Skeptical Faith

Google Image The sign on a college classroom door reads, “Philosophy 101.” A professor walks in and places a jar, about the size of an average cookie jar, on his desk. He extracts from his brief case a box full of golf balls and apparently fills the jar with them. Then he asks his students, “Is the jar full?” They all answer, “Yes.” Then he takes a container of pebbles out of the brief case and adds them to the jar up to the brim. “Is it full now?” he asks. Again, the class says “yes.” Then he takes a container of sand from his brief case and fills all the crevices between the golf balls and pebbles, also up to the brim. “How about now?” he asks. Their answer is a more emphatic, “yes.” But he’s not finished. He pulls two bottles of beer out of the brief case and pours the contents of one of them into the jar, truly filling the jar. The lesson? We all have only one life to live, he says, “a fleeting shadow of all that exists in this vast universe.” The jar represents you...

Google Image Sometimes as I jump rope – an exercise I’ve done most days for at least 35 years - I watch episodes of the series, “Nurse Jackie,” on Netflix. The show stars Edie Falco  in the title character, Jackie Peyton, an emergency-room  nurse at the fictitious All Saints' Hospital in New York City . It suites my purposes because the episodes last about the same amount of time as my exercises. I have mixed feelings about the show, however. I like the fact that it’s a medical show whose main character is a nurse, not a doctor. And there isn’t a nurse alive who's more compassionate toward her patients, and sometimes fellow employees, than Jackie Peyton. But she’s a drug addict, and watching her get through her days at the hospital or at home, and with her husband and daughters, boyfriends, drug suppliers and drug counselors, is like watching a plane tumbling out of the sky on its way to a horrific crash. Only Redeeming Quality? She engages in continual lyi...

Google Image I wrote in a previous blog about my visit as a young man to London’s famous Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. Anyone can get on a soapbox there and talk about any subject. Sometimes the speakers draw crowds. The day I visited back in the 1960s, a man was spewing hatred of Christians, specifically Catholics. He particularly detested the crucifix, saying that Christians wallowed in the gore and reveled in its cruelty. He had drawn an enthusiastic crowd of about 30 people who largely seemed to agree with him. I’m sure many people share his confusion, if not his hostility, about the cross, and about Christians’ attitude toward suffering in general. Personally, I don’t believe in a God who wants us to suffer because it doesn’t square with the idea of God as a loving parent, the traditional view of the God of Christians and Jews. The last thing parents want is for their children to suffer, and God is no exception. An Instrument of Torturous Death As for the cross and...

Google Image One Sunday night when I was a priest in Bolivia, a man pounded on my door and asked for help. He was a “marinero,” a member of a crew of one of the small boats that went back and forth between Bolivia and Peru on Lake Titicaca, reportedly carrying contraband. One of his fellow crew members was deathly sick, he said. The sick man was still in the boat, which was on the shore about a 45 minute Jeep drive away. The man at the door had walked that distance, meaning the sick man had already had a considerable wait. Could I please pick up the man and get him medical care? They possibly knew that our parish had two nuns who were nurses and that we had a clinic. Or he could have learned that I was one of the few people in the area who had a car. At any rate, how could I refuse? Writhing in Pain We brought the sick man to the parish’s examination room. He was writhing in pain, had abdominal swelling and an extremely high temperature. One of the nuns determined that...

Google Image I recently began re-reading the famous novel, “The Exorcist” by William Blatty. The movie of the same name, made in 1973, is considered by many to be a classic, starting a whole genre of “supernatural” horror films. The book, unlike many contemporary novels, is in my opinion actual literature. I recall that back at Iowa State University, I saw the movie with a group of my fellow graduate students, some of whom had no interest in religion, others who were skeptical, if not cynical, about the existence of the spiritual. Because I had been a priest, I was deluged after the movie with questions and comments. The movie, though about beings believed to be the personification of evil, seemed to spark interest in the spiritual – a subject that had been ignored, forgotten or a matter of contempt for some of them. It was the awakening of a part of them that had been asleep for some time.   Some of them, no doubt, had been religious as children but “outgrew” it. As fo...