choosing to be catholic: for the first time or once again

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First published in 2001, "Choosing to Be Catholic" has sold nearly 25,000 copies and maintains its status as a Catholic parish favorite. In this revised edition, Jesuit priest, master-teacher, and bestselling author William J. O’Malley, S.J., prompts seekers and skeptics alike to ask a new set of questions as they hunger and search for God. He demonstrates once again his uncanny ability to approach the human quest for God with refreshingly frank discourse as he sorts out the Hows, Whys, and So whats of being Catholic. With razor sharp focus, O’Malley offers a cultured and deeply personal argument for Catholicism to those curious about joining the Church, those wondering if they should stay, and those “vacationing” from it. Ideal Uses for "Choosing to Be Catholic": * RCIA * Gift for spiritual seekers * Faith-sharing groups

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“William O’Malley, S.J., has been a leader in Catholic secondary and higher education, Christian spiritual writing and speaking, and fundamental faith formation in this country for the last for-ty years. He is a Jesuit priest who cannot write an uninteresting sentence, and who never fails to inspire.”

Rev. James Martin, S.J.Author of Between Heaven and Mirth

“Because we have to ask many questions about being Catholic today, no one is better prepared to give us intelligent, honest, and faith-filled answers than O’Malley. Just when you think you have considered every perspective, O’Malley will give you another one—and it will be well worth considering!”

Rev. Richard Rohr, O.F.M.Author of Falling Upward

“I have long respected O’Malley’s work and find his clear, con-cise, and direct manner truly beneficial for pastoral leaders and those we serve. Choosing to Be Catholic is perfect for so many who seek deeper understanding of our faith.”

Leisa AnslingerFounder and Director

CatholicLifeAndFaith.net

“If you are a spiritual seeker, this book is for you. An experi-enced teacher and writer, O’Malley deftly guides the reader on a journey that tackles key issues of modern belief, such as the nature of the soul, the existence of God, and the value of reli-gion. Because it is a journey that challenges us to rethink our deepest values, it is one well worth taking.”

Neil A. ParentAuthor of A Concise Guide to Adult Faith Formation

Previously published by Thomas More, an imprint of Ave Maria Press, in 2001.

Nihil Obstat: Michael Heintz, PhD, Censor LibrorumImprimatur: Kevin C. Rhoades Bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend July 31, 2012____________________________________

© 2001, 2012 by William J. O’Malley, S.J.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews, without written permission from Ave Maria Press®, Inc., P.O. Box 428, Notre Dame, IN 46556.Founded in 1865, Ave Maria Press is a ministry of the United States Province of Holy Cross.www.avemariapress.comPaperback: ISBN-10 1-59471-343-X, ISBN-13 978-1-59471-343-9E-book: ISBN-10 1-59471-360-X, ISBN-13 978-1-59471-360-6Cover image © Elio Ciol/CORBIS.Cover and text design by David R. Scholtes.Printed and bound in the United States of America.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataO’Malley, William J. Choosing to be Catholic : for the first time or once again / William J. O’Malley. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-59471-343-9 (pbk.) – ISBN 1-59471-343-X (pbk.) 1. Catholic Church–Adult education. 2. Faith development. 3. Catholic Church--Mem-bership. I. Title. BX921.O43 2012 282--dc23 2012025582

Contents

Preface ...........................................................................................vii

Introduction ................................................................................... x

1. Uncertainty: The Meaning of Faith .......................................1

2. The First Conversion: Humanity ........................................ 13

3. Conscience .............................................................................25

4. A World without Enchantment: Atheism ......................... 41

5. The Case for God ..................................................................54

6. The Other Faces of God: World Religions ..................... 66

7. Your Basic Christian ...............................................................85

8. Why Be Catholic? ................................................................. 98

9. Scripture from Scratch ....................................................... 114

10. The Hebrew Scriptures .....................................................129

11. The Gospel Becomes the Gospels ................................ 141

12. The Church .........................................................................156

13. The Sacraments .................................................................. 175

14. The Days of the Lord ....................................................... 205

15. Praying ................................................................................. 224

For

Gerald Blaszczak, S.J. and

Robert Sealy, S.J.

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Preface

Over the last decade or so, the Roman Catholic Church has suffered an unnerving amount of scandal, bad press, and internal discord. Negative news reports

about Catholics show up regularly in almost every kind of media, even the Church’s own. Such august papers as the New York Times always seem to have space for the latest Catholic scandal or conflict—with plenty of sidebars for related stories about problems within the Church. The manner in which this internal discord has played itself out in the media has been a matter of great frustration and even embarrassment to many who love the Church and have long defended it.

