So where are we? After going back and forth with my friend Frank and meeting once a month with the “Catholic elders” over the last five or six months I’ve bounced around a whole series of concepts in my head about what it means to believe in a god, God, the God of Christians, the Son of God, the Holy Trinity as believed by the Roman Catholic Church, the nature of faith, the meaning to life, scripture, divine revelation and a whole bunch of other good stuff.
Frankly, my view on most of this, though shaped and somewhat more nuanced by this intensified discernment process has pretty much remained as it was before we started.
We’re all going through a discernment process about whether there is a god, nature of that being, the presence of evil in the world and the ultimate personal question: “what is my ultimate purpose in life?”
For me, this all comes down to a series of beliefs resulting from my life experiences, including my education, my observations, and the expressed thoughts and actions of others:
1) there is a life force that people from the beginning of recorded history have referred to with the concept of “gods” and only more recently as “God.”
2) That life force is a mystery and hence unknowable by me.
3) I was born and raised a Roman Catholic because both of my parents were Roman Catholics.
4) As a child I had the faith of a child.
5) I am the product of a Catholic educational system from the seventh grade through college.
6) As a college sophomore I stopped going to church for about fifteen years.
7) After returning to church when our oldest child was school age I eventually served at various times as a lector, Eucharistic minister at Mass and to the homebound, member of the choir, president of the parish council, president of the parish St. Vincent de Paul Society and a member of the Archdiocesan Pastoral Council.
8) My “faith” has evolved over the period of my life concomitant with my own maturation process and life experiences.
9) I believe that this life force that is called “God” is involved in some causal way with the ongoing act of creation as well my own ongoing breath of life.
10) I find it difficult as an intellectual process to believe in a personal god to me and to the billions upon billions of human beings who lived before me, contemporaneously with me or who will live after my death.
11) I believe that there is an inner spirituality that we each can tap.
12) Organized religion, scripture, divine revelation and ritual can often assist people to tap or “drill down” to locate the source or wellspring of this spirituality.
13) It is not infrequent that various religious practices and beliefs become an end in themselves and hinder rather than facilitate the search for this god within, the wellspring of our spirituality.
14) “Faith” is more than the intellectual or emotional acceptance of the truth of various facts.
15) True “faith” is experiential, more how you live your life than which facts and practices you believe in or practice.
16) This internal faith is rooted in and grows out of compassion for the suffering of other sentient beings.
17) If we are always “good” to all living things and always try to help them we will always be aware of our “god”, our inner spirituality.
18) Being spontaneously and profoundly grateful for the blessings that have been bestowed on us in life indicates that we are aware of our inner “god.”
19) Accepting the pain and hurt of the various misfortunes that befall us in life without anger and bitterness is an indication of the equanimity that grows out of this “inner faith”
20) sharing our faith experience through ritual or other group experience can enhance our individual searches for this “God within” as long as the ritual or group experience does not become an end in itself.
21) prayer is the spontaneous or structured outpouring of gratitude for the life we have been given and the blessings we share.
22) The question of evil as part of this mystery continues to trouble me.
23) We should live our lives day by day in acts of compassion knowing that one day will be our last.
24) Perhaps at that point after we’ve breathed our last, this mystery we’ve lived will be understandable to us in much the same way that life after birth eventually makes more sense to the child who heretofore only understood life as being in utero.
25) We each have within us the power to make our god a god of love or a god of evil and perhaps the concepts of heaven and hell as we’ve come to know them are nothing more than states of mind that are finalized by death.
26) Notwithstanding the foregoing (which in legal terms means that what follows trumps what has come before) I remain a practicing Catholic, comfortable in my unknowing and comforted in my community of “believers.” Though our individual beliefs may differ greatly over a whole range of items of faith we are, each in our own way, trying to find “(G)od” in our lives. In spite of my intellectual difficulties in understanding how a personal god would work (perhaps with the mother of all super computers) I have hope and ascribe to the values taught by Jesus Christ. That he is the son of god, whatever that concept means, is a matter of hope for me rather than a matter of faith. I do try to live a life in accord with those values that he taught.
27) I do believe that my institutional church is deeply flawed and over the couple of thousand years since his death I believe it has grievously strayed from Christ’s message and has become a vehicle for the wealth and self promotion of many of it’s leaders based on temporal values and its ability to accumulate that very wealth which has corrupted so many of its leaders.