A focus on the here and now when considering faith
Back when I was still going around in academic circles — pun intended, again — one of my friends was a biologist named Norman. We used to compare notes about how we had both risen above our raising — mine as a Catholic, his as a secular Jew. He confided that he had once asked his father why they never went to temple. “Because we can’t let those people tell us how to live,” his father answered.
I could relate. Early on, I decided I couldn’t let my people — priests and devout Catholic relatives — tell me how to live, much less what to believe. I reserved the right to think for myself.
I feel the same way about the Christian right, especially the Christian nationalists. It’s not that I’m anti-Christian. Christians of any stripe certainly have the right to believe what they want to believe and to worship as they please. They just don’t have the right to tell the rest of us how to live and what to believe.
One thing I can say about the Roman Catholic Church is that they have outgrown the worst vestiges of their medieval past. In the early 17th century, Galileo was forced to recant his support for the Copernican theory, which held that the earth rotates around the sun. Science and faith have since been pretty much reconciled in the Church. The faithful, however, are still constrained to believe God has occasionally made exceptions to the laws of nature and physics and reserves the right to do so again. Prime examples are Christ’s resurrection and the communion wafer literally becoming the body and blood of Christ. (Only the priest drinks wine during a Catholic communion service.)
A major point of contention between Protestants and Catholics, of course, is what to make of the Bible. Protestant friends have occasionally been astounded to learn I was never encouraged to read the Bible throughout my church-going days. Catholic theologians recognize that the Bible presents a complicated and contradictory series of texts. Back in the middle ages, it fell to the clergy to interpret the Bible for parishioners — most of whom were illiterate. That practice persists. I believe Catholics are still not encouraged to read the Bible on their own, lest it lead them astray. The Catholic Church is nothing if not authoritative.
The Catholic attitude toward the Bible, it seems to me, is akin to that of John Milton of “Paradise Lost” fame. The reality of God, Milton held, transcends human understanding, and he believed that the Bible as a whole is not to be taken literally. Rather, much of the Bible consists of a series of divinely sanctioned stories and metaphors accommodated to our limited human understanding.
Fundamentalist Christians, on the other hand, hold the Bible to be literally true and authoritative in all matters. (I’m drawing here on Liberty University’s Doctrinal Statement.) Hence, fundamentalists are constrained to believe the world was created in six historical days, that humans were directly created and didn’t evolve, and that the world is only 6,000 years old — all of which are at odds with established science and history.
One point of commonality is the biblical theory of typology uniting the Old and New Testaments. This is the view that certain figures and events in the Old Testament foreshadow those in the New Testament. The corresponding types, however, are not self-evident. A biblical authority, Protestant or Catholic, must point them out. To my mind, this is all rather far-fetched. I hold with the scholars who will tell you the books of the Bible were written by different people at different times. And that they reflect the concerns and beliefs of the times in which they were written.
For my part, I’m not an atheist. I suppose you could call me an agnostic — meaning I’m still wondering. A line in Sir Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Truth” (1625) has long resonated with me. Truth, Bacon wrote, “is a hill not to be commanded.” Bacon believed we’ve been given the light of reason to search out truth, and he recognized that the search for the ultimate truths is evolutionary. The Copernican theory of the universe replaced the Ptolemaic theory. Relativity replaced Newtonian physics, which in turn has given way to quantum mechanics.
Will we ever empirically determine how we’re connected to the cosmos? Probably not this side of the grave. But in the meanwhile, I believe we’re meant to focus on the here and now and to trust that whatever comes after death is for the best. As Archangel Raphael has occasion to admonish Adam in “Paradise Lost”: “Heaven is for thee / Too high to know what passes there; be lowly wise.” Considering how organized religion has time and again led to conflict in this world, I think that’s good advice.
An Afterword. I’ve gone on record as doubting we have a personal God we can pray to. But I’m hedging my bets. I often pray as the late, great Warren Zevon has instructed us to do: “”Don’t let us get sick, don’t let us get [act?] old / Don’t let us get stupid, all right? / Just make us behave and make us play nice / And let us be together tonight.”
“Don’t Let Us Get Sick” is the title of the song in which the prayer is found. It also contains a stanza that speaks to my condition: “I’m lucky to be here / With someone I like / Who maketh my spirit to shine.” Enough said.
If there really are saints, I nominate Warren.
Contact Ed Palm at majorpalm@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: A focus on the here and now when considering faith
