FAITH

Sky Diving, Paralysis by Analysis, Old Shoes

I recently had another birthday.  When I was a child, I could hardly wait for them and it seemed like years between my special days.  Now they seem to arrive every couple of months.  I shouldn’t be surprised.  After all, back to school promotions start in June and my local Hallmark store annually reminds me that Christmas season starts in early September.  I would like all of those things to return to the timing of my childhood.  Perhaps that has something to do with my efforts to come to grips with my spiritual life.

As I’ve grown older, I really don’t feel much wiser.  I’m more reluctant to offer advice, even when asked.  My wife and I are dealing with some of the disappointments that often disrupt our “golden” years which  reminds me of a saying attributed to Woody Allen: “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him about your plans”.  It seems to me that we may also bring a smile to His face when we tell Him about our faith and what we believe. Life’s experiences, observations, study, successes, and failures have provoked what I hope is a healthy level of skepticism.  All of which is the best I could come up with as a segue to my topic.

Faith.  This is truly a ponderous topic examined and debated by the greatest philosophers and thinkers that we have records of from Aristotle, the Hindu authors of The Upanishads and The Bhagavad Gita, The Buddha, Confucius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Nietzsche, Johnson, Santayana, and a myriad of others from antiquity to modernity.  Dropping all those names only means I have a working knowledge of Google, not necessarily of their philosophies;  the list is offered only to give you a reason to completely discredit my unworthy personal observations.

A simple working definition of faith might be: A belief in something you can’t prove.  We can get all tied up in knots about what “prove” means, but let’s not.  I think we all get the gist.  Often when we hear the word faith, our minds immediately think of God or, more specifically,  religion.  That may be the same reaction of those who believe in a supreme being (or beings) and those who don’t.  Although there have been many philosophical “proofs” deployed for the existence of God, I don’t know of any that have been embraced as the ultimate proof and most seem to only be noticed by other philosophers when promoting their own theories.

But it appears that humans have had a belief in some higher power from earliest times. Our distant Neanderthal cousins might have ceremoniously buried their dead, a practice that could be related to the realization of a greater power.  Some early Homo Sapiens may have begun believing in deities.  Cave paintings and Venus like figurines from 30,000 tears ago seem to allude to some belief in a God or gods.  It seems unlikely that this primitive society had a sophisticated “proof” to support this belief.  In other words, they relied on faith.

This same ability to express faith in a deity or deities expresses itself in the estimated existence of over 4,000 different religions today.  About seventy-five percent of believers adhere to one of the five major faiths: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Chinese Traditional and Buddhism.  So we can go from the one God of Christianity and Islam (and Judaism) to the 12 gods of Hinduism, 8 gods of Buddhism and manifest possibilities in China’s traditional religious expressions.  So what gives?  What compels most of humankind to adhere to a belief in a higher power they can’t prove exists?  Is it merely a convention to provide meaning to life’s inexplicable destiny?

Some pop-psychology related to work done by Andrew Newberg, a neurotheology pioneer, and others posited that our brains are “hard-wired” for God.  Measuring brain activity during prayer or meditation sessions showed reduced activity in the frontal lobes and increased activity in the emotion related parts of the brain.  The assessment is that humans interpret this as an “other world” or God experience rather than simply a conscious slowing of the brain components related to physical awareness.  In another take on faith,  Freud characterized faith or religion as pathological, a malignant reaction to guilt and simply an irrational superstition.

These observations by the erudite may be a bunch of hooey–or not.  They may also be simply an expression of a humanistic belief system, or faith, as a substitute for a supernatural based system.  In other words, we all seem to have faith in something even if it’s nothing (think about that for a while–remember my simple definition of faith).

So, we get into conflict and trouble with each other when we attach a set of dogmas to our faith.  My simple definition of dogma is a set of principles determined by an authority to be incontrovertibly true.  Adherence to a set of dogmas is usually how someone associates with a particular religion.  This seems particularly true in Christianity, Islam and Judaism and probably so in most other religions.  It follows then that most of us, including you agnostics and atheists, associate with a set of dogmatic ideas and beliefs we consider to be incontrovertibly true based on a faith we can’t prove. While this statement may be legitimately criticized from all sides, the God of my faith is smiling, and sometimes crying, as we stumble through life advocating and proselytizing our particular religious faith system.  The resulting cacophony is much like a crowd of men, blind since birth, discussing the attributes of a particular color palette (think about that for a while).

After this somewhat chaotic discussion, readers may think that I am at best, an agnostic and probably distanced myself from any religion.  Actually I have settled on Roman Catholicism, the religion of most of my ancestors, except for a smattering of Anabaptist Amish, as the foundation of my spirituality.  This is the current culmination of proceeding through several stages, the most significant I refer to as “Old Shoeism”, “Sky Diving”‘ and the always present for me, “Paralysis by Analysis”, and is really a decision I make for myself.

For a good pert of my life, I professed faith based on a particular religion for the same reason I pull on a pair of old shoes; it just felt comfortable.  I was raised Catholic and all things Catholic seemed reassuring and comfortable.  Then there was the “Sky Diving” phase.  I was looking to get some excitement into my version of faith.  I wanted a religious experience which I now compare to trying sky diving.  The whole thing starts with signing a paper acknowledging you may die, getting about an hour of minimal instruction, strapping on a parachute packed by an unknown “expert”,  getting in a plane, flying to a few thousand feet above the earth and then jumping out on the back of a total stranger.  I tried charismatic prayer meetings and even went to a fortune-telling spiritualist: in retrospect, both seemed more weird than helpful.