Even the celebration of Mass has been an arena of dispute, most recently because of the promulgation of the new transla-tion of the Mass in late 2011. The reason for the new transla-tion was to get our prayer “closer to the Latin,” which many welcomed but others have experienced only as a dishearten-ing intrusion into their prayer. Added to the internal conflicts and public scandals already mentioned, many saw this change as an unnecessary use of the Church’s time, energy, and other resources.

We know that over the last decade or so one third of Ameri-cans raised Catholic have taken their affiliation elsewhere not only because of scandal or disagreement with Church teaching,

I do believe, help my unbelief!

—Mark 9:24

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but because they simply are not being spiritually fed. Any wise person should be thinking, “Don’t invest in that church!” So when I recommend Choosing to be Catholic to those who have as yet had no real commitment to religion or to those who have stopped short in their commitment wondering whether it is worth continuing, I am asking a lot! I am asking people to in-vest their very souls—the essence of what each of them is, their proximate and ultimate values, the motivation of their career paths, their marriages, and the moral and spiritual formation of their very children in a Church that often seems to be help-lessly falling apart.

However, there is one critical problem with the investment metaphor. It is completely unjustified, too easy-to-hand, and not just limping like all analogies, but crippled. In a word it’s wrong. Acceptance of and allegiance to a manifestly imperfect Church is no more irrational than acceptance of and allegiance to a manifestly imperfect nation.

I find a host of unpleasant—even utterly repugnant—choices made by those who have directed the United States of America in my eighty years as a citizen. Richard Nixon was forced to resign for suborning perjury and Bill Clinton was impeached for having sex with an intern in the Oval Office. Factor in the heinous tragedies of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghani-stan. Consider the lack of fiscal control and unchecked greed of money managers that led the whole world to near financial collapse. Then add lawmakers who are held willing hostage to lobbyists—digging in their heels and insisting on curtailing services to the inculpably poor while refusing to fix laws that continue to give unfair advantage to the rich. The unborn, the elderly, and so many of our children and adults in real need re-main unprotected by our laws and by our courts. But although I despise what these people have done to our country, I have no intention of packing my bags and winging off to Tierra del Fuego.

ixPreface

Despite attacks from without and stupidities from within, the nation envisioned by those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution has not only survived but thrived. If those bewigged personages returned today, the present attitudes and actions of our leaders might leave them stupefied. But we’re still here. And doing both good and well. The burden of this book is to establish that the Catholic Church is the same—still here, still doing both good and well. This reminder will surface over and over in these pages: An ideal is like the North Star. It’s a guide, not a destination. The Gospel and the Constitution are ideals, but in bringing any ideal to life in our world, we have to rely on fallible human beings. If you expect any institution made up of and guided by human beings to live up to the perfection of its ideals, you probably should have arranged to land in a different universe. But if you are ready to wade through a considerable amount of muck to discover the beauty of the Gospel revealed in the life and teachings of the Catholic Church—read on! Let’s see if I can convince you to choose—really choose—this Church.

x

I suddenly saw that all the time it was not I who had been seeking God

but God who had been seeking me.

—Bede Griffiths The Golden String

Introduction

Very often books such as this, which try to explain—or re-explain—the basics of Catholicism, seem overly con-cerned with thoroughly covering all doctrines as if they

all carried the same weight, and very often theology forgets to take into consideration the complexity and obscurity of it all, like trying to teach calculus without basic arithmetic. In the interest of logical progression and all-inclusive thoroughness, we teach catechetics (a summary of Christian doctrines and principles) and completely bypass apologetics (Why should I even bother with God, much less with Christianity, and even less with Catholicism and “all those rules”?). We act as if the interested person has already been fully converted and cares to probe further, which is like explaining the intricate myster-ies of the internal combustion engine to someone who’s not too sure yet whether she even wants to drive.

Religious conversion is much more like falling in love. Hardly ever is it “Wham! Bam! Alacazam! Wonderful you came by!” Maybe in being-in-love songs, but not in real life, which is where most of us live. Here, it usually begins with, “He looks interesting,” and “She’s cute.” Then comes the hard

xiIntroduction

part: just saying hello. The process from that moment to the wedding—and far beyond that—is dramatic only in rare mo-ments, and not all of them pleasant. Like falling in love and only gradually moving to greater and deeper commitment, conversion is a process with its ups and downs.

