Skeptical Faith

Google Image There’s an old joke about an assistant going to the pope and saying, “I have good news and bad news.” “What’s the good news?” asks the pope. “God’s on the phone and he wants to talk with you.” “Ah, that’s very good news,” says the pope. “What bad news could match it?” “He’s calling from Salt Lake City.” It’s just a joke, but it brings to mind a couple of truths about our relationship to God. The first is that from all we know from the Bible and tradition, God is always a surprise – at least this scenario would be a surprise for Catholics. The second is that we know God only by analogy, by anthropomorphism. Both the Hebrew and Christian bibles are filled with scenes in which God is very much like a human being, and humans are said to have been created in God’s “image and likeness.” But the similarity is extremely limited. God doesn’t show himself/herself in normal human ways, except, of course, in Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that I have to use “himself...

Google Image I’ve come to believe that the gay-marriage issue is a critical factor in alienating many people from religion, if not from God, and I think many believers underestimate its importance. Many people feel about gay marriage as some of us felt about the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 70s. In the eyes of many young people, especially, it’s a matter of justice, of recognizing people’s rights, of acknowledging that love comes in various forms. Many religious people counter that gay marriage is against the natural law, a traditional concept for Catholics and some other Christians. They also believe gay marriage is bad public policy that undermines the traditional family. A federal judge recently struck down Wisconsin’s ban on gay marriage, one of many states where the law has changed due to the courts or the ballot. The unmistakable trend everywhere is toward allowing gay marriage, and it doesn’t appear that opponents can muster enough energy and clout to rev...

Google Image The marching season in Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland recently ended. For those of you unfamiliar with this phenomenon, it’s a time when “Orangemen” – and they are almost all men and decidedly gray haired – march to “commemorate the Battle of the Boyne.” “Hmmm. I don’t know about that battle,” you might say, “and I’m pretty much up on news and recent history.” That’s because it occurred on or about July 12, 1690 , between two claimants to the English (and Irish) throne, the Catholic King James and the Protestant, William of Orange. William won. The Boyne is a river north of Dublin. William was from the “House of Orange,” a royal line in Holland, and Protestant groups in Ireland and Scotland long ago formed “Orange” lodges in his honor. Their members are called “Orangemen,” and every year they march through cities in Northern Ireland and Scotland to stick it to Catholics. Before, after and during these parades, they pound exuberantly on drums, carry s...

Google Image As a reporter doing a story on why Mexican immigrants come to the U.S., I once drove in the front seat of a pickup truck to central Mexico with a Des Moines packing house worker – we’ll call him Hector – his girlfriend and the girlfriend’s 8-year-old daughter. It was a very crowded ride. The back of the pickup was filled with building materials with which Hector intended to remodel his parents’ house. After a day or two at his home, near the town of Fresnillo in the state of Zacatecas, we visited families who had all worked in Iowa and returned to Mexico with enough money to continue their lives on a little higher economic level. While driving to the ranchos, we drove across a pasture and came to an opening between two barbed-wire fences, an opening large enough to allow a vehicle to go through. Standing to one side was a man who approached Hector. The man held out a palm and Hector placed a few pesos in it. Grinning, the man returned to the fence and went throug...

Google Image My brother Dick, a priest in Kansas City who died a few years ago, told the story of a priest colleague who said he sometimes woke up in the morning, looked at himself in the mirror and imagined a big “S” on his forehead. The “S” stood for “sucker.” These were undoubtedly moments of self-awareness and self-doubt for the priest, a healthy thing in my estimation. It was an opportunity to remind himself what he was about. He presumably wondered whether he was a fool for becoming a priest, for sacrificing married life, the possibility of children, the chance to succeed at a “secular” career, for something as bizarre as Christianity. Yes, bizarre. And we Christians – especially Catholics – who don’t think what we believe is bizarre are bizarre ourselves. God exists though he/she hardly, if ever reveals him/herself? This God became a human being and was born of a virgin? He rose from the dead? He’s still present in the world today? He is particularly present in the bre...