We swim in the waters of racism

It has been  while since I put anything here. I wrote the following piece intending to put it into our diocesan newspaper. I hope to get around to that one of these days.


We may never be able to overcome a feeling of discomfort between Blacks and Whites in the United States. This feeling depends on two facts, one historical and the other statistical. 

Historically, the feeling comes from the years when Whites were systematically taught to consider Blacks as intellectually and morally inferior. This thinking was necessary to preserve a system where Whites could make Blacks work for them without pay, and far worse, could buy and sell human beings as though they were property. When slavery was abolished by the 13th amendment, former slave-owners devised ways to continue the system under the laws which we now call "Jim Crow." No intermarriage, no sharing of drinking fountains, etc. etc. etc.

For Whites, the atmosphere created by that history is like the water in which fish swim. We swim in it without realizing it exists. 

The second fact is statistical. There are nine Whites to every Black person in this country. In northern rural areas the difference is even greater. That means that the average White person is 90% unlikely to meet a Black person and get to know that person. There are simply not enough Black people for most of us Whites to interact with on a regular basis. Without regular interaction, stereotypes and prejudices can continue without challenge. When we get to know one another, those stereotypes are gradually dispelled, though they may never get washed out entirely. I can see Black actors on TV and vote for a Black president, but until I interact with real people of color, I can continue with the two problems I just described. Most of us do. 

So what are we to do, as people of faith, people who follow the Gospel of Jesus Christ? 

One thing we can do is to recognize the handicap we face. Call it original sin, if you prefer. It is like our traditional idea of original sin in that we are born with it. 

The more active thing we can do is to practice treating people with respect. 

Respect is a set of learned behaviors. Parents drill these behaviors into their children. But often I as a white person am uncomfortable when I meet a Black person because I'm afraid of saying the wrong thing, and in my discomfort, I forget to be respectful. I may not look the person in the eye, or I might not address that person as warmly as I would a person of my own race. Most damaging of all, I might avoid the person, and just like that, I am practicing racial segregation and contributing to the problem. 

Being respectful is not, as they say, rocket science. It means approaching another human being with the behaviors that imply that I accept the other person as an equal, even if I may not feel that equality. It means simple courtesy. 

Recently some Black friends of mine described a reunion of their family that took place, in Georgia, in a vacation site that was not used to Black faces. My friends, who are "middle class," with educations and good jobs, had every right to rent the location. A neighbor came over and wanted to know why they were there. Implied was the neighbor's expectation that Black people do not belong in that place.  

That is lack of courtesy and respect. The courteous and respectful thing for such neighbors to do would have been to approach the newcomers with a smile and gestures of welcome, even if doing that might feel uncomfortable. Asking what the newcomers were doing there implied that the questioner was afraid that the newcomers would import poverty and crime.

I think we Christians are called to practice being respectful to every person who comes into our lives, regardless of that person's appearance or history or even behavior. If we want to be like Jesus, we might even look for people who make us feel uncomfortable.

In Jesus' day, anyone with a physical disability was something of an outcast. Poor people were outcasts because they did not observe all the rules that the religious leaders set up. (Jesus had some comments about that situation.) It was the poor and people with disabilities who flocked to Jesus. I can imagine people worrying about what that was doing to the neighborhood. 

Let us White Christians sigh, accept our own disabilities of prejudice, and practice being respectful. We are going to be living in our world of stereotypes and prejudice for a long time. An act of contrition would help.

How to do religion

5/3/2016 9:49 AM

Standard survey question: “What is your religion: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, other, or none?” People who give the last answer are called “nones.” About a fourth of the U.S. population now falls into that category.

Here is why there are so many “nones.” People don’t know how to do religion.

To do religion, you have to do three things:

          1. You have to move your body. You can’t just think religion, or just feel it. You have to do something that involves physical movement. The reason for this is that, if you want to relate yourself to God, you have to do that with all parts of your being, not just your mind or feelings.

          2. You have to do religion in relationship with other human beings. The reason for this is that God is a community of persons, and God has created us to do things in relationship with others.

          This is the most serious obstacle to religion in western societies. We have become so individualized that we tend to approach everything as though we do not need anyone else for anything. Above all, we think that we do not need anybody else when we deal with God.