Saint Paul, on his way to Jericho to root out Christian her-etics, was apparently struck down and overwhelmed by an ex-perience of the risen Jesus. Such conversions are rare indeed. By far, the majority of conversions are far slower and much less dramatic. I’m a cradle Catholic, but my experience of the conversion that was the call of my vocation, was surely not that stunning—and by no means that clear and certain. Of all the words in the Gospel, what I find most difficult to accept is that when Jesus stopped by the future apostles’ boats and said, “Come, follow me,” they “immediately” left their nets and followed him. Unless they had considerable previous dealings with Jesus (and the gospels at least don’t say they did), that is really hard to accept. I mean, there were these hard-handed, practical men, in the middle of a workday, and a stranger just arrives and tells them to come along, and they do? Just like that? No questions like who is this guy? What about my fam-ily? Where are we going? Or what we will eat? Not even why?

Not me. When I felt the first urges of a vocation, I did exactly what the prophet Jonah did when Yahweh came and told him to go and convert Nineveh: I ran the other way. I knew what that call was asking me to give up, and I avoided it in every way I knew how for two years. The poet Francis Thompson was also Catholic from infancy but—swamped among the dregs of humanity and self-hatred—he shuddered when he felt the first whispering of the call back to God.

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;I fled Him, down the arches of the years;I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

CHOOSING to Be CATHOLICxii

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tearsI hid from Him, and under running laughter.

—“The Hound of Heaven”

I don’t think very many cradle Catholics understand how conversion feels, what it costs. Perhaps many born-and-bap-tized, lifelong Catholics have never really suffered a genuine conversion. The faith has simply always been unquestionably true.

The word “conversion” means a total reversal of direc-tion, a metanoia, a complete turnabout in one’s understand-ing of what life is all about. The prodigal son, starving among his employer’s swine, understood. Oedipus the King, finally yielding to the truth about himself and the gods, understood. Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day understood. Any man or woman who has sinned and repented understands, but so do men and women who have tried their best to live upright lives but—suddenly or gradually—begin to suspect, “I wonder if I could be missing something.” It’s a temptation, and often one that seems to have more drawbacks and uncertainties than assurances.

Other textbooks I have studied that were written to help prepare for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, for wel-coming back “vacationing Catholics,” for preparing young people for Confirmation, seem (at least to me) to be coming “from the top down,” as if those asking for (or submitting to) instruction were completely convinced and docile. As if there were no hesitancies or doubts. On the contrary, I’d like to offer an approach that doesn’t jump into the middle, but starts from scratch and presumes nothing more than, “Yes, uh, I’m mildly interested.”

Someone wise once said that skeptics make the best preach-ers, and that’s the way I’ve written and preached all my adult life. I try never to take an audience for granted; I never pre-sume anyone’s interest. I learned that from directing over a

xiiiIntroduction

hundred plays and musicals (so far), and from fifty years of teaching theology to skeptical high-school seniors, college freshmen, and adults. I never presume they listened to what they were taught before or thought it valuable enough to re-member, much less that they accepted it and internalized it. So at every gradual step of the way in this text, I hope you’ll face the questions as I have—skeptically. “Now wait just a minute, how can he say that?” After all, this process is asking you to reassess the basic values of your life.

In one Peanuts strip, Charlie Brown says to Snoopy who’s typing on top of his doghouse, “I hear you’re writing a book on theology. I hope you have a good title.” And as Charlie walks away, Snoopy says, “I have the perfect title. Has It Ever Occurred to You that You Might Be Wrong?” Unless you’ve hon-estly examined ideas that challenge your own ideas, you can never be confident in them. If there are five ways of getting a job done, and you know only one way, you don’t take that way freely—because it’s the only one you know. At the end of this process, I would hope we will no longer be talking about the faith, but about your faith.

So this text starts a long way before the place most texts for Christian initiation or returning begin: with apologetics, not “apology” in the sense of “I’m sorry,” but in the sense of a defense of the very basics upon which any relationship with God (religion) founds itself. Presuming nothing but good will and mutual respect between student and teacher, I would like to begin with terms for realities most texts presume we under-stand: faith, soul, pride, conscience—as if we all knew what we meant, even the teachers. Let’s have at least tentatively sat-isfying understandings of what these fundamental realities are and what responses they call for, before we start barging into problems like the validity of Scripture and the nature of the sacraments.

