I thought I'd share this letter, in case anyone feels like reading yet another nobody's views on his own navel. After a brief intro contextually relating to previous exchanges, I wrote the following to my 16 year old cousin (slightly edited for anonymity & context).
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I was doing my normal political junkie thing and stumbled across this article about Obama's recent speech at Notre Dame. I read a phrase from that speech that felt particularly close to home and decided to share. Quick back story on the speech: ND is a catholic school, and some jack-asses felt like making a big protest about how Obama shouldn't be allowed to speak there because he's pro-choice and the church is not, while ignoring that there was no Bush protest, even though the church is equally against the death penalty (Bush loved putting the zap on inmates in Texas) and war.
For his part, Obama gave what may have been both the most radical and the most conservative speech of his presidency. Acknowledging the Roman Catholic Church's role in supporting his early community organizing work, the president drew on the resources of Catholic social thought. It combines opposition to abortion with a sharp critique of economic injustice and thus doesn't squeeze into the round holes of contemporary ideology.
"Too many of us view life only through the lens of immediate self-interest and crass materialism," Obama declared. "The strong too often dominate the weak, and too many of those with wealth and with power find all manner of justification for their own privilege in the face of poverty and injustice."
Yet his argument drew on very old ideas, notably original sin and the common good. Obama was as explicit in talking about his faith as George W. Bush ever was about his own but with distinctly different inflections and conclusions.
The former president often emphasized the comfort and certainty he drew from his religious beliefs. Obama said that "the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt."
"This doubt should not push away our faith," Obama preached. "But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, cause us to be wary of too much self-righteousness." It was a quietly pointed response to his critics.
I've always felt that way, I've just had trouble formulating the words. Faith is not certainty, not testable knowledge. That's in its nature. It is trust. It's silk, not stone. It flexes, it bends, it tears, and yeah, it seems damn thin when you're getting pounded on by the elements. You can't build a world out of it, but you can damn sure make the place look different. Better.
It wasn't that there was really any one verse that hit home (though there were a few of those) so much as a realization that faith isn't about testable hypotheses, and that's ok. When I was agnostic, I was searching. Looking for a way to prove that something intangible was real, something that would dispel doubt. I knew it was fruitless, as countless philosophers wiser and more arrogant than I have ruminated for millenia without result, but I couldn't help but see a whole lot of beauty and good and know that we are far too puny in the scheme of the size and scope of space and time to ever be able to understand even a fraction of what's really going on. I realized some mysteries will always be beyond us.
If you want to know specific verses that got me, I couldn't really tell you. I'm generally too lax on bible study to have anything memorized, and I've never been comfortable with the kind of literal, legalistic view of God and the bible that Round Peg's mother has anyway. I refuse to be so rigid and unwelcoming to new ideas and such. I think I deal with more doubt, but I think that in a way, it may make my view the stronger of the two. If something ever causes Round Peg's mom to actually, seriously doubt, she'll shatter.
I guess I take the idea of hell and heaven somewhat less literally, or see them as less overriding concerns than a lot of people, and most of my faith centers around personal spirituality in the time we have here on earth. I didn't need the Christian message, the threat of hell, or the promise of heaven to tell me to be a good person (I HAVE told you I was Round Peg's mom's first exposure to that idea, right? That a person doesn't need to be a Christian to have compassion, or love in their heart, or be trustworthy? It's always saddened me, what an insulated, fearful life she's lived in that sense). Even at my most cynical and furthest from God, I did my best to take this kind of view. I've always had trouble dredging up quite that level of enthusiasm, but you get the idea (that's what I have Round Peg for, anyway).
But I guess one reason Christianity fits so well is because it feels good. It feels good to do good works. It feels good to forgive (when it can truly be managed). And it feels damn good to be forgiven. Christ gives me that. Round Peg gives me that. She's my cheerleader, my teammate in everything, my ever-forgiving, ever-understanding best friend. I think one of the keys to how we pull it off is that we each think we're the lucky one, we each think we're getting the better bargain than the other, we each think we don't deserve the other.
The first "brick to the head" making me realize there was something more going on was how beautifully Round Peg and I fit together. We grew up mere blocks apart, perfect complements to each others' personalities at the time we met (in high school) and from then onward. She and I had each gone through some dramatic changes in the adolescent years prior to when we met, and it really felt, and feels, too perfect for us to have not met until we did to have been an accident. It felt like that finding of my soul mate so early in my life, so soon after figuring out who I was, was a deliberate message to me from the universe, from God, that I was loved.