          3. What you do has to lead to an increase of beauty in the world. This is the ethical dimension of religion.

I am reading a book on the Franciscan approach to ethics. The author argues that Franciscan tradition sees beauty as the foundation of ethical behavior. Beauty is expressed most powerfully in the way we relate to each other as human beings. A human person fully alive is beautiful. What we do must lead toward making humans, including ourselves, more fully alive. What does not do this is “sinful” or evil.

Our capitalist cultures do not value beauty, except for those with resources. We do not care if what we do destroys beauty, as long as it increases profit. So we go though the world, leaving behind ugliness and decay. Last Sunday I took a walk along the Mississippi riverfront here in Quincy. I passed several properties overrun with weeds, featuring the remnants of concrete foundations and abandoned stair steps. In poorer neighborhoods in our beautiful city, houses features blue tarps on the roof (covering shingles blown off by last summer’s windstorm), weeds and trees sprouting up in the midst of what used to be sidewalks, houses whose paint peeled off years ago, and windows covered with plastic or even boarded up. Only the well-to-do (including me) can afford beauty.

Bottom line: if you think that you can be religious just by thinking about God, and perhaps having nice feelings, but never using your body; if you think you can be religious all by yourself; if you think you can be religious just by trusting in the maximizing of profit, you are not likely to be religious at all.

In earlier ages, followers of Jesus Christ were focused on baptizing people as a way of “saving” them. Baptism was a physical act, and it had to be done in relationship to others. If it led to an imitation of Jesus’ approach to the world, beauty followed. We have gotten away from that kind of baptizing, probably because we have downplayed the importance of the physical, of relationships with others, and of beauty.

You may notice that nothing I have said requires that you be Christian. The majority of people in the world are not Christian. But if they use their bodies in worship, relate to others in their worship, and work to create beauty, they are on the road to God. As a Christian, I happen to believe that Jesus Christ has showed us the best way to approach God, but I don’t believe that non-Christians are hopelessly out of touch with God. I believe that God loves each of them, and takes care of them in ways that I do not know.

 

Words

Bear with me a little, while I play at philosophy.

What is a word?

You can say that a word is a sound. But there are lots of sounds that are not words. What makes a sound into a word?

The sound has to be shared by other human beings.

“Shared.” What does that mean?

You say a word: “hello.” I hear the sound. I know what that sound means. When I hear that sound, I locate it in the midst of a story.

A story is a sequence of memories in my brain. When I hear “hello” I think of other times when I heard that sound. The experience of the sound was followed by other events that are somewhat similar to each other. I remember people smiling, maybe shaking my hand. Each such memory is a story, a script for things that happen.

But what is the word itself? It is not just my memory, because I cannot create a word on my own. A word has to be created by a community of some kind. The word is not the sound that the community hears, because in the midst of a different group of people, for example, people speaking a different language, the sound would be meaningless. The word is somehow “out there,” floating above the people making the sound.

They say that the sounds that a bird makes has meaning to other birds of that species. There is one song for warning, another for mating, and still another for just celebrating the morning (I think of what I used to call “the morning song of the robin”). 

I once used a textbook in social psychology that claimed that without words, we cannot think. When the portion of the brain that processes language is damaged, for example, by a stroke, we literally cannot think. We cannot remember.

My father had a stroke. The last months of his life he sat by his living room window looking out. When I came into the room he would brighten up. The textbook would say that when I was not in the room, he literally could not think of me. His brain was processing his immediate experiences, but nothing beyond the immediate experience.

A word is an event that has no weight. It cannot be measured. It can be observed only when people are using it, but it ceases to exist when people are not using it, except that the memory of it is lodged in the people’s brains. But their memory is not the word itself. Their memory is of a sound linked to a story. The memory would have no meaning unless the experience of the sound had been shared by others, who have linked it to similar stories.

A word is an interpersonal event. It cannot be observed or measured, except in its effects. That sounds to me very much like what the ancients called a “spirit.” A word is literally spiritual.

They say you cannot observe or measure a soul. You cannot observe or measure a word either.

There is a spirit world that we live in the midst of, a world of words and stories.

I like to think of an evil spirit as a bad story, and an angel as a good story.

Let me describe an experience I recently had.

I wear two hearing aids, each one worth $1300. I was walking down by the Mississippi River. The day was very windy, and I began to worry that the wind could catch one of the hearing aids and flip it out of my ear without my realizing it. So I took out the hearing aids and put them into my left pocket.