CHOOSING to Be CATHOLICxiv

We face the God question early—not the Catholic God or the Christian God or the Muslim God or the Jewish God. En-tertain the most basic challenge: What if the atheists are actu-ally right? What if there is no God, objectively, factually, truly? How would our lives be changed if we had the courage to re-ject what atheists believe is our “crutch”? (Has It Ever Occurred to You that You Might Be Wrong?) What hard evidence can we discover to prove that there is a greater likelihood that God exists than that God doesn’t? Even if there is a God, why have organized religions? Why can’t we each go out into the woods, onto a beach, or a city rooftop and worship God gratefully in our own individual way? If communal worship is better, then why not be Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim? Why Christian? When asked their core beliefs, most Christian educators would an-swer: “The Apostles’ Creed.” Before we study what makes Catholics different, how are all Christians alike?

Most books like this work “from the top down,” from the doctrine or the magisterium to the interested Christian. For instance, the Catechism of the Catholic Church article on holy or-ders describes its degrees as episcopate, priesthood, diaconate, because that is the direction in which the ministerial power flows, from Peter and the first apostles (pope and bishops), to the priests and to the deacons. I believe most readers are more comfortable working “from the bottom up,” from where we stand. Similarly, in an article on the responsibility of the laity in the Church (#906), the Catechism says that, when they have serious reason to object to something in the Church, they have an obligation “to manifest it to the sacred pastors.” When I quote that passage, I omit the word “sacred” because I believe it skews the relationship. Members of the laity are sacred, too.

Finally, even if we can demonstrate a strong probability that Jesus Christ was indeed—and still is—a visitation of God into human life, why be Catholic, with “all those rules”? Only then, I believe, will we be ready and confident, psychologically and

xvIntroduction

spiritually, to say, “All right. I honestly want to find out about the workings of this Catholic Church. I’m ready to see what I am committing myself to, where I have confusions, reser-vations, and objections. I want to know how I can honestly, peacefully resolve them. If I become part of this Church, I want to feel ‘at home’ in it.”

In the larger part of the text, we will treat what other such texts treat, but I hope with the same “show-me,” down-to-earth attitude. How do the Scriptures mediate truth? What does the Church mean, and what effective place does each of us have in the People of God? What is the meaning and pur-pose of each of the seven sacraments? How does the order of the eucharistic liturgy body set forth and manifest the beliefs of the people of the Church; how does it convey meaning, en-liven, and sanctify? How can the progression of the liturgical year give a broader perspective and coherence to its weeks and days? And finally—though it is presumed all along—the book takes us back to the most basic “connection” to God: praying.

Conversion is most definitely not a blind leap into the dark. It is a slow, taxing, enlightening, and, we hope, invigorating process. A process we also hope will never end. And the great truth is that, in the Church, you never have to do it alone.

This book is for adults and becoming-adults. Without being overly technical and scholarly, it is an attempt to open up the life of the soul, the Christian faith, and the Catholic Church to more than mere childlike (or childish) understanding. Saint Paul says, “When I was a child, my speech, feelings, and think-ing were all those of a child. Now that I am a man, I have no more use for childish ways” (1 Corinthians 13:11). I am no theologian. I am a pedagogue, a popularizer, trying to make complexities comprehensible without making them either too simplistic or too baffling. Skeptic, take my skeptic’s hand.

1

Go your way; your faith has saved you.

—Mark 10:52

1

Uncertainty: The Meaning of Faith

Before we approach the faith, it’s probably wise to examine just what “faith” means—not specifically faith in God, or faith in a particular religion’s unique insights into the

nature and personality of God, just a better understanding of what the commitment designated by the word “faith” entails. So let’s back off a while from what books like catechisms have to say about faith (which is often pretty heady and inaccessi-ble) and, instead of considering faith “from the top down” the way theologians do, try to understand faith “from the bottom up,” starting with acts of faith we’re all familiar with. After all, God isn’t the only object of faith.

We’ve all been through the process of forming friendships but have probably never stopped to realize that a friendship is a whole process of acts of faith. Think of your very best friend, someone to whom you could unburden anything, and who

2 CHOOSING to Be CATHOLIC

you know without question would stick by you no matter what. Well at one time, that person was “way out there” in the almost endless sea of anonymous faces—along with old ladies in Manchuria, children in Africa, and the people who tend the heating system in your office building. How did your friend get from “way out there” into your innermost heart?

I’m not asking you to explain nuclear physics here, just to think about something we have all experienced but probably never examined. Maybe lay the book aside a few moments and try to figure out how that precious friendship happened.

