The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything Read online

  SIX PATHS TO GOD

  The Path of Belief

  For people on this first path, belief in God has always been part of their lives. They were born into religious families or were introduced to religion at an early age. They move through life more or less confident of their belief in God. Faith has always been an essential element of their lives. They pray regularly, attend religious services frequently, and feel comfortable talking about God. Their lives, like every life, are not free from suffering, but faith enables them to put their sufferings into a framework of meaning.

  The early life of Walter Ciszek, an American Jesuit priest who spent twenty years in Soviet prisons and Siberian labor camps beginning in the 1940s, reflects this kind of upbringing. In his autobiography, With God in Russia, published after his return to the United States, Ciszek describes growing up in a devout Catholic family in the coal belt of Pennsylvania. Family life centered on the local parish: Sunday Masses, special feast days, weekly confessions. So it is not a surprise when Ciszek says this in his book’s first chapter: “It must have been through my mother’s prayers and example that I made up my mind in the eighth grade, out of a clear blue sky, that I would be a priest.”

  What for many people would be a difficult decision was for young Walter Ciszek the most natural thing in the world.

  The benefits of walking along the path of belief are clear: faith gives meaning to both the joys and struggles of life. Faith in God means that you know that you are never alone. You know and are known. Life within a worshipping community provides companionship. During times of hardship, faith is an anchor. And the Christian faith also holds out the promise of life beyond this earthly one.

  This kind of faith sustained Walter Ciszek during his years in the Soviet labor camps and enabled him, as he finally left Russia in 1963, to bless the country whose government had caused him untold physical and mental suffering. At times he struggled with his belief— who wouldn’t in such conditions?—but ultimately his faith remained firm. With God in Russia ends with these haunting words, describing what Ciszek does as his plane takes off: “Slowly, carefully, I made the sign of the cross over the land I was leaving.”

  Others sometimes envy people who walk along the path of belief. “If only I had faith like you!” one friend often tells me. While I understand her sentiment, that perspective makes faith seem like something you have rather than have to work at keeping. It’s as if you’re born with unquestioning faith, like being born with red hair or brown eyes. Or as if faith were like pulling into a gas station and filling your tank.

  Neither metaphor is apt. Ultimately, faith is a gift from God. But faith isn’t something that you just have. Perhaps a better metaphor is that faith is like a garden: while you may already have the basics— soil, seeds, water—you have to cultivate and nourish it. Like a garden, faith takes patience, persistence, and even work.

  If you envy those on the path of belief, don’t worry—many people go through a period of doubt and confusion before they come to know God. Sometimes for a long time. Ignatius finally accepted God’s presence at an age when many of his peers were well on their way to raising a family and achieving financial success.

  None of these six paths is free from dangers. One pitfall for those on the path of belief is an inability to understand people on other paths and a temptation to judge them for their doubt or disbelief. Certainty prevents some believers from being compassionate, sympathetic, or even tolerant of others who are not as certain in their faith. Their arrogance turns them into the “frozen chosen,” consciously or unconsciously excluding others from their cozy, believing world. This is the crabbed, joyless, and ungenerous religiosity that Jesus spoke against: spiritual blindness.

  There is a more subtle danger for this group: a complacency that makes one’s relationship with God stagnate. Some people cling to ways of understanding their faith learned in childhood that might not work for an adult. For example, you might cling to a childhood notion of a God who will never let anything bad happen. When tragedy strikes, since your youthful image of God is not reflected in reality, you may abandon the God of your youth. Or you may abandon God completely.

  An adult life requires an adult faith. Think of it this way: you wouldn’t consider yourself equipped to face life with a third-grader’s understanding of math. Yet people often expect the religious instruction they had in grammar school to sustain them in the adult world.

  In his book A Friendship Like No Other, the Jesuit spiritual writer William A. Barry invites adults to relate to God in an adult way. Just as an adult child needs to relate to his or her parent in a new way, he suggests, so adult believers need to relate to God in new ways as they mature. Otherwise, one remains stuck in a childlike view of God that prevents fully embracing a mature faith.

  Like all of the six paths, the path of belief is not without its stumbling blocks.

  The Path of Independence

  Those on the path of independence have made a conscious decision to separate themselves from organized religion, but they still believe in God. Maybe they find church services meaningless, offensive, dull, or all three. Maybe they’ve been hurt by a church. Maybe they’ve been insulted (or abused) by a priest, pastor, rabbi, minister, or imam. Or they feel offended by certain dogmas of organized religion. Or they find religious leaders hypocritical.

  Or maybe they’re just bored. Believe me, I’ve heard plenty of homilies that have put me to sleep, sometimes literally. As the Catholic priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley once wrote, sometimes the question is not why so many Catholics leave the church—it’s why they stay.

  Catholics may be turned off by the church’s teachings on a particular moral question, or its stance on a political question, or by the scandal of clergy sex abuse. Consequently, while they still believe in God, they no longer consider themselves part of the church. They are sometimes called “lapsed,” “fallen away,” or “recovering” Catholics. But, as one friend said after the sex abuse crisis, “I didn’t fall away from the church. It fell away from me.”

