I’ve had a remarkably tumultuous relationship with the word Faith over the last 40 years.
It started as a child at family gatherings. While our household was religiously ambivalent, the maternal arm of my extended family was decidedly not so. In fact of my mother’s 6 brothers and sisters, a fairly distressing number of them were born again Christian, all of them having been raised Catholic. This subset of my family provided a uniquely bad example of religiosity during my formative years. It is certainly not the case with all of them, but there are a couple spectacularly bad apples.
During my early years I remember vaguely my father neck deep in religious argument, against the religious aunts and uncles, and winning handily. I took from this time and these people a concrete picture of what Christianity meant. How the born agains were uniformly vapid, with minds as empty as they were closed. I took away an understanding of Catholicism being a domineering institution used by Italian immigrants to keep their seven children under a yoke.
As I grew up my father retired from these conversations a bit more quickly than our family retired from large extended family gatherings. Into my teens I took up the mantle of Dismissive. It was easy. I was dealing with no great intellect and no arguments of substance.
I distinctly remember trying to drag, kicking and screaming, a reason WHY The Word was The Word and not just words. My uncle would smile broadly, shake his head, and proudly utter the word.
Faith
I argued that by his estimation he’s willfully dispensed with the capacity for reason.
More he smiled, farther he shook his head. All arguments resulted in his growing ever more triumphant and smug. And the more I, a budding intellectual overflowing with teenage rage, began to loathe him.
It had gotten to a point where the utterance of the word was revolting. I had a girlfriend for a brief time who would speak so proudly of how she Had Faith and I would flinch, disgusted completely. It had become a symbol of all that I hated, the willful divestature of one’s most powerful capacity. The power to reason, and by reasoning to decide and by deciding, to then act. If there was to be a religion or spiritual path for me it must not only allow for reason, but it must exalt it. To do less was to be revolting beyond measure.
So I turned elsewhere. To paths with less structured belief systems, believing that believing was the problem. I went through western eclectic neo-paganism. But I found it a perfectly hollow spiritual structure based largely on sensate pleasures and boundary free existance, full of people pathetically demanding respect and validation of beliefs they made up as they went along and didn’t honestly hold.
I looked at Eastern philosophies. They were complete philosophical systems based entirely around casting a strange mystical sense over a core of nihilism. They were full of interesting exercises, while perfectly skirting the issue of cosmology.
There was Buddhism, with it’s hierarchical reincarnation structure so obviously designed around he social caste system of it’s home cultures.
Throughout all this time there were always a couple curious exceptions. A couple people, thoughtful, serious and intelligent who wore their belief, faith and exploration proudly.
One is an uncle, of the same family. He was always somewhat different. Never pushy, always serious about Christianity and his faith when it arose. A persistently kind and funny person.
There was a girl I dated for a time, a medical malpractice lawyer who wretled quite seriously with her faith and career.
A blogger friend, whose spiritual journeys were well documented and fascinating.
None of these people were idiots. None were the brainless gum-smacking toll takers I’d extrapolated them to be. They didn’t make sense to me at all.
But really… I’d given up. It’s only now that I understand that I gave up, but I did. There was a period of almost 10 years where I had no particular expansion of interest or knowledge.
A few years ago though I was recommended The Man Who Was Thursday, but G.K.Chesterton. It’s a strange little book, entirely off topic for this area. But it did lead me to read him more thoroughly. Chesterton is a Catholic apologist of the highest order. His writing is peerless, surpassing the Bard in my estimation of his wordsmithing skills. The subject matter of such a craftsman is entirely irrelevant. Anything to get more of his words to pass in front of my eyes.
So I read Orthodoxy. I read The Everlasting Man, and many others. I settled on Manalive, which has since become my favorite piece of artwork the world has yet offered me to judge.
And aspects of Christianity and Catholocism more specifically were brought into focus. This was not the mindless “I just believe because I believe and it’s true because they said” religion of my flatlining uncle. It was a very thoughtful thing full of questions that were allowed and answers to most of them that were borne of reason and logic. I ventured elsewhere, mildly and found that nowhere did someone, in their defence of Catholocism, try to wave The Book in my face as a dismissive gesture designed to shortcut questioning.
And so for the last couple years i’ve been doing an awful lot of thinking.
I don’t know that I’ll ever be Christian. As much of it as makes sense to me I still can’t get to the leap of faith that is belief in the divinity of Christ. It’s too far away. Most of the ideas of the church make a great deal more sense to me than the vapid thoughtlessness I’d experienced on those Thanksgiving afternoons and even a great deal more sense than any other of my intentional pursuits had made. But to take that step without believing it is true is a lie I can’t commit.
But the topic is still fascinating to me.
Family gatherings have certainly taken on a different tenor, now that I go to them again after more than 15 years of self-induced absence. Yes my devout brainwashed uncle and couple of aunts are still maddening, even more so given that I know how much more there is there than they represent.
Lately, after the Letterman/Palin debaucle, there was an awful lot of revised talk around the internet about feminism as opposed to Feminism. (Camile Paglia vs. Paige Mellish.) I recalled a quote that I’d heard some decades ago. An interesting if pithy idea.
“A woman is not free until she can decide she wants to raise children and be a home-maker.”
Now, I’ve got that wrong, not having tracked down the original. I’m satisfied with the paraphrasal. But it’s an interesting idea that highlights the reason Feminism is a complete and total sham, a thinly disguised anti-establishment movement. Capital F Feminists react pretty violently to that quote. It’s a good barometer to test the honesty of their adherence to the cause they purport to be fighting for.
But leaving feminism behind specifically, it distills down into a compelling concept: The notion of being able to chose the role that would have been chosen for you, as an expression of freedom having come full circle is fascinating to me.
My mixed up brainsauce being what it is, these thoughts and ideas overlapped in time and therefore in content with my recent cogitations about deism and more specifically, Catholocism.
So as a thought experiment, let’s start with “Catholocism is true”:
God could easily have created us such that we would serve him and his purposes and plans. But he didn’t. God created us with free will. Free will to decide to live well or poorly, to love or hate, to create or destroy. Most importantly the freedom to decide to seek Him out or not.
If God granted us free will, then I put it to you: Does it not follow then that having Faith in God the ultimate expression of free will?
UPDATE: Despite the entertaining accidental ambiguity, I had to adjust the final question. “Is not having free will…” can be read either way depending on the merely the internal annunciation of the sentence. It makes for a clever experiment in “reading what you want to read” but as it’s not what I meant, it needed to change. Sorry for the confusion. o/
