, and it suffers as a result. The Church is a people who live alongside these souls in the same wasteland, and if we are to seek the living water, then we are to bring others to do the same. And here is the key: how can we bring others, indeed ourselves, to seek this living water without entering into and living out of a deep, dry, and despondent thirst? Indeed, we see in the same passage that the very exchange between Christ and the woman began because Jesus, tired from his journey, sat down there at the well and asked her for a drink. Christ’s thirst for our faith is what leads us to thirst for His mercy.