Luke Timothy Johnson, on the essays of the Czech priest Tomáš Halík:
The simpler—and in my view also more profound—essays each offer readers a dimension of the wisdom that begins with the fear of the Lord. These reflections have no trace of academic posturing. They are themselves exercises in the kenotic theology that risks the vulnerability of naked thought exposed to public view, not unlike a body baring its wounds to the gaze of others. The opening essays, for example, “Gate of the Wounded” and “Without Distance,” form a set of Easter reflections, developing the distinctive witness of Thomas among Jesus’ disciples, namely to stand as witness between two kinds of “fundamentalist” assertions: the one from the side of believers that claims to possess God as “a given,” and the other from the side of atheists that claims “there is no God.” Thomas represents those who resist such flat reductions and see God as a possibility and a challenge, who find themselves in thought and action within a dialectic movement that includes doubt, rather than in a fixed position of certainty.
On the great commission being given by the resurrected-but-still-wounded Jesus:
Being wounded is not a basis for retreating from humanity or for seeking revenge. It is, rather, an empathic lens that allows the forgiveness of others, who are viewed as also wounded.
Similarly, “Knocking on the Wall” extends the theme of forgiveness to embrace intercessory prayer for those who have wounded us. This powerful essay takes its point of departure from the striking statement of Simone Weil (which also appears as an epigraph fronting the book): “Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing that separates them but is also the means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link” (Gravity and Grace). Thus, Halík argues, being wounded is a threat to meaning, but it is at the same time an invitation to understand “meaning” at a still deeper level. And here he speaks of prayer as “God’s forge, in which we are to be, in the words of the gospel, remelted and forged into God’s instrument.” God’s answer to our prayers is to enable a faithful life of hope that extends love even to those enemies who do not will our good and even seek to harm us.
And on the genuine “nature” — the genuineness — of faith:
The book’s final essay, “The Last Beatitude,” juxtaposes the eight beatitudes pronounced by Jesus to his disciples at the start of his ministry in Matthew 5:1-10 and the “beatitude” that Jesus pronounces in John 20:29 in response to Thomas’s recognition of him as Lord and God: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Halík reflects on the character of genuine faith as a lifelong fidelity to God’s call that inevitably involves moments of doubt like Thomas’s, but that is found most truly not “in what we ‘see’ or ‘think,’ or what our convictions are, but [in] our hopes, our faith, and our love. These are what we must prove and demonstrate, so that more light may penetrate the dark recesses of the world.”