I thought I put them into my left pocket. I did not. After about a half hour of walking, I returned to the car and got out the hearing aids to put them back in. There was only one hearing aid in my pocket. I searched the car, over and over again. I felt in my pockets, and began to panic. $1300. Finally in despair I decided there was nothing else I could do except to go home, and maybe look in the car with different lighting, although there was nothing wrong with the lighting where I was.

My companion insisted on trying to retrace our steps, to see if I had dropped it somewhere along the way. She went one way, so I decided, with no hope at all of success, to go the other way. I had not gone more than ten steps, when I saw the hearing aid, lying on the pavement in the street about a foot from the curb. I could not believe it. How had it escaped being run over by a car? It had to have lain there for at least a half hour.

That whole event was as close to a miracle as I have ever experienced. It would be very easy for me to tell the story that an angel had saved the hearing aid and pointed me to it at the right time.

It is that kind of experience that causes people to talk about angels.

I have heard stories of people, especially young people, who suddenly go “off the deep end.” They seem to become someone else. They start doing things they would never otherwise do, sometimes very destructive things. I speculate that an evil story has entered their head. A “demon.” (The original meaning of the word “demon,” in Greek, meant some kind of force that took over a person or a situation. The force could be good or bad--an angel or a devil.)

We very easily turn physical objects into persons. We personify a car. I think of the way World War II pilots named their airplanes after women. The plane that dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima was called the “Enola Gay,” the name of the mother of the pilot.

As a child, I got my first introduction to electronics from a book called Electronics for Young People. It personified electrons as little people, moving about in wires and vacuum tubes. That allowed me to visualize what was happening.

I have come a long way from “words.” I guess what I am saying is that a word is a spiritual event, one that cannot be measured or observed in itself. But once you start analyzing the experiences that give rise to words like “angels” and “devils,” the experiences do not seem so unbelievable.

We are learning that each of us is bathed, inside and out, in microbes, our “bionic” environment. We are also bathed in spiritual realities, inside and out. We are bathed in words.

A Better Philosophy

Fr. John Joe Lakers, my close friend who died in 2011, got his philosophical education at Oxford in England. That education was sometimes called “analytic” philosophy, and focused on language. As “JJ’ went though the last decades of the 1900s, he began to relate this approach to what was coming to be called “postmodernism.”

I come at postmodernism through sociology, and specifically, sociological theory. I taught a course with that title for several years. The readings that were appearing in the theory textbooks were by strange new authors: Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Richard Rorty. When JJ talked about postmodernism, he related it also to Rene Descartes, Emmanuel Kant, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche especially was toxic for believers. He was famous for his statement that “God is dead.”

But our Franciscan approach to philosophy was grounded in the principle that no one is so toxic that we cannot dialogue with that person, and that sometimes ideas that appear toxic at first have some merit to them. The education that we received in Our Lady of Angels Seminary in Cleveland in the 1950s was heavily influenced by two Franciscan friars, Philotheus Boehner and Allan Wolter. Boehner, a German emigre who was widely known in European Catholic philosophical circles, had become a specialist in William of Ockham, another toxic author. Ockham got into trouble with Pope John XXII, and Thomistic authors accused him of being a precursor to the Reformation. Wolter was a specialist in the writings of John Duns Scotus, but was sufficiently competent in scientific cosmology that he was able to teach alternate semesters at Princeton.

The Franciscan philosophical tradition, therefore, never accepted Pope Leo XIII’s 1897 decree that all Catholic philosophy and theology should be based on the writings of Thomas Aquinas. In JJ’s view, that position froze Catholic thinking into the thirteenth century and made it impossible for Catholic scholars to deal honestly with anything more recent.

Back to postmodernism. JJ was determined to mine the thinking of Nietzsche and the postmodernists for nuggets of insight that might contribute to a life of faith in our world.

My reading in the aforementioned postmodernist authors convinced me that their position could be boiled down to one statement. (I have always held that anything can be boiled down to one statement.) That statement is: “Any time someone claims to be speaking the truth, that person is hiding an agenda of getting power over someone else.”

Postmodernists are rejected by many Catholic authors because their position can be rephrased as “There is no such thing as the truth.” That formulation is completely nihilistic, and can easily be rejected, even on philosophical grounds. It reminds me of the riddle that we discussed in philosophy: “All statements are false, including this one.” To claim that there is no such thing as the truth is to imply that the statement itself is true.