The absolutely essential first step in making a friend is, of course, to notice that person. Without that, he or she will re-main irretrievably “way out there.” After that, we usually as-sign the new face and body a name, and he or she becomes an acquaintance. “Oh, yeah. I know who she is.” Most of the people we know are acquaintances. But a few people push forward, impressing (or imposing) themselves, spending time with us, and talking so that they become friends. We often think of these people as “work” or “office” friends, even if we know them through some other life activity, such as our neighborhood as-sociation, charitable outreach, or a civic project. These are in-dividuals we don’t mind sitting with at lunch.

Some people penetrate our defenses even further, offering not just shared time, conversation, and interests but mutual sacrifice in pursuit of a common purpose. That sacrifice tight-ens our relationship with them. They become real friends—people with whom we assume we’ll go to lunch, a movie, or a game. Still others work their way into our innermost hearts, usually because we’ve shared some truly daunting experi-ence. These are our best friends. Those few become the people whom we trust implicitly—not blindly, but because of all that shared risk beforehand, based on all that previous experience. Those are the people we trust enough to cry with, and know

Uncertainty: The Meaning of Faith 3

that the tears are not a threat but a kind of cement to the bond of friendship.

Marriage is also an act of faith. In fact, marriage is not just the dramatic commitment at the altar but also an uncountable series of acts of faith. It begins from the very first date, when he stares at the suddenly intimidating phone, wiping his palms on his pants, trying to get up the courage to call or text. He thinks to himself, “Oh, God, she won’t even remember who I am!” When he reaches her, she paces and thinks to herself, “He’s nice, but his friends are weird.” The acts of faith—and the related risks—multiply in number and escalate in intensity as the two date, get serious, announce their engagement, and on their wedding day vow to stay together forever. Even then they don’t know it’s going to work out; they’re betting it will. That is faith.

And that’s by no means the last of it. After the (more-or-less) blissful honeymoon period, when reality stops by in the form of bills, household chores, ingrained habits at cross purposes, career conflicts, and all the other frictions that naturally arise when two once-autonomous individuals try to form a part-nership, spouses have to face the real act of faith. Now they need to keep loving one another without the constant support-ive help of thumping hearts, lusty urges, and the “love po-tion” that once made her seem like Cinderella and him Prince Charming. That’s when romance can turn into love, which is considerably less dramatic than being in love. Married love becomes stirring-the-pasta-sauce love and letting-go-of-the-grudge love. In a very true sense, this maturing love with all its many acts of self-emptying is a more profound expression of genuine faith than was expressed on the wedding day.

Later comes the titanic act of faith required when having a child. Husband and wife commit themselves to raising an-other fragile human being for the next twenty-plus years and to raising at least a quarter of a million dollars to support that

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child. All this they do—sight unseen and without any chance of an exchange! Day after day and week after week, there are acts of faith: investments, job changes, and school choices—ad infinitum. On the couple’s thirtieth anniversary, they are a lot more married than they were on their wedding day because of all those acts of faith—trusting one another through thick and thin, titanic and trivial. Faith grows incrementally as each new act of faith is easier because of all the previous acts of faith that proved to be worth the risk.

At least for me, this gives a more solid basis for understand-ing faith than the usual dictionary definition: “belief that is not based on proof.” If you had proof, what need would there be for belief? Seeing isn’t believing; seeing is knowing. It’s also better than Saint Paul’s definition of faith as “the realization of what is hoped for” (Hebrews 11:1). In my waning years, I think I have better insight into the difference between “faith” and “hope” than I did when I was younger. Hope is the gut urge to cling on even though all the evidence seems to undercut that option; faith is the gut urge to cling on even though the evidence for it is persuasive but not compelling.

A lifetime of belief has convinced me that real, genuine, and authentic faith still doubts. It must doubt. Otherwise it’s not faith but witless conformity. When I ask people what faith means, almost without exception they say, “a blind leap in the dark.” Just think for a minute what a “blind leap in the dark” really means. Putting your life’s savings on a single lottery ticket is a blind leap. Buying land in Mexico sight unseen is a blind leap. “Hi, we’ve just met; let’s get married” is a blind leap. And these are preposterous choices! If that’s what most people think faith is—holding hands and jumping off a cliff—then it’s not surprising that having faith is so difficult.

What’s more, that “blind leap” business flies directly in the face of what we know from our own personal experience about those other acts of faith—friendship and marriage. Those acts

Uncertainty: The Meaning of Faith 5

of faith are most often not arrived at logically, but neither are they completely impulsive. And though they may not be painstakingly rational, they are by no means irrational. At each stage of the journey of friendship and marriage, when the re-lationship calls for a deeper commitment and a more profound level of trust, the new commitment is not baseless (like a blind leap), but rather based on all the previous experiences the two people have had together. The same holds true with God.

