Friends
Peace be with you.
One of the more notorious biases the world has against Christians is that we are stupid…or at least not as curious or demanding of proof as they are. Think about Ned Flanders from the Simpsons or the way the guys from Monty Python portray belief in their sketches and in the movie The Life of Brian or the way the new atheists like Neil Degrasse Tyson or Christopher Hitchens will bend over backwards to use science in a way that seems to disprove the never notion of God, as though belief in science is diametrically opposed to belief in God. I hear it on college campuses, sadly more on our historically Catholic campusesthan on state campuses, that the church is an outmoded institution imposing rules and laws that are long disproved on largely ignorant individuals because faith is out of step with more modern, secular, intelligent people. I’ll sometimes even hear people say that they can’t wait until religion is a thing of the past because people will outgrow the need for it as more questions are answered that disprove the need for religious, hocus pocus answers. And, while I take consolation that these tend to be attitudes of people who have good lives and that these same attitudes stand like the Great and Wonderful Oz unveiled for the sham that he is whenever the person encounters any kind of struggle in life such as illness or age, it doesn’t mean that the depiction of Christianity as blind followers is accurate, let alone that it will be the fallback place these folks come to when they need help.
The challenge with faith is when it becomes too intellectual, too abstract, too much of the leap of faith as the philosopher Soren Kierkegard called it. It makes perfect sense to me that Soren Kierkegard is the gate between philosophers who generally believed in the existence of God and existentialist philosophers who generally didn’t. If faith is like the scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where you have to take a step into what appears to be a bottomless pit onto the hidden walkway below, I can understand why more people don’t believe.
Faith is more relational than a leap of faith, specifically having a relationship with Jesus Christ who is the intermediary between God and human beings. Mary, who is often called Sedes Sapientia or Seat of Wisdom, can help us in this because she knows her son better than anyone else so she can pray for and with us to get to know her Son but Jesus wants to reveal himself to us. He does it most preeminently in the Eucharist. That’s why this parish has such a strong tradition of adoring the Blessed Sacrament and why Fr. Ivan, Fr. Greg, and I have consistently encouraged people to take time at least once a week to spend an hour with the Lord in our chapel. When Fr. Ivan started this, he was almost alone in this town in terms of weekly adoration and now I believe every Catholic church in town sets aside at least some time every week to adore the Lord. In adoration, we can take the time to reflect upon what happens at Mass, upon Jesus taking simple bread and wine and fulfilling his promise in John’s bread of life discourse “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” You see, God didn’t just leave us a pit to fall into as proof that we believe. He left us food to keep nourishing our faith and to keep us in relationship with him. He also made us into his body, the Church, so that we can be in relationship with others and see the presence of Christ in them. But that means we have to be living a Christ-like life so that others can see him in our life too, which is a challenge. We have the sacrament of reconciliation for when we make mistakes but we need to be working to live a Christ-like life and not just trying to constantly clean up the mess when we don’t.
Part of the way we do this is by learning about God from other Christians, especially Christians who are deeply prayerful individuals. There are many profoundly intellectual people who are also deeply prayerful like St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Bishop Robert Barron, St. John Paul II, or Sister Bethany Madonna of the Sisters of life. These people remind us that faith needn’t be a leap for the foolish but accepting an invitation to get to know God in his transcendent simplicity. How do we keep seeking to get to know the God who knows us so well?