Back to Sociology

In the 1960s, a sociologist, Peter Berger, and a Lutheran theologian, Thomas Luckmann, wrote a small book with the title The Social Construction of Reality. The title says it all. What we call “reality” is a socially constructed thing, and as such is subject to the vagaries of the social groups that are constructing it.

Behind that definition of reality is an idea as old as sociology—W.I. Thomas’s 1917 principle of what we called “the definition of the situation”: “If a situation is defined as real, it is real in its consequences.”

Sociologists have accepted that principle over most of the last century and society has continued to exist. What we have is a tension between the fact that we humans tell stories about things that happen to us, and the fact that sometimes the stories we tell are not verified by others.

The best example of this is a court of law. Every trial is a competition between competing definitions of the situation—competing stories. The defendant claims that something happened, and tells the story in support of that claim. The prosecutor challenges the story with an alternate story about what happened. The jury’s role is to determine which the of the two stories is more likely to describe what actually happened.

Sometimes no one can determine what actually happened. The position of the postmodernists is that such a situation is in effect in most of the important issues in life. I think they argue that position because they see people using truth claims to support political domination. But they don’t, JJ claims, get past that. All they offer is what JJ calls “a hollow voice of protest.”

Thomas Aquinas and his more modern followers, including popes, talk about “natural law.” The term really means that there are some stories about reality that everyone accepts, and that if you don’t accept the story, you are mentally or morally deficient. That is a shaky basis for making decisions about life. For centuries people accepted the story that the sun goes around the earth. The Church has clung to stories about human sexuality that most of the rest of society has rejected--for example, that artificial means of contraception are bad. The only sense I can make out of that statement is that it means that bad things happen when you use artificial means of contraception. But whether bad things happen or not is a matter for observation. The last fifty years of observation give evidence that, while there are some bad outcomes of such use, as is true of almost anything in life, overall such use does not cause enough harm to forbid the practice.

What does all this mean?

The endpoint of this line of reasoning is that the Catholic intellectual community, especially those who claim to speak authoritatively in the name of the Church, is out of touch with the major philosophical currents of the day. That is one of the roots of the widespread abandonment of religious affiliation. There are other sources of such abandonment, most notably the huge tendency toward individualistic isolation in our societies, but when we have no credible answer to the questions that people put to us, we lose them.

This gap between official Church teaching and the wider philosophical environment is one of the sources of lack of applicants for leadership in the Church—i.e. priesthood. Who wants to be locked into presenting things as true when the individual is not convinced they are true. Even worse, who wants to be locked into a situation where you cannot even discuss the issues?

The clergy problem is not limited to the Catholic community. Protestant groups also face a slowdown in clergy recruitment. I suggest that those groups face a similar problem. Their spiritualities—the practices and stories that they use to structure the lives of believers—are too often out of touch with the realities that most people have constructed for themselves. Protestant congregations have their own versions of orthodoxy, and their own punishments for people who say things outside the orthodoxy.

In short, part of our problem is intellectual, and its solution has to be to grapple on a wider level with the intellectual issues. That was JJ’s position, and it is mine.

Control

The Church has lost control. The churches have lost control.

I grew up with the idea that it was the job of the Church to control people so they would not get hurt. The worst hurt, of course, was hell.

We of the Roman Catholic Church have lost control. We cannot keep our young people from straying off into what used to be forbidden pastures. Or from straying off into no pastures at all. The so-called "mainline" Protestant denominations are in the same situation. Some "evangelical" churches are growing, but their spirituality is not for me.

Why not for me?

The most fundamental thing we should be doing in religion is coaching people about God. Coaching ourselves and, as God calls us, other people.

I have thought a lot about coaching, ever since I reflected that I never had good coaching in the field of athletics. I didn't have it in several other areas of life either, but the term "coach" gets used mostly about athletic sports.

Now that I've seen good coaching, I have learned that coaching skill requires the coach to approach the "coachee" with empathy and encouragement. The coach's job is not to weed out the inferior players. It is to help the inferior players to get better, at least better enough to enjoy the game.

Now the first thing about God is that God is pretty mysterious, so mysterious that no human being has a lock on how to deal with God. At least, no human being besides Jesus Christ. I mention him because I am a Christian, and I believe that Jesus gave us our best approaches to God.

But there are people who do not see Jesus the way I do. Yet I believe they are trying to live out what they think is their best approach to God. Can I learn from them?