At the other end of the spectrum from those who say faith is a totally irrational, baseless leap in the dark, there are those who say, “Okay, I’ll believe if you give me scientific proof.” They’ll commit only when they have an ironclad guarantee, evidence so clear and distinct they can have no occasion what-ever to doubt it, and certitudes as unarguable as water freez-ing at thirty-two degrees, objects released from a height going down, and the inevitability of death.

Just as the relativist, blind-leap people labor under a convic-tion about faith that’s irrational, the rationalist certitude folks labor under a conviction about faith that’s impossible. Even in the examples mentioned above, there is room for uncer-tainty. Someone might have dumped antifreeze into the water this time or the object that dropped from a great height might be jet-propelled. The only unquestionable certitude in life is death, and even that is wildly unpredictable.

In physics—the “hardest” of the hard sciences—we’ve known that nothing is certain since Werner Heisenberg won the Nobel Prize in 1932 for his Principle of Uncertainty that demonstrated how objects in the sub-atomic world simply don’t yield to absolute certitude. You can tell where an elec-tron is located at the moment, but you can’t tell its velocity at the same time, because when you bounce a bundle of energy off it to tell where it is, you change its velocity and direction! Sometimes the electron acts like a pellet and sometimes like

6 CHOOSING to Be CATHOLIC

a wave. Which is it at the moment? Well, uh, we don’t know. That’s not theology; that’s the best of science.

This misconception of “scientific proof” comes, I believe, from the fact that most of us never took anything more than very rudimentary science classes. The “experiments” we did were not experiments at all in the real sense of that word: a ten-tative procedure to see if something works. The lab manuals were books of recipes: if you just don’t mess up, this will come out exactly the same every time. Chemistry was cookbook sci-ence. When a real scientist goes into her lab, she doesn’t expect to find the cure for the common cold by the time the bell rings, or by the end of the term, or even by the end of her career. Real scientists are content with knowing just a bit more, with push-ing back the frontiers of knowledge just a bit more—exactly in the same way as people learning to become better friends and better marriage partners learn a bit more at a time. It’s exactly like establishing faith in God.

Even science, then, is an act of faith! It begins with prepara-tion in the rudiments of science. Then, given that knowledge, the scientist gets a hunch: “Maybe if we fiddled with this bread mold we might come up with a medicine; we’ll call it penicil-lin. . . . Maybe if we fooled around with these silicon chips we might find a kind of conductor. . . ! Maybe out of this mountain of pitchblende we could get just a small vial of radium.”

Those who study the way the human brain works discov-er two quite different—but complementary—avenues to the truth, two mental functions isolated (more or less) to the left and right lobes. The left brain is analytical and takes things apart. It is rational, logical, organized, and works in defini-tions and formulas. The right brain is intuitive and sees things whole. It is insightful, engages in hunches, and operates in seeming “leaps.” It works in symbols, pictures, and stories. Each function is vital for a fuller, richer, less simplistic view of what’s really out there. In the cases just mentioned, the

Uncertainty: The Meaning of Faith 7

scientist gets a right-brain “hunch” about the bread mold and silicon and pitchblende and then turns those intuitions over to the left brain to see if it does in fact work out rationally and physically. The two functions complement one another and work toward a unified understanding of reality.

If one were to work exclusively with the operations of the analytical left brain, for instance, there could be no such thing as friendship and love. Getting married and having children would be utterly foolish without guarantees. Integrity, pa-triotism, honesty, and humor simply wouldn’t compute. All judgments of human behavior would be unbending and mer-ciless. Conversely, if one were to work exclusively with the operations of the intuitive right brain, any opinion would be self-justifying, without any need to back it up with evidence. Everybody would be going off haphazardly in all directions at once. All judgments of human behavior would be random, wishy-washy, and spineless.

The two lobes of the brain need one another to achieve a balanced look at the truth—no matter what the question. To neglect either the rational powers of the left brain or the intui-tive powers of the right brain is to act half-wittedly. To say that faith requires absolute certitude or that it is a blind leap with-out any evidence at all is, well, half-witted.

An act of faith in anything is therefore neither a commit-ment based on certitude nor an irrational leap. Rather, it’s a bit of both: a calculated risk, an educated guess, and a well-rea-soned hunch. Both elements are essential for a well-rounded opinion: the calculated-educated-reasoned part and the risk-guess-hunch part. You will almost never have certitude (about anything), but you come to a point where you have to make a commitment—to a college, a career, a spouse, a child, an in-vestment, and to God. You gather all the evidence and advice you can (the calculation part) and then you come to a point where you have a hunch that it all just “feels right” (the risk

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part). Then at least for a while you have to give yourself to the decision to find if it is, in fact, right.