  Though they keep their distance from churches, synagogues, or mosques, many people in this group are still firm believers. Often they find solace in the religious practices they learned as children. Just as often they long for a more formal way to worship God in their lives.

  One strength of this group is a healthy independence that enables them to see things in a fresh way—something that their own religious community often desperately needs. Those on the “outside,” who are not bound by the usual restrictions on what is “appropriate” and “not appropriate” to say within the community, can often speak more honestly.

  The main danger for this group, however, is a perfectionism that sets up any organized religion for failure.

  Not long ago, a friend stopped attending his family’s church. My friend is an intelligent and compassionate man who believes in God and whose parents had deep roots in Episcopalianism. But he believed his local church was too aligned with the affluent. So he decided to search for a community that recognized the place of the poor in the world.

  After he left his church, he toyed with the idea of joining the local Catholic church, which he noticed many of the poor attended on Sundays. But my friend disagreed with their prohibition on ordaining women. So he rejected Catholicism.

  Next he experimented with Buddhism, but he found it impossible to reconcile his belief in a personal God, and his devotion to Jesus Christ, with the Buddhist worldview.

  Finally, he ended up at the local Unitarian church, which initially seemed to suit him. He appreciated their broad-minded Christian-based spirituality and commitment to social justice, as well as their welcome of people who feel unwelcome in other churches. But he eventually ran into a problem: the Unitarians didn’t espouse a clear enough belief system for my friend. In the end, he decided to belong to no church. Now he stays at home on Sundays.

  My friend’s experience reminded me that the search for a perfect religious community is a
futile one. As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in The Seven Storey Mountain, “The first and most elementary test of one’s call to the religious life—whether as a Jesuit, Franciscan, Cistercian or Carthusian—is the willingness to accept life in a community in which everybody is more or less imperfect.” That holds for any religious organization.

  This is not to excuse all the problems, imperfections, and even sinfulness of religious organizations. Rather, it is a realistic admission that as long as we’re human, we will be imperfect. It’s also a reminder that for those on the path of independence—believers who have left organized religion—the search for a perfect religious community may be one without end.

  The Path of Disbelief

  Those traveling along the path of disbelief not only find that organized religion holds no appeal (even if they sometimes find its services and rituals comforting), but have also arrived at an intellectual conclusion that God may not, does not, or cannot exist. Often they seek proof for God’s existence, and finding none, or encountering intense suffering, they reject the theistic worldview completely.

  The cardinal benefit of this group is that they take none of the bland reassurances of religion for granted. Sometimes they have thought more deeply about God and religion than some believers have. Likewise, sometimes the most selfless people in our world are atheists or agnostics. Some of the hardest working aid workers I met in my time working with refugees in East Africa were nonbelievers. The “secular saint” is real.

  They also have a knack for detecting hypocrisy, cant, or lazy answers: a religious-baloney detector. Tell a person in this group that suffering is part of God’s mysterious plan and needs to be accepted unquestioningly, and he will rightly challenge you to explain yourself. One of my college friends practices his atheism religiously; his questions have kept me on my toes for the last thirty years. Try telling him about “God’s will,” and you will find yourself on the receiving end of a pointed lecture on personal responsibility.

  The main danger for this group is that they sometimes expect God’s presence to be proven solely in an intellectual way. When something profound happens in their emotional lives, something that touches them deeply, they reject the possibility that it could be a sign of God’s activity. Their intellect may become a wall that closes off their hearts to experiences of God’s presence. They may also be unwilling to attribute to God anything that the believer might see as an obvious example of God’s presence.

  It’s like the story of the atheist caught in a flood. The fellow figures that the flood threatening his house is the chance to prove conclusively whether God exists. So he says to himself, If there is a God, I will ask him for help, and he will save me. When he hears a warning on the radio advising listeners to move to higher ground, he ignores it. If there is a God, he will save me, he thinks. Next, a firefighter knocks on his door to warn him to evacuate. “If there is a God, he will save me,” he says to the firefighter. When the floodwaters rise, the man climbs to the second floor. The coast guard boat motors by his window and offers him rescue. “If there is a God, he will save me,” he says and refuses help from the coast guard.

  Finally, he ends up on the roof, with the waters rising around him. A police helicopter hovers over the house and drops a rope to climb. “If there is a God, he will save me!” he shouts over the roar of the helicopter’s blades.

  Suddenly a giant wave sweeps over him, and the man drowns and finds himself in heaven. When God comes to welcome him, the atheist is first surprised. And then furious. “Why didn’t you save me?” he asks.

  “What do you mean?” says God. “I sent the firefighter, the coast guard, and the police officer, and you still wouldn’t listen!”

  The Path of Return

  This path gets more crowded every year. People in this group typically begin life in a religious family but drift away from their faith. After a childhood in which they were encouraged (or forced) to attend religious services, they find them either tiresome or irrelevant or both. Religion remains distant, though oddly appealing.

