Christians who pray must hope that God will listen to prayers and respond. After all, Jesus himself promised: "If you ask, it will be given to you; if you seek, you must find; if you knock, it will be opened to you, because whoever asks will receive..." (Matthew 7:7-8) However, sometimes, no matter what we beg for, our inner desires may not be fulfilled, and God will sometimes even make no response.
Unanswered prayer is an inevitable problem in the Christian life. The apostle Jacob’s reflection on this is: “You can’t get it because you don’t ask; you ask but you can’t because you ask improperly. , I want to waste it in your lustful pleasures.” (James 4:2-3) The word “kinky” here is understood in a broad sense, just like in “kinky rain” and “fornication”: Don’t Wrap excessive desires into prayers in an attempt to win the mercy of God.
Therefore, Christians with certain education know that if they have advanced cancer, instead of praying to God for recovery, it is better to ask him to give him the courage to face everything calmly during the process of treatment and death, and to help him understand the meaning of pain and death. . Those who attribute their recovery to prayer will face some unanswerable questions: don’t those who died praying for recovery deserve God’s sympathy? If the disease recurs after recovery, can it be said that God is joking?
But the problem is that the situation that cannot be sought is not limited to people who are ill, and it is not a predicament that only people in desperate situations will face. Sometimes, our prayers are not excessive, but we still get no response. This is the case as the saying goes, "Calling the earth to fail every day, and the earth to be unsound".
God does not respond, or to answer our prayers with silence, nothing can shake and destroy faith more than this. The Lutheran priest Thomas in "Winter Light" faced this terrifying silence. The silence of God (translated as "the silence of God" in Chinese subtitles) made him doubt his beliefs and turned him into a weak and poor man. He can neither help the fisherman who has a nervous breakdown, nor can he face his (former) lover Marta. According to his own account, the first time the silence hit him was during the Spanish Civil War, when he served the Swedish fisherman on a sailing ship. Although it is not explicitly stated in the movie, it is very likely that it was in the mutual killing of the atheist republicans and the Catholic conservatives that he first experienced the silence of God for the first time. A large number of churches were destroyed and priests were killed. Why did God not respond? Catholics use the name of God to kill innocent people. How can God remain indifferent? For Sweden, which has been peaceful and prosperous for a long time, it is not easy to find such a state of God's silence in the country: it was also the nuclear proliferation crisis in a country in the Far East that caused the fisherman's mental problems.
But whether it is found that the scene of God's silence is a distant killing or a personal struggle, what ultimately triggers is the doubt, wavering, and even destruction of faith. When Thomas finished talking with the fisherman, he rushed out of the pastor’s office and yelled in Marta’s arms: "I am free!" If God does not exist, then it is normal for the prayer to be unanswered: to the air Speaking, the only answer to you is silence. For Christians, the process of recognizing this is very painful (the fisherman did not endure it and committed suicide), but admitting that his faith is empty is actually a process of self-liberation-at least in the eyes of some atheists Is such that.
But Bergman is clearly not such a simple atheist. Bergman's father Eric was a famous Swedish clergyman and was a full-time priest of the Swedish court. Before filming "Winter Light", the father and son visited many churches in the Uppland countryside. Bergman knew well that he admitted that there is no spiritual crisis that cannot be resolved by God, and after chanting freedom, Thomas is still unable to face the fisherman's remains and widow, and still cannot accept his lover's emotions. In fact, he rejected her in the most vicious language.
Thomas, who admitted that his faith had collapsed, still needed to go to another church, and there was no one in this church except him, Marta, the organist, and the disabled helper. (There were also very few attendees in the morning service, which shows that faith is rapidly disappearing in this Christian country.) While preparing for the service, the disabled helper shared with the pastor his recent experience of watching the "Gospel of Matthew" and Jesus was arrested. I prayed before and found that all his disciples were asleep. After he was arrested, they broke up, and his most beloved disciple refused to recognize him. When he was crucified and suffered, he would cry helplessly: "My God, my God! Why did you abandon me?" However, God responded to him with silence. Thomas seemed to be inspired and decided to continue to worship without anyone attending, because he realized that even Jesus Christ, the savior who is the Son of God, would face the silence of God. No one in the church will indeed make people doubt the faith, but learning to coexist with doubt is exactly the example that Jesus set for us.
Learning to accept silence as part of faith is a compulsory course for everyone who has faith. If we know that God will inevitably be silent or will inevitably respond, then this kind of certainty is no longer faith, but science or other things.
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