We Catholics are in a tradition that sees bishops and priests, and especially the pope, as being in control of how people should approach God. There was a time in my youth (the 1950s, for example) that it looked as though we were doing a pretty good job of it. Then we lost control.

Losing control was the best thing that ever happened to us.

It takes some boldness to suggest that almost two thousand years of Christian tradition were somewhat off track, but that is what I think has happened. Somewhere in those early centuries of Church tradition--some people blame Augustine--we took control of things. That has caused us all kinds of trouble.

The first troubles had to do with Church people trying to tell secular leaders what to do. That peaked somewhere around the year 1300, but then we gave up on it, mostly because we had no choice. The secular leaders quit paying attention to our orders.

The Second Vatican Council, whose ending 50 years ago we are celebrating these days, put the Church on record as saying that the Church does not have to control how people approach God. Having said that, they gave away the store.

Which was good, because we should not have had the store in the first place.

This line of thought came to me as I was reading someone describing Catholic religion in Latin America. Latin or "Hispanic" Catholics do not approach God quite the same way I do. My first reaction is to figure out a way to get them to do it right--my way. I must present my beliefs in such an attractive way that they will see the light.

Then I reflected. I am, at least for the time being, at peace with my ways of approaching God. I have two approaches. One is to sit in my rocking chair, look out the window, and pray a psalm aloud. As I do that I reflect on why people used the words in the psalm to approach God. I end every psalm with the prayer that begins "Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit," which makes me remember the basic belief of my Christianity. My second way to approach God is to listen to the prophets God sends into my life, beginning with one very close friend.

Now I know that to try to get other people to pray psalms is a doomed enterprise. For one thing, I was once forced to endure six years of Latin and four years of Greek, which allows me to pray the psalms in Latin and Greek. There is no way that most people are going to endure that kind of language preparation before they can deal with God in their own way. My way is my way.

We can all use my second way of approaching God: listen to the prophets God sends us. But your prophets are not my prophets.

Therefore I need to appreciate your ways more. What I need to do is to learn from you how you approach God, really, every day, in good times and in bad. What do you do, physically? How do you use language, if you use language? Do you use music, or dance? Do you bow down toward Mecca with your face on the ground? How does praying the Qur'an help you approach God?

The first requirement for me to begin such a conversation with you is to get rid of any hope, or expectation, or dream, or long-term goal, of controlling how you approach God. I'm listening to you to learn, pure and simple.

Pope Francis has used two images that stick with me. One is that the Church is a field hospital for people wounded in battle. Field hospitals do not control much--they try to do good in the immediate present and let the long-term outcome up to someone else. The other image is that we shepherds should smell like our sheep. Both images, field hospital and smelling like sheep, do not go with controlling the situation.

So I reach the conclusion that our future as a Church lies in letting go of our tradition of trying to control people and spend our time listening to them and talking with them, and in the meantime, try to find out some good ways that we ourselves can approach God. But not with the goal of getting other people to do it the same way.

That idea causes me to breathe a great big sigh of relief. Somehow I think this is the way Jesus wants me to do it.

Cosmology

The latest issue of Astronomy magazine is labeled “Special Issue: The Immensity of the Cosmos.”

The Greek word “kosmos” means “order,” “good order.” When applied to people it can mean “decorated” (think “cosmetics”). When applied to astronomy, it means “the biggest space we know about.”

In September 2014, the issue says, astronomers defined the “Laniakea Supercluster.” (“Laniakea” is the Hawaiian word for “immense heaven.”) The Milky Way is our own galaxy, 400 billion stars, among which our sun is one. The Laniakea Supercluster has 100,000 galaxies and is 520 million light years across.

I’m thinking about this as I pray morning prayer today. I am using words that people have used for over two thousand years to express their relation to “God.” I am a religious person.

My religion tells me that God made the universe, and that this God is triune, three Persons, whom we call Father, Son, and Spirit, or, feminists would say, “Creator, the Christ, and Spirit (Sophia).” It tells me that this triune God is personally involved with me, and that I can speak to this God and be heard.

A close friend of mine has rejected religion because he says it has done nothing but cause suffering around the world. Think ISIS. Closer to home, he is thinking of the Religious Right, which he blames for leading politicians to reject concern for the poor, in the name of the Invisible Hand.