  Then something reignites their curiosity about God. Maybe they’ve achieved some financial or professional success and ask, “Is that all there is?” Or after the death of a parent, they start to wonder about their own mortality. Or their children ask about God, awakening questions that have lain dormant within themselves for years. “Who is God, Mommy?”

  Thus begins a tentative journey back to their faith—though it may not be the same faith they knew as children. Perhaps a new tradition speaks more clearly to them. Perhaps they return to their original religion but in a different, and more committed, way than when they were young.

  That’s not surprising. As I mentioned, you would hardly consider yourself an educated adult if you ended your academic training as a child. Yet many believers cease their religious education as children, and expect it to carry them through adulthood. People in this group often find that they need to reeducate themselves to understand their faith in a mature way.

  When I was a boy, for instance, I used to think of God as the Great Problem Solver who would fix all my problems if I just prayed hard enough. Let me get an A on my social studies test. Let me do well in math. Better yet, let tomorrow be a snow day.

  If God was all good, I reasoned, then he would answer my prayers. What possible reason could God have for not answering them?

  As I grew older, the model of God as the Great Problem Solver collapsed—primarily because God didn’t seem interested in solving all of my problems. I prayed and prayed and prayed, and all my problems still weren’t solved. Why not? I wondered. Didn’t God care about me? My adolescent narcissism led to some serious doubts, which led me to consider the possibility that God didn’t exist.

  This lukewarm agnosticism came to a boil during my college days at the University of Pennsylvania. During freshman and sophomore years at Penn, my friends and I spent many late nights arguing loudly about religion (usually after too many beers or too much pot). Those late-night sessions raised doubts about the God to whom I had prayed when I was young. But at the time they were just random doubts and unconnected questions.

  They coalesced when my freshman-year roommate was killed in an automobile accident during our senior year. Brad was one of my closest friends, and his death was almost too much to bear.

  At Brad’s funeral, on a humid spring day in a wealthy suburb outside of Washington, DC, I sat in a tasteful Episcopal church, surrounded by Brad’s shattered family and my grieving friends, and thought about the absurdity of believing in a God who would allow this. By the end of the service I had decided not to believe in a God who would act so cruelly. The Great Problem Solver wasn’t solving problems but creating them.

  My newfound atheism was invigorating. Not only did I feel like a person with a first-rate intellect, I was proud to have rejected something that obviously had not worked. Why believe in a God who either couldn’t or wouldn’t prevent suffering? Atheism was not only intellectually respectable but also had some practical benefits: I now had my Sunday mornings free.

  So I firmly stepped onto the path of disbelief.

  This journey continued for a few months until a conversation with a mutual friend of Brad. Jacque (she pronounced it “Jackie”) came from a small town outside of Chicago and was what my friends derisively called a “fundamentalist,” though we had scant idea of what that meant. (It meant that her faith informed her life.) Jacque had lived in the same dorm with Brad and me during freshman year. Though wildly different from Brad in outlook and interests, the two became close.

  After an accounting class one day, standing in a snowfall outside of our old freshman dorm, I told Jacque how angry I was at God, and how I had decided I would no longer go to church. My comments were flung at her like a challenge. You’re the believer, I thought, explain this.

  “Well,” she said softly, “I’ve been thanking God for Brad’s life.” I can still remember standing in the cold and having my breath taken away by her answer.
Rather than arguing about suffering, she was telling me that there were other ways to relate to God, ways other than as the Great Problem Solver.

  Jacque’s response nudged me onto the path of return. She hadn’t answered my question about suffering. Rather, her words reminded me that the question of suffering (or the “mystery of evil” as theologians say) is not the only question to ask about God. Her reply said that you can live with the question of suffering and still believe in God—much as a child can trust a parent even when he doesn’t fully understand all of the parent’s ways. It also reminded me that there are other questions that are equally important—such as “Who is God?” Not being able to answer one question does not mean that others are not equally valid. Her answer opened a window onto another vista of faith.

  Yet I was still stuck with a big question: if God wasn’t the Great Problem Solver, the God of my youth, who was He? Or She? Or It?

  Not until I entered the Jesuits and began hearing about a different kind of God—a God who was with you in your suffering, a God who took a personal interest in your life, even if you didn’t feel that all your problems were solved—did life started to make more sense. That’s not to say I ever found an entirely satisfying answer for the mystery of suffering—or for why my friend’s life was ended at twenty-one. But it helped me understand the importance of being in relationship with God, even during difficult times.

  When I was a novice, one of my spiritual directors quoted the Scottish philosopherJohn Macmurray, who contrasted “real religion” and “illusory religion.” The maxim of “illusory religion” is as follows: “Fear not; trust in God and He will see that none of the things you fear will happen to you.” “Real religion,” said Macmurray, has a different maxim: “Fear not; the things you are afraid of are quite likely to happen to you, but they are nothing to be afraid of.”

  The Path of Exploration