In the case of friendship, one takes a greater risk at each stage of the relationship, often trusting the other before one is really certain the other is up to it. The same is true of marriage and the scientist in her lab: each act of trust fulfilled provides an even firmer basis from which to take the next leap. There is a risk, all right, just as there was for diver Greg Louganis when in 1988 at the Seoul Olympics he hit his head on the concrete high platform in the preliminaries. After he was patched up, he climbed the ladder and dove again with a concussion. It was a leap, all right, but it wasn’t a blind leap. It was based on the advice of his coaches, the approval of his doctor, and the track record of those countless thousands of other successful dives. It was an act of faith: a calculated risk.

Most of us would like things clear: it’s either this or it’s that. But reality fails to conform to our desires (one more proof that we are not God). For example, philosophers have always neatly defined humans as “rational animals.” But this is far too sim-plistic, too reductionist, leaving out evidence that is not only crucial but that definitively separates us from other animals. There are distinctively human activities that simply cannot be reduced to “rational” or to “animal,” to body or brain, or to a combination of the two. Take for example displaying unselfish sacrifice even for people we dislike; acting with honor when we could easily get away with something; needing purpose and meaning; and using understanding, wisdom, or good hu-mor in the middle of terror. All these constitutively human ac-tivities, which no other animal has, defy reduction to body or brain. They are solid evidence of a third human power: the soul. And that’s where faith “happens.”

The principle of complementarity requires a greater toler-ance for ambiguity than many people are able to muster. They want clear simplicities. The action in Golding’s classic novel

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Lord of the Flies, for instance, demonstrates a belief of German sixteenth-century reformer, Martin Luther. Luther’s idea is that human beings are basically savage beasts, held in control only by the structures and strictures of organized society. The first third of any tabloid newspaper gives ample evidence of that truth. Conversely, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye demonstrates eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s belief that human beings are angelic innocents cor-rupted by society. Stories of sublimely noble and rare humans such as Mother Teresa, Terry Anderson, Nelson Mandela, and Helen Keller give ample evidence for that truth, too. Year after year, my students say the two aforementioned novels really “tell it like it is”—even though the novels are completely at odds with one another. But the students are right because hu-man beings are indeed both—angelic and bestial at once. This is complementarity. Even if the two assertions seem contra-dictory, you can understand human beings better if you allow them to be not either/or but both/and.

Is an electron a pellet or a wave? Yes. Are humans beasts or angels? Yes. Are the operations of the left brain or right brain more important? Yes. Is God utterly otherworldly (transcen-dent) or utterly this-worldly (immanent)? Yes. Is God three or one? Yes. Was Jesus God or man? Yes. Are the eucharistic ele-ments bread and wine or body and blood? Yes.

If you deal with God exclusively with your prove-it left brain or exclusively with your blind-leap right brain, you’ll quite like-ly never find God, or at least the God most religions know.

This book attempts to lessen the precariousness of the com-mitment in faith to a person you cannot see and whom you cannot box into a definition or into a picture. We can and will explore the strictly rational evidence for and against a Mind behind It All: the calculation. But just as in the case of friend-ship and marriage, this calculation cannot compel assent. If God is going to “prove” himself, God can do that only in the

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way your other friends prove themselves: noticing, sharing time and talk, sacrificing for one another, and trusting one an-other at rock bottom. This is the journey we begin.

Questions to Ponder and Discuss

• The late film critic Gene Siskel used to ask those he in-terviewed: “What are you sure of?” It’s a fine question. I’m sure I’m a flawed good man who tries his best. I’m sure I was born to be a teacher. I’m not at all sure of the causes of original sin, but I’m completely sure of its ef-fects. I’m sure I will not convince all—or even many—to reject their self-absorption, fears, and shortcomings in or-der to become more fully alive human beings, much less Christians, much less Catholics. And I’m content with that. What are you sure of?

• You know that you are sure of certain truths about your-self and your life. For instance, you know that honor is more important than dishonor and kindness better than exploitation. Explore what brings you to these convic-tions. How did they evolve? Surely not overnight. Try to apply your insights into that process to what lies ahead in trying to become “sure” about God, about organized reli-gion, about Christianity, and about the Catholic Church.

