#174 - The God I Don’t Believe In – by Juan Arias

The God I Don’t Believe In
(edited for space) – by Juan Arias

No, I shall never believe in:

The God who catches us by surprise in a sin of weakness, the God who condemns material things, the God incapable of giving an answer to the grave problems of a sincere and honest person who cries in tears: “I can’t!”

The God who loves pain, the God who sterilizes our reason, the God who is a magician and sorcerer, the God who makes himself feared, the God who does not allow us to talk familiarly to him, the grandfather-God whom one can twist around one’s little finger, the God who makes himself the monopoly of a church, a race, a culture or a caste, the lottery-god whom one can find only by chance, the judge-God who can give a verdict only with a rule book in his hands, the God incapable of smiling at many of our awkward mistakes, the God who “sends” people to hell, the God who always demands 100 percent in examinations.

The God who can be fully explained by a philosophy, the God adored by those who are capable of condemning a person to death, the God incapable of loving what many people despise, the God incapable of forgiving what many condemn, the God incapable of redeeming the wretched, the God incapable of understanding that children will always get themselves dirty and be forgetful, the God who prevents us from growing and conquering, transforming and overcoming.

#173 - Mysticism

What is a mystic?
Many bemoan the drop in attendance and involvement in all main-line churches over the past several decades, including Catholics. In fact our “fallen-away” number is the biggest of the bunch. Many parents worry whether their children will ever “come back” or “make it to heaven.” Perhaps there might be another way of looking at things?

Back in the early 60’s Fr. Karl Rahner said that “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or nothing at all” – a mystic being someone who has had an experience of spiritual union or direct communion with God. In 1962 pollsters found that 22% of Americans claimed to have had a “mystical experience” of God. In 1976 that number had risen to 31% of our U.S. population. The most recent poll reported a whopping 48% who said that they had this kind of encounter with the divine. Diana Butler Bass believes that these numbers indicate that “American faith has undergone a profound and extensive reorientation away from externalized religion towards internalized spiritual experience.” Is this a good? Bad? I don’t know.

What if the trend we are observing is “the first stirrings of a new spiritual awakening, a vast interreligious movement toward individual, social and cultural transformation? Have we lived the majority of our lives in the context of this awakening, struggling towards new understandings of God, how we should act ethically and politically, and who we are deep in our souls? What if <we are> playing a significant role in forming the contours of a new kind of faith beyond conventional religious boundaries? Is America living in the wake of a revival gone awry or a spiritual awakening that is finally taking concrete - albeit unexpected - shape?” (Bass)

#172 - Why am I here?

Why am I here today?

I’m Lisa Brown, the Director of Religious Education here at CTR. Part of my job is writing this little column where someone submits a question and I do my best to respond. I made-up this particular question because I suspect many of us are asking it quietly to ourselves at this prickly juncture in our Catholic history.

I’ve only been given 600 words, so let’s cut to the chase - it’s been a rough year for us Catholics. Well, maybe we should say a rough 17 or 70 years given the sexual abuse crisis? Or a rough 1000 years since the Crusades? Well, dang, let’s just call it. We Christians have been a train wreck from day one. So why are we still here?

The late Irish poet John O’Donohue, says “Tradition is to the community what memory is to the individual…it’s a huge naïveté for anyone to believe that a religion, understood as the collective wisdom and the lived spirit experience of a people, is an empty mass. It’s a huge resource! Tradition, like memory, has huge dark passages - within the Christian tradition there are dark zones of complete horror - but there are also zones of great light and immense wells of refreshment and healing.”

This speaks to me. My rose-colored glasses are long gone, but my love for our resilient Catholic family hasn’t waned. We just keep showing up and searching for God in this mess and there is something deeply endearing about this indomitable level of hope; something I find safe and lovely. Yes, we Catholics have a seemingly bottomless font of dysfunction, but what family doesn’t? To leave would be just trading one family’s problems for another. I intimately know MY family’s problems; our language, customs, faults and factions, and I feel that in terms of bringing about change, this awareness is an extremely valuable tool.

#171 - Tragedy

Where is God when tragedy strikes?

I don’t know about you, but I just cringe when in the face of grave human tragedy and suffering I hear someone say “This was God’s will” and/or “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” Really? Because it sure seems that some people get a crushing helping of grief on occasion.

Two generations ago, we Catholics had an answer to suffering. We used to advise one another to ‘offer our suffering up to God, for the good of others, for the souls in purgatory or in amends for our own sinfulness.’ This stock answer, which has slowly faded out of use, strikes many of us as quaint and even somewhat cruel at times. But, perhaps there is some deeper truth to be mined in this traditional response.

The heart of the good news that Jesus came to share with us is not "God loves us, and has a wonderful plan for our lives." Rather, the first and primary claim of the gospel is "God is here." The cross tells us that God’s answer to suffering is not to avoid it, or deny it, or blame it on human waywardness, but rather to be with us in it even when we don’t feel God’s presence. Our faith offers no one an escape from suffering. On the contrary, being a loving, compassionate person in this world practically assures suffering, because we are open and vulnerable. What the gospel does promise is that God will be with us so that we do not have to walk through our suffering alone.

The mystery of God’s life with us is that the very moment of catastrophe is, in truth, the moment of liberation. Jesus redeemed suffering by entering into it with us - loving us right up until the end, even as we put him to death. He gave us a demonstration of the only force with the power to bring about change; that of unconditional, self-giving love and we, as his disciples, are called to follow him in this demonstration to one another, and to the world.

This is not to say that we should seek or endure suffering without a fight. Jesus was always healing people, easing the their isolation, working tirelessly to cure their ills - which tells us that the problem of pain is a matter for action; God works to fight suffering, therefore so should we, using every means at our disposal – prayer, medicine, social action, relief work, and so on. It is right to hate loneliness and poverty. The image of the suffering God we see on the cross is the image of a protesting God.

So, maybe our tradition isn’t so far off the mark after all. To ‘offer it up” is to somehow connect our suffering to the suffering of Christ; to acknowledge that we are all in this together and to be receptive to the unity and purification that can be worked in us through our pain if we do not give in to bitterness. Though never ‘good’, our suffering can have value; it can actually draw us closer to God and one another.

Although we may never find an adequate explanation for human suffering on this side of the grave, we do catch glimpses of the kingdom when we support each other in our suffering. But, in the end, suffering remains a mystery. In his movie “Hannah & Her Sisters” Woody Allen plays an atheist son of a Jewish family who in an argument asks, “If there is a God, why are there Nazis?” His father replies, “How should I know? I don’t even know how the can opener works.” Mysteries abound.

Send your "Crazy Catholic Questions" Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns at: http://crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com.