We have two world views, science and religion. For the past couple of hundred years, intellectuals have seen the two in conflict, struggle to the death. They predict that religion will lose and will die. They point to the increasing number of people who say they have no religion. I think of the increasing number of young Catholics who drift away from the Church. Some of them drift into other denominations, but many of them drift into the “None” category. When the survey asks “Which of the following options describes your religion?” they answer “None.”

During my years of studying philosophy in the seminary, we had a course with the title “Cosmology.” Therefore I found it striking that astronomers are using that word these days. How can they take this fine religious word and use it for scientific purposes?

Stories about the Cosmos

The Laniakea Supercluster is a story about the cosmos. The story says that the cosmos came into being 13.82 billion light years ago, from the Big Bang, an explosion from an infinitesimally small source.

My faith’s story about the cosmos does not deny the Big Bang. But it says that a spiritual source was behind the Big Bang, and continues to guide its evolution. That source, which we call God, focused on one point of time and space and became human in the person of Jesus Christ.

Two stories. Both are collections of words, language used to describe things that no one has ever actually seen. The astonomer is basing the Big Bang on observing tiny spots of light or other radiation through a telescope or microscope, trying to explain why those spots of light behave the way they do. My story is based on a tradition of words passed on in many languages down through several centuries, and shaped into writings which we call the Bible.

Both stories are based in communities, the community of scientists and the community of Christians or members of other religions. Both communities need faith to tell their stories to others. They believe that the story they tell is true, that it reflects reality the way it really is. Neither community can ultimately prove that its story is true. Scientists know that the story they tell today may not be the story that they will tell a hundred years from now. Religious people know that the story they tell today has been shaped by many human factors, and that parts of the story may have to be revised in the light of what we learn as we make this journey through history.

But both communities believe that their stories are important and valuable, valuable enough for people to devote their lives to studying the stories and passing them on to others.

But what about ISIS and the Religious Right? Don’t religious stories cause more harm than good?

I have to admit that religion can cause a great deal of harm. Karl Marx claimed that religion was an opium that deadened people to their oppression so that they would not do anything to make things better. Sigmund Freud claimed that religion is a human response to a desire to go back to the womb, a comfortable place where there is no challenge. ISIS is clearly a bad thing. One can argue that it is really more of a political movement than a religious one, but it seems to appeal to young people who have the same hopes and dreams that young religious people have.

I am not equating the Religious Right with ISIS in the level of physical evil it causes, but the Religious Right is destroying our political system by creating an atmosphere of intolerance and rejection of compromise. The “Founding Fathers” were hoping to avoid that kind of intolerance in this land, because they had experienced enough of it in Europe. Intolerance freezes the political process into inaction and will ultimately bring it down. It could lead to civil war, which is what happens when two irreconcilable political forces collide. It is certainly leading to environmental disaster.

But.

Science too can cause a great deal of harm. Alfred Nobel, who gave us the Nobel prizes, invented dynamite, thinking that its invention would bring wars to an end. What dynamite has done is make possible destruction on a scale unimaginable in earlier times. Atomic science raised that destruction level to such a height that we face the real danger that we could make our planet uninhabitable. Our science, allying itself with the Invisible Hand, allows people to pursue their individual interests to the point of destroying the environment, another way of making the planet uninhabitable.

Both religion and science can result in great harm, but on balance I think science can do the greater harm. Does that mean we should stop doing science?

No.

It means that science and religion both have to be used in life-giving ways.

There are plenty of people both in science and in religion that already spend their lives hoping to give life to others. We need to encourage such people, and quit rewarding only the ones who make the most money.

All human activity has to be motivated by passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement of human beings with each other. Of course it won’t be, because we are not perfect. But we can work to bring about that kind of involvement on the individual level, where we all live our individual lives, and on the political level, where we need to write our rules so that such behavior is rewarded.

Pope Francis’s recent encyclical, Laudato Si, is one example of the kind of approach that we will need if we are to pass on a livable world to coming generations. But there are many other people, with many other writings, who are working toward the same goal.

I believe in the statement: “I am not optimistic, but I am hopeful.” Optimism predicts good things. Hope says that God is good for us.

Predictions of the future of our planet do not look good.

But I believe that God is good, and that God is good for us.