Then there was the “Paralysis by Analysis” phase which is a recurring pattern for most things in my life.  I read spiritual writers, tried to understand the spirituality of Thomas Merton and others, listened to bible thumping television preachers, read Christopher Hitchens and excerpts from Richard Dawkins atheistic thinking, got a Jerome’s Biblical Commentary and set out to read and understand the complete bible and finally read Bart Ehrman’s critique of Christianity based on his assessment of modern biblical criticism.  Islam, Hinduism and far eastern religions escaped my analysis, probably because of lack of curiosity.

At some point not that long ago, I realized that I was basically trying to find a pair of new shoes.  The one’s I tried on were either too tight (hurtful), too loose (feel good TV types and atheists, go figure), wrong style (hell, fire and brimstone), made from synthetic material  (prosperity gospel types) or insisting on “solo scriptura” Christianity.  Here I must digress momentarily.  If I choose to remain in the Catholic tradition, I must accept the bible as the word of God.  I have trouble believing God stopped all his “words” sometime in the early second century.  I do understand the bible to be some of the story of man’s relationship with God, but I’m less certain God considers it all the story or that it completely reflects God’s relationship with man, which is how God sees things, not man. Also, probably close to 600 million Christians (Catholics really) lived and died prior to the bible being more available to all thanks to Gutenberg’s press in 1455 and the printing in Latin of the Vulgate version.  For us English speakers, Tyndale’s translation published between 1526 and 1537 was our first chance. Early Christians certainly didn’t have the current collection of books that comprise the bible: those weren’t organized into a canon until the late 4th century, by the Catholic Church. Most couldn’t read or write anyway and relied on the Catholic Church for salvation guidance. Luther had some legitimate concerns but I’m not sure he envisioned individual interpretation by all according to their own whims.

All this is what eventually brought me back to that old pair of shoes in the back of the closet.  They were beat up and scuffed (sex scandals, financial malfeasance, misogyny, etc.), heels worn to one side (leaning to the right), worn out soles (the cushion was gone, every step hurt), and missing laces to keep them on and tie life together.  So I set out to see if I could ever be comfortable in them again.

I polished those beat up Catholic shoes up as best I could.  They looked better, but the old shine never really came back and the scuffs showed through several layers of polish.  A constant reminder of our human nature and a warning to be always vigilant.  I put in a pair of inserts fashioned in recognition of one of our greatest gifts, the ability to reason. These inserts contain a blend of doubt, skepticism, inquisitiveness, inclusiveness, forgiveness, and hope all held together by the idea that the God that enters into my life expects me to evaluate everything, discard the meaningless and live my life as best I can with the gifts I have been given.  My God is less concerned with who we sleep with and more concerned with the nature of the relationship.  My God alone knows when life begins and ends (don’t take this as support of abortion or euthanasia).  My God doesn’t see countries with artificial boundaries, but all humans with a shared purpose in living and an absolute need to rely on each other.

Now that the shoes were presentable and didn’t hurt, I needed something to keep them snug and keep me from walking out of them.  I chose new laces for them from the Christian bible (actually from The New American Bible, Revised Edition).  Specifically a portion of Mathew’s gospel that seems to summarize succinctly what is expected from us. We commonly refer to these chapters, 5, 6 and 7, as the Sermon on the Mount.  Saint Augustine, in his famous commentary on these chapters written in the 5th century, states that it is”…a perfect standard for the Christian life.”  Ten centuries later, Luther apparently concluded it was an impossible standard.  In my mind, both positions are worthy of consideration and are not mutually exclusive.

The “Sermon” is very hard to live up to and probably impossible for a human.  I don’t meet the standard in so many ways.  But that didn’t stop me from using it to lace up my shoes so I could walk in them.  It also give me a pass from having to continually be conflicted by opposing positions on things such as the inerrancy of the bible in all things, transubstantiation, virgin birth, necessity of faith alone to reach salvation (how much, how strong, in what), did the whale really swallow Jonah, what is the book of Revelation really about, who really wrote the gospels and when, and a laundry list of other issues we sometimes think are most important.

And now that they are laced up, something to keep the laces from coming undone.  This was an easy choice also covered in the “Sermon”.  I rely on “The Lord’s Prayer” found in Mathew  6:9-13.  It seems to cover it all.

Those more faith filled than me might call this “cafeteria Catholicism” or suggest I become a protestant or maybe a Unitarian.  But those shoes don’t fit.  They’re either too loose (Unitarianism) or not made with authentic leather (Protestantism).  Sorry to my non-Catholic friends, but you may think much worse of Catholicism.  As far as the cafeteria part, someone counted 255 “must believe” dogmas of Catholicism along with another 102 “certain truths”.  So the cafateria is really a smorgasbord of 255 entrées you must eat and swallow whole and leave room for another 102 side dishes.  My gift of faith must be much smaller than the mustard seed described in Luke 17:6 but I believe concentrating on trying to live up to the standard of the “Sermon” and walking carefully in my reconditioned old shoes will get me where I need to be.  Hopefully God is only smiling at my efforts and not laughing.

I don’t mean to proselytize by sharing my thoughts.  Everybody’s life journey is their own.  Saint Francis of Assisi reportedly said: “Preach the gospel at all times and if necessary, use words” and “It’s no use walking somewhere to preach unless walking is our preaching”.  Take time to think about those two ideas.  I just hope that all of you , as you meander through life trying to do the best you can with what you have been given, will take time to read Jesus’ Sermon.  It may set impossible standards and I continually fall short in so many ways, but I keep on walking in those old shoes with as much faith as is possible, relying on forgiveness and mercy.

Postscript.  Although I have proofread this essay about a dozen times, I am sure a careful reader of this essay may find spelling, grammar, logic and content errors.  In that sense, it remains an incomplete work, much as my life is still incomplete.  I look forward to the rest of my life’s spiritual journey along with  any gifts or insights God chooses to reveal to me.