• Each of us holds certain values, without which we prob-ably couldn’t get through life. Brainstorm and jot down the values you hold with greatest conviction: honesty? ambition? responsibility? security? dignity? creativity? Then try to put them in a rough order of priority for you personally. They tell a great deal about you and about the person you bring to God. Mull over the people, the crises, the challenges, and the unexpected opportunities

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that have brought you to where you are as a person now. This process surely didn’t happen completely by chance, nor did it come about from scrupulous planning. How does one come to know, trust, and respect one’s own self?

• Some people are by nature or by upbringing shy, hesi-tant, and reserved. Others are outright paranoid, fearful of trusting anyone, anytime. Still others can confidently stride through the jaws of hell without batting an eye because they trust themselves and life itself. Where do you see yourself along the spectrum between those two extremes? How easy or difficult is trust for you? What are the obstacles to trusting others that are within you? What are the hesitancies (and there surely must be some) in trusting God?

• Many people seem to have a quite satisfying relationship with God without recourse to any organized religion. What are the advantages and disadvantages of sharing a common belief in ritual and community rather than one-on-One, person-to-Person with God? (Again, surely there are both pluses and minuses; surely a private con-nection to God and a common connection to God do not preclude one another.)

• If you are exploring these questions within a group, how are you being called to trust in the other members of the group? And to trust yourself?

• Thomas Aquinas, thirteenth-century philosopher, theo-logian, and saint defines faith as “an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will, moved by God through grace.” Does this work for you? How would you change the definition to reflect your

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own experience of faith in your friends, in your mar-riage, and in God?

• It’s perfectly okay that you have hesitations about state-ments from the Fathers of the Church, the present-day administration of the Church, and even with Jesus him-self—as long as you find some honest way to resolve these difficulties, a way which keeps in mind not only your discomforts with a particular thing that is said but also with the powerful source of what is said. If you feel such hesitations, raise them with a priest or other par-ish leader and try to make peace with them, rather than let them irritate you to the point of bitterness. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. This is why God gave us minds.

For Further Exploration

Scripture: Genesis 22:1–13; Mark 9:14–29; John 6:66–69; He-brews 11:1–40

Catechism of the Catholic Church: 199, 1816, 2087–89

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For Wales? Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . but for Wales?

—Thomas MoreIn Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons

2

The First Conversion: Humanity

It is a cliché that the purpose of the Catholic Church is “to save our souls” through the merits of Jesus Christ. Like most clichés, it comes trippingly off the tongue, unexamined.

What are we saving souls from? Indeed, what are we saving? What is a soul?

If you roam the jungles of our cities, it’s easy to become dis-heartened. You see so many hooded eyes and so many dead-ended faces. People are hurrying unsmilingly past, unaware of anything but other insulated bodies, locked into various electronic devices. They are so focused, so businesslike, so effi-cient, dehumanized, and seemingly soulless. Everywhere you look, ads bastardize the meaning of “value.” Nothing seems really sacred, not even sex. Especially not sex.

Picture a group of babies on a blanket, sweet-smelling, giggling, and exploring one another. Now picture a group of

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people on a subway, slack-jawed, shrouded in blank indiffer-ence, and merely coping. All of those older people were once exactly like those babies. What got lost?

A lot of things: vulnerability, curiosity, and wonder, to name a few. It may sound silly at first, but I think the death of the soul—what makes us human—begins around second grade. After the innocent self-absorption of infancy, when parents ca-tered to a child’s every need, the world continued to be fasci-nating. A three-year-old is startled into wonderment every five minutes even by such things as an empty box, the swaybacked nag in a fairy tale, or raindrops trickling down a windowpane. Preschool and kindergarten are intriguing, too, exciting. So is first grade: “Look, Daddy! I wrote my name!”

But after that, we’ve got them. Learning becomes a serious, efficient business, pointing toward those SATs—and beyond to the dog-eat-dog, it’s-a-jungle-out-there, rat-race world. Don’t ask questions or make waves. You get this material. Don’t ask why. It’s required. The kids who still retain their curiosity, still have hunches, smell rats, and ask why, become colossal head-aches because they get in the way of the syllabus. Education—real learning, being curious, following the truth wherever it leads, reasoning on your own—yields to schooling, whose sole purpose is to get you into a good college so you can get a good job. Most of the time, this is the way the system works. But at least by seventh grade, you’ve learned how to beat the system: Cliffs Notes, the Internet, and faked outlines. That’s life: beat-ing the system, doing the minimum, and getting by. You tread water and tread water and tread water. Then you die. But is that really all there is?

The sole purpose of education ought to be mastering the skills to answer the only truly important questions: What are people for? What will help me live a truly fulfilled life? What does “success” really mean? I have only one time around; how do I get the most from it?