The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything (5 page)

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

A few years ago, I worked with an Off-Broadway acting company that was producing a new play about the relationship between Jesus and Judas called
The Last Days of Judas Iscariot
. After some meetings with the actor who would play Judas, as well as the playwright and the director, I was invited to help the cast better understand the subject material. In time they asked me to serve as “theological consultant” for the play. This isn’t as strange as it may seem: the Jesuits have historically been active in theater, having used it extensively in their schools from the earliest days. (More about “Jesuit theater” later on.)

Over the course of six months, I found myself talking with the actors not simply about Jesus and Judas but also about their spiritual lives, answering questions prompted by our freewheeling discussions about the Gospels, about sin and forgiveness, and about faith.

Several of the actors had toggled between one religious tradition and another, seeking something that would “fit.” One actor, named Yetta, who played Mary Magdalene, told me that her mother was Catholic and her father was Jewish. They decided to let her choose her own religion when she was grown. “But,” she said, “I haven’t chosen yet.” (By the way, when I quote people in this book, or tell their stories, it is with their permission.)

My time with the actors was one of not only discovering the theater but also meeting people who were traveling along a path I hadn’t encountered before. They were on the path of exploration.

Given their profession, this was not surprising. A good actor often researches a new role by spending time with a person from a particular background. An actor prepping for a role in a police drama, for instance, will hang out with real-life police officers. So the idea of “exploration” comes naturally to them. Stepping into another person’s shoes for a time is not that different from entering into another religious tradition for a time.

Others—not just actors—more settled in their religious beliefs often find that their own spiritual practices are enhanced through interactions with other religious traditions. Several years ago I was astonished by the richness of my prayer one Sunday morning in a Quaker meeting house near my parents’ home outside Philadelphia. While I had ample experience praying contemplatively on my own, and worshipping together during Catholic Masses, the Quakers’ “gathered silence” (praying silently
together)
was a type of contemplation I’d never before imagined. Their tradition enriched my own.

Exploration comes naturally to Americans in particular and is a theme celebrated not only in U.S. history but in our great works of literature: Huckleberry Finn is an explorer. So are the heroes and heroines of the novels of Jack London and Willa Cather, to name but two favorite authors. Our homegrown religious writers—especially the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau—were inner explorers. “Afoot and lighthearted, I take to the open road,” wrote Walt Whitman, “Healthy, free, the world before me, / The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.”

Exploration comes naturally in American faith as well. Turned off by their childhood faith, or by the failings of organized religion, and lacking extensive religious training, many Americans searching for a religion that “fits” embark on a quest—itself a spiritual metaphor.

The benefit of walking along the path of exploration is plain. After a serious search, you may discover a tradition ideally suited to your understanding of God, your desires for community, and even to your own personality. Likewise, returning to your original community may give you a renewed appreciation for your “spiritual home.” Explorers may also be more grateful for what they have found and are not as likely to take their communities for granted. The most grateful pilgrim is the one who has finished the longest journey.

The pitfall for this path is similar to the one for the path of independence: the danger of not settling for any tradition because none is perfect. An even greater danger for explorers is not settling on any one religious tradition because it doesn’t suit
them:
God may become someone who is supposed to satisfy their needs. God becomes what one writer called a “pocket-size God,” small enough to put in your pocket when God doesn’t suit you (for example, when the Scriptures say things that you would rather not hear) and take out of your pocket only when convenient.

Another danger is a lack of commitment. Your entire life may become one of exploration—constant sampling, spiritual grazing. And when the path becomes the goal, rather than God, people may ultimately find themselves unfulfilled, confused, lost, and maybe even a little sad.

The Path of Confusion

This final path crosses all the other ones at various points. People on the path of confusion run hot and cold with their childhood faith— finding it relatively easy to believe in God at times, almost impossible at others. They haven’t “fallen away,” but they’ve not stayed connected either. They cry out to God in prayer and then wonder why there doesn’t seem to be an answer. They intuit God’s presence during important moments, and perhaps even during religious services, but find themselves bothered by the problems of belonging to a church, synagogue, or mosque. They may pray from time to time, particularly when in dire need, and they may go to services on key holidays.

But for this group, finding God is a mystery, a worry, or a problem.

The main benefit of this path is that it often helps people to fine-tune their approach to their childhood faith. Unlike those who consider themselves clearly religious or clearly nonreligious, these people have not yet made up their minds, and so they are constantly refining their ideas about a religious commitment.

But confusion can lapse into laziness. Avoiding worship services because of a particular criticism can lead to leaving organized religion entirely because it’s too much work, or because it takes too much energy to belong to a group that demands, say, charity and forgiveness.

Much of my adult life, before entering the Jesuits, was spent on this path. As a boy, I was raised in a loving family with a lukewarm Catholic background. My family went to church regularly, but we didn’t engage in those practices that mark very religious Catholics— saying grace at meals, speaking regularly about God, praying before going to bed, and attending Catholic schools. And in college I grew increasingly confused about God.

After Jacque’s mysterious answer moved me to give God another chance, I returned to church, but in a desultory way. I wasn’t sure exactly what, or who, I believed in. So for several years God the Problem Solver was replaced by a more amorphous spiritual concept: God the Life Force, God the Other, God the Far-Away One. While these are valid images of God, I had no idea that God could be anything
but
those abstract ideas. And I figured that things would stay that way until I died.

Then, at age twenty-six, I came home one night after work and turned on the television set. After graduation, I had taken a job with General Electric but was beginning to grow dissatisfied with the work. After six years of working late at night and on the weekends, I had also started to develop stress-related stomach problems and was wondering how much more I could take.

On television that night was a documentary about Thomas Merton, a man who had turned his back on a dissolute life to enter a Trappist monastery in the early 1940s. Something about the expression on his face spoke to me: his countenance radiated a peace that to me seemed unknown, or at least forgotten. The show was so interesting that the next day I purchased and began reading Merton’s autobiography,
The Seven Storey Mountain
.

Gradually, I discovered within myself a desire to do something similar to what Thomas Merton had done; maybe not join a monastery (since I’m too talkative) but somehow lead a more contemplative, more religious, life. That experience helped me to step off the path of confusion and onto the path of belief, which led to the Jesuits.