Beyond Life’s Fragile Appearances
Michiel Peeters - Permit me to start with a short poem by Eugenio Montale: “Perhaps some morning, walking in a vitreous, clear air, / turning, I shall see the miracle appear, / the nothingness around my shoulders and the void behind, / and know the terror of the drunken paranoid. // Then suddenly, as on a screen, confusion of hills and houses, / planted in the usual illusion. / But it will be too late, and I shall be warier / as I move among those men who do not turn, with my secret terror.”
At least one moment in their lives, every human being realizes that the things that surround them, on which they place their hope, have no consistency and are only appearances. Upon that dramatic realization, we have two options: we can withdraw in disgust, like Montale, “with our secret terror,” deciding that behind the appearances there is nothing—void. Or we can, like Moses in the first reading, when he sees the burning bush, “look on,” “go over to look better,” “more closely,” and realize that behind appearances there is Being. “I am who am.” “I AM.”
Incidentally, the two options are not equivalent. Even though things have no consistency in themselves, they are there; they do appear. If they have no consistency in themselves, they are the appearance, the token, the evidence of something else. The Mystery exists because things that have no consistency in themselves speak about It. Contingent things can appear because they are made. Thus, the things that perish veil and reveal, with their fragile being, that which remains.
The truth—in the sense of correspondence, of human convenience—of this is “proven” by the change that occurs in those who, like Moses, permit things to lead them to What makes them. Those who allow the energy of their reason to penetrate through the things to the Mystery implied in their existence and be “grasped” by this mysterious but inexorable Presence gain consistency, become themselves, and obtain a new intelligence and energy, even for treating the transient things. They “do not perish.”
Instead, as Jesus says in today’s Gospel, “If you do not repent, you will all perish.” “Repentance” translates the Greek metanoia. This term is composed of meta- and a substantive, the former meaning “change,” and the latter, “mentality, way of thinking.” Originally, it had a primarily cognitive meaning, namely, a “change of heart or mind,” a “new way of thinking or seeing things.”
Therefore, it would be better to translate it as “conversion.” If you do not convert, if you do not obtain a new way of looking—a new, true, totally human way of using your reason, piercing through the appearances until arriving at the Mystery that they imply, as happened to Moses in front of the burning bush—you will perish, as things perish. We tend to get stuck on appearances, which is why we need someone who keeps telling us, “Look,” “Look closer,” “What is actually in your experience?” Christ presents himself as this friend, as this educator.
With the image in today’s parable, he is the gardener who tries to cultivate the ground of the fig trees we are. He fertilizes it with his words and presence, which continue in the company he creates, so that we may bear fruit—the fruits of a humanity that is on the level of what it is made for: the free relationship with the infinite.
20250323 3rd Sunday of Lent C (Exodus 3:1–8a, 13-15; Luke 13:1–9)
(Homily by Fr. Michiel Peeters, Tilburg University Chaplaincy)
The author has not revised the text and its translation.