"God"

I recently subscribed to the magazine Astronomy. The first issue I got has a picture, taken by the Hubble telescope (the one on a satellite), of a region of the universe never before observed. In the picture are hundreds of galaxies floating out there, some angled up, some down, some at right angles to us. In other words, the farther out we look, the more things we see. 

The universe—the place we live in—is huge.

I accept the theory that we human beings evolved from earlier life forms, which in turn evolved from a mass of atoms that gave birth to the Big Bang

The obvious question, one that no scientist I know has answered, is “where did that original mass of atoms come from?”

Some of the ancients thought that the earth was at the center of a set of spheres—one sphere held the sun, another held the moon, and still others held the planets and stars. Just beyond that set of spheres was God. The term “God” in this context is a metaphor referring to “some kind of force that created the spheres.”

Today the term “God” refers to “some kind of force that created the original mass of atoms and set the process of evolution in motion.”

I don’t see where today’s metaphor is any more or any less satisfactory than the one the ancients used. Our metaphor just pushes the boundaries further out.

The term “God,” as a metaphor, is based on two human experiences. One is that when something happens, we look for a cause. The other is that when something extraordinary happens, we look for an intelligent agent behind the event. When archaeologists find a piece of rock that gives evidence of “intelligent” work, they conclude that the piece of rock is a “tool,” and the maker of the tool had to be intelligent. The creation of a set of galaxies structured so as to allow the emergence of intelligent life (on our planet) is surely something extraordinary.

It is possible that the emergence of life is the result of random occurrences over billions of years. But if I conclude that the shape of a piece of rock gives evidence of an intelligent cause, surely the emergence of intelligence itself should be worth something as evidence. Does randomness explain the complex structure of our universe, from the largest galaxies down to the subatomic level? The theory of randomness, they say, could explain a monkey typing randomly and eventually producing all the plays of Shakespeare. Is fourteen billion years (the accepted age of our universe) long enough for either of those events (the evolution of our universe, including intelligent life, or the monkey's typing)? Many scientists think so. To me, to say that those things occurred randomly requires an act of faith. But maybe I just don't understand how long fourteen billion years really is. 

One variant of the Big Bang theory, one that I am not able to refute, is that our Big Bang is only one among a huge number of Big Bangs—perhaps an infinite number of Big Bangs—and the whole business has taken place without any intelligent force. That just seems to me to push the issue one step further back.

Could there be an infinite number of Big Bangs? There is a philosophical principle that an infinite number of actually existing objects is impossible. No matter how many there are, there can always be one more, ad infinitum. There must be a stop somewhere.

That leaves us right back where we started. Our beliefs in causality and in the idea that intelligent objects require an intelligent maker are untouched.

I used the term “beliefs.” These are truly beliefs. We cannot prove that events need causes, nor that intelligent events need intelligent causes. Both the term “cause” and the term “intelligence” are metaphors for experiences we get from everyday life. I can say that events need causes, and you can say that they don’t, and no one can prove either of us right.

This is what “faith” is all about.

I sit in my room and look out the window at the sky. If it were night, I could see out to the edges of our universe, granted that I would need a telescope to see objects very far out. I choose to affirm the principles that events need causes, and that intelligent events need intelligent causes. So, somewhere out there, is the cause, and indeed the intelligent cause, of my universe.

This is a modest affirmation. I am not claiming to understand all the principles of nuclear physics. But I recall that Einstein derived even the principles of relativity from a rather simple metaphor of two trains moving along a track. Is my belief that something intelligent made this stuff any more simplistic? 

So, next question. What is that intelligent cause like?

Ah, now we get to the real issue. This is the issue that generations of human cultures have struggled over, even to the point of violence and death.

I am a Christian. That means that I see myself as part of a story of several million people going back a couple of thousand years, to the event of the person Jesus Christ.

Now why should I accept the belief that the intelligent cause of my universe chose to become human in one single human being at one specific place and time?

Well, I accept that belief because of those several million people before me. Specifically, because of the relatively few human beings who gave birth to me and taught me stuff while I was growing up.

Of course, every single Muslim or Hindu or Sikh can say the same thing. Each of them accepts a set of beliefs about “God” (or “Allah” or perhaps other metaphorical terms) because each of them is part of the story of their millions of ancestors, and specifically, because of the relatively few human beings who gave birth to them and taught them stuff while they were growing up.

I accept my belief about Jesus Christ because I choose to do so. That is what faith means. I can’t prove that my belief is any better than my Muslim neighbor’s. I don’t even want to try to prove that. I have better things to do, as surely he or she also has better things to do.

