Whom Do You Trust?

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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 bread and wine in the Eucharist? What could be more bizarre?

For many Christians, however, all these bizarre beliefs are ho-hum. We’ve always believed this stuff, and so did our parents, grandparents and family members as far back as we know. What’s the big deal?

Could this be one of the reasons people are turned off by faith and religion? Not so much because what we believe appears to be bizarre but because we Christians appear to be so clueless and apathetic about it? Because if all this stuff is true, Christians should be the most upbeat, deliriously happy people in the world.

An article I saved from America Magazine last year quotes The God Delusion, the famous book by atheist Richard Dawkins. Mocking people of faith, Dawkins wrote: “Faith (belief without evidence) is a virtue. The more your beliefs defy the evidence, the more virtuous you are. Virtuoso believers who can manage to believe something really weird, unsupported and insupportable, in the teeth of evidence and reason, are especially rewarded.”

Dawkins delights in baiting believers, but his taunts should make us think about what we believe, why we believe it and how weird it may be to “the world.” One thing we should recall is the nature of faith itself. The author of the America article, Stephen Bullivant, a lecturer in theology at St. Mary’s University College in London, reminds us that faith’s primary meaning is “trust.”

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We are creatures of limited understanding of ourselves, others and the world around us. To survive as human beings, we need to trust – first, our parents and family members, then other people, then God. We have good reason to trust God, though perhaps not the kind of reason that will satisfy the Dawkinses of this world.

We trust the likes of Moses, Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Buber, Oscar Cullman, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, Pope Francis, our parents and grandparents and ancestors who were believers. And above all, we Christians trust Jesus of Nazareth. And though we believe in evolution, we trust there is more behind what we see of this remarkable, unimaginable universe than sheer randomness. While we may not be able to scientifically prove God’s existence (and if we did, say some theologians, it wouldn’t really be God), there’s no proof God doesn’t exist.    

So why should we not be blasé about our beliefs? Because we continually need fresh perspectives, and because nothing kills faith like comfort and apathy. In this regard, while we may not agree with Dawkins and other critics of belief, we look for anything of truth they may say that can help us be who we say we are.

 We may be tempted to be saddened by critics, and may get discouraged by the people giving up on God and/or religion. But besides the renewal of trust, we have to see the criticism for what it is. Many people just don’t “get it” when it comes to religion. Many of them, I believe, are good people who are struggling to find God even if they don’t know it.

As for the data about people abandoning God/religion, you have to place it in historical perspective. I’m reading a book called, The Irish Americans, by Jay P. Dolan, which reminds us that immigrants in the face of the uncertainties and risks of their adopted countries often cling to their religion in a way they wouldn’t in their home countries. And in the case of Irish immigrants, they were greatly influenced by the “devotional revolution” that occurred in Ireland during the mid to late 1800s, at the time of the greatest rush of immigrants to the U.S.

The late 1800s and first part of the 20^th century was a boon time for U.S. Catholicism and for many other churches. Churches sprang up like weeds and were quickly filled; priests flocked from Ireland to care for their immigrant co-religionists; seminaries began to burst at the seams. Irish Catholics’ lives revolved around their priests and parishes and their faith was supported by their social networks. Scandinavian immigrants built and filled Lutheran churches just as people in their home countries were beginning to abandon religion.   

Obviously, it’s a different age. With prosperity and acceptance, the immigrant faith changed. The social and cultural props are gone. Now, if you want to be a believer, you have to have an independent streak, do some hard thinking and make some hard decisions.

Although I mentioned that we should take whatever is of value from comments of our critics, I think it’s important to also read and watch material that supports our beliefs and provides us with new insights. Besides openness to criticism and avoidance of cynicism, we need support from others – our pastors, our fellow believers, authors, public figures who share our beliefs. And for Christians and Jews, nothing compares to the Bible for supporting our spiritual lives.

In the gospel of John, in a scene where some disciples abandon Jesus because of their inability to understand his message, Jesus asks his apostles, “Will you also go away?” Peter answered, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”