I know it isn't like that for everybody (in faith or in relationships), that's just how it hit me, both kinds of love at once. I don't want you to think when you do find the right guy that because it is different, it is somehow less, or that if you don't find the guy right away that it's because you're less loved or less deserving. You just have to take your time and really know them.
Arg. Getting all lovingly paternal and getting off topic. I find myself wanting to lecture you on waiting for marriage. Nevermind.
A couple ideas that have stuck with me over the years (which I have a feeling you'll ask about):
- We've all sinned. We're all bad. Anyone claiming to be holier than thou is lying out their ass, which they're probably able to do because they've stuck their heads up there. In a very real sense, we're all just animals, shitting and fucking and eating and killing as much as the foulest rat. The human scale of morality ranges from Mother Theresa to Hitler, but relative to perfection, we might as well be trying to jump the grand canyon. Use a pole to vault, use Evil Kineval's bike and a ramp, you'll still not make it. But at the same time, there's something more to consciousness, to society, and to humanity than that base, animal level of rage, jealousy, and loneliness. The idea that God sent his son to elevate us past that animal filth, to bridge the canyon for us, may seem ludicrous in a way, but it fits. We're tiny specks of life on a tiny speck of dust carooming through the unimaginably vast blackness of space surviving solely off a teensy fraction of the energy hiccupped out by a briefly lit fireball in the sky, but we feel love for one another, and that's no small thing.
- The need to do good works is not a chore. It isn't a commandment. It isn't limited to the church, as some people seem to think (a conversation I've actually had multiple times while canvassing door to door in college: "Wanna donate to save the Arctic Wildlife National Refuge?" "No. I already give money to my church." Fucking Orange County). Think of it more as a request to swab the deck from the ship's captain who pulled your drowning ass out of the ocean. We're to take care of God's creation, treat the least of us (even the lazy welfare cheats and the murderers and the prostitutes and the forgotten) as we would treat the king of kings. It's been a long time since I worked in a soup kitchen, but I loved it, and I want to go back.
- Organized religion can seem like a total crock, I know. That was one reason I eschewed it for so long. Churches are filled with swindlers and pedophiles and hypocrites. But so is every other human institution, so is humanity. I don't imagine the priest or the bishop or the pope to really be any better as humans than I am, just different. They chose different paths. Some chose it for the closeness they feel to god or the focus on good works, and have a genuine humility about their path. Some chose it for politics and power. Whatever. That's people. So is the homophobia and intolerance that seems so much stronger in some churches than others. There's bad out there, and you fight it where you can. An organized faith is really about community, and I didn't realize how much I valued that until I got up here to the Bay and had none. A church is a community of people similarly focused on the betterment of humanity, their own individual spiritual journeys, and, for the more outgoing, others' spiritual journeys. If you can really find that, you're in a good place. Our church helped us a lot after the mess of the last couple years.
- Some faiths (evangelical protestants in particular) put HEAVY emphasis on proselytizing, and say that is central to the individual journey and to salvation, but I don't buy it. I see that and I think "pyramid scheme." Lots of churches are businesses for profit, and the blatant abuse of people's spirituality gets pretty disgusting. Many of them spend money on bigger and fancier churches to draw in more people, and yeah, they send missionaries to feed the poverty-stricken heathen masses around the world, but only from a position of patriarchal superiority, and only after those masses have read the pamphlet and attended a class and dealt with timeshare-style sales techniques. What I like about the work of the Catholic church is that there really does seem to be more emphasis on the "food, shelter, and clothing" part than on the "swell our ranks to make more money for the institution" part (though, naturally, that comes into it), and there's just a hope that they look for more info and draw in good people by doing it that way.
- Free will is a tricky subject. Mathematicians and physicists have been working on disproving it for years, and there really IS a lot of doubt about it scientifically. Don't really know what to think; I'm still working on that one, but it tends to come up in conversations of religion, so I just thought I'd mention that I'm clueless.
Anyway. That's all I can seem to dredge up right now on the topic. Read. Ask questions. I'm sure I'll find more for you if you do.