Maybe at some time in the future, either of us will have re-configured our story of faith in a way that is compatible with the other person’s story of faith. That’s not my business right now.

My business right now is to answer the question: If indeed the creator of my universe chose to become human in the person of Jesus Christ, my immediate concern is two-fold. 1) How should I behave in the presence of “God,” and of this person Jesus? 2) How should I behave in relation to my fellow human beings? The first question is liturgical; the second is ethical.

My religious community, Christians—more specifically, Catholics—gives me answers to both questions. I am presented with a set of rituals and a set of moral precepts.

Now both sets, rituals and moral principles, are subject to revision. We human beings seem to get better over time at understanding our situation. In the Catholic Church, at the Second Vatican Council, we changed the way we did the “Mass,” and we are even now struggling over how we should behave in the presence of our fellow Catholics who have divorced and remarried, or who are gay.

It took us several centuries, but we Catholics seem to be pretty much in consensus that it is not good to try to use violence to make other people believe as we do and behave as we do. I can hope that other faith communities will come to a similar conclusion. Do I think they will?

The history of humanity is not promising in that regard. A hundred years ago we in the “western” world were pretty excited about the idea of “progress” or “evolution.” Things would get better and better as we learned to use our intelligence to decide what is good to do. Then came the First World War and Hitler and Vietnam and ISIS, and we have pretty much scrapped that naïve hope.

Yet I can still hope. My main reason for hope is the Grand Metaphor of Christianity, the belief that God brings life out of the worst human disaster. This person that we believe was God made human was condemned and executed as a criminal. We believe that he was restored to life. So even if we humans were to destroy our entire species—a possibility not entirely remote, given the number of nuclear weapons floating around and the damage that we continue to inflict on the very environment that makes our life possible—even if we were to destroy our species, God would somehow bring life out of that disaster.

But I don’t want to dwell on that apocalyptic possibility. I want to know how I should do things right here and right now.

One principle that seems to be wired into us humans is the principle that we need other human beings in order to thrive. The sad thing is that our gadgets (smart phones, etc.) keep isolating us from one another. We will not be able to keep isolating ourselves without serious effects. (This is a belief, an item of faith, on my part, but I suspect it is a belief that most social scientists share.)

To me it is comforting to realize that my story—the story of my life—is part of a larger story that involves people all around the world today, and in all the centuries back through history, back to Jesus Christ, and before him, to Abraham. I can sit in my room and pray one of the Hebrew psalms and realize that there are men and women all around the world who are praying these same words today (granted that the words are in various translations). Furthermore, as I pray that psalm in Latin (one of the gifts of having been subjected to six years of Latin study in my seminary days), I can think about all the people down through the centuries who have prayed these exact words. What did those words mean to those people in the past? What do they mean to my fellow believers today?

As I pray those words, I think of all the stories in the Hebrew scriptures that give color to my story, and of all the stories in my Christian history that give color, both light and dark, to my story. It is sad that so many of my fellow Catholics do not know these stories. I could construct an entire curriculum for religious study, from kindergarden through graduate school, based on these stories. As we get older, we accept more adult nourishment. I can accept that popes had mistresses and children. I can even accept the statement of Garry Wills that the great sin of the modern papacy is lack of truthfulness, a serious charge given that we stated, in 1870, that the pope is infallible.

Mature stories can be controversial and can have serious political effects. Garry Wills, a layman, can make the charge that the great sin of the modern papacy is lack of truthfulness, but were I to make it, I would be out of the priesthood faster than you can, as they used to say, shake a fist.

Intellectual freedom does not exist in the Catholic Church for priests, and even less for bishops. Power is the ability to punish, and the Church hierarchy uses power very effectively.

But, as they say, I digress. My point in this piece of writing is to describe how I deal with some of the important scientific findings of our day. We used to call such an enterprise “apologetics,” but that word has the connotation of defeating one’s opponents intellectually. My purpose is not to defeat anyone. I want to show, as St. Paul says, the reason for my faith, so that other people do not think I am hopelessly out of touch with reason.

My Franciscan tradition says that the most important function of rational discourse is to “edify,” to “build up”—to build up the ability of my neighbors to relate to God and to one another with love. As Jesus agreed (when a questioner put the issue in those words), there is no greater commandment than those two.