I’m rocking four month old Nico as I write this. He’s just eaten and has fallen asleep in my arms after having a sore belly and spitting up. 

You’d think that after eight grandchildren I’d be better at this. 
The feelings of love, fulfillment and gratitude don’t change; if anything they become more profound, more layered as with each birth my role keeps changing and deepening until now I’m aware, with this beautiful child in my arms, that with his arrival I have succeeded my own father as patriarch and am now the “head” of a tribe of 16. 

This awareness just came to me as I hold him like I did his sister and his six cousins. 

What are my duties and privileges in this role that most recently I’ve become aware of? I raise this question after having just wiped some schmutz from the folds of Nico’s neck. I suppose that is one of the duties; the main role I think I should play is that of best supporting actor and coordinator for and to each of the three nuclear families that come together into my patriarchy, helping where help is appropriate, being cautious to always respect my subordinate role as supporter, advisor but not as primary actor. 

Trying to enhance and encourage strong familial ties between this new generation within my patriarchy is a major function. Physical, emotional and sometimes financial support are all part of the job description. 

And… also, as much as I don’t like to think of it, I must be prepared to turn my duties over to my successor, the matriarch in waiting. I must help her to understand and internalize her role as the glue that holds the family together generation to generation and to prepare her own successor as our triad of nuclear families expands in an exponential fashion, pulling away from its nucleus. As I write this her successor, her brother’s son is now ten years old, the elder grandson, and one who already displays the character and traits – even at that young age – to be a successor to his aunt, the matriarch in waiting.  

 We each long for community from deep within. The unspoken goal of organized religion, growing out of that longing, is for us to come together to confirm our group and individual suspension of disbelief in the tenets and beliefs of the supernatural that underlie all religions.  
Anthropologists would say that Homo sapiens is a social being. 
To the extent that spirituality wells intrinsically within each of us it’s also true that organized religion is intrinsically social and communal and as such the social and communal interaction within the group of believers supports the individual expressions of spirituality based on their shared beliefs. 
Through the medium of organized religion we affirm each other’s belief system especially as we come together periodically to engage and participate in group ritual, whether it is the periodic prayers of Muslims throughout the day, the Catholic Mass or the Martens of Protestants. 
Recitation of the rosary for Catholics can be either an individual or a group exercise, a uniquely Catholic mantra the repetitive recitation of which either as a solitary or social exercise leads to what some might call a mind numbing experience of emptying one’s consciousness. In that sense an inner peace develops as the continuous repetitiogn of the same words over and over causes them to lose any intellectual meaning but by blocking out the random and fleeting thoughts that tend to transit through our minds this mind numbing experience does indeed lead to inner peace and tranquility. 
The celebration of the Mass is another communal event where people come together to recite ritual prayers in a ceremony led by a priest. The theology of the Mass is such that the celebrant purportedly stands in the place of Jesus during this reenactment of the Last Supper.
Wars have been fought over issues such as Transubstantiation versus Consubstantiation, whether Christ really becomes present through the Consecration of the Mass or whether the whole ritual is merely an act done to commentate his life and last Passover meal. 

Group identity is crucial to all religions and the group is tightly controlled and herded together by its spiritual leaders. History shows us that wars have been and continue to be fought by fanatics over perceived religious differences. 
The obverse side of group identity and cohesiveness is the exclusion and frequently the denigration of non group members … nonbelievers. Jesus preached inclusiveness; the church that developed in his name and after his death became over the years both exclusive and hostile, battling other religious groups as well as individuals through crusades and the inquisition. This loving god who Jesus represented had untold atrocities carried out in his name and ostensibly on his behalf. Today Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims battle to the death with similar atrocities committed on the name of their group and Allah their god. 
The various churches of Jesus have not fared much better from the Reformation through current day Evangelicals: strong cohesive group identity and if not hostility, palpable distrust and dislike of competing religions. 
It is factually correct that our intrinsic longing for community has over the centuries brought billions of people together in various self selected religious groups, groups that have focused hate and on occasion unspeakable pain and suffering on other groups or individuals of differing theological beliefs… all in the name of their god. 

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. 

Fifteen month old Ian broke his leg this week and they put it in a cast this morning. I feel badly for my grandson, but these things happen. In some ways I feel more concern for his parents. If you have kids you know what I’m talking about: the times you had a mental lapse when you could always say “What if I had done this or hadn’t done that?” But, nothing is going to change the fact of whatever it is that happened, and beating yourself up on a guilt trip isn’t going to help either you or your child.
This stuff happens and hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20. I once thought I might write an article or a book entitled “Emergency Rooms of New England.” Our three children survived childhood and adolescence and have children of their own now. Whether their survival was because of our parenting or in spite of it we’ll never know.
But, in retrospect, the one thing I know is that my wife and I beat up on ourselves unnecessarily and without reason on some of those trips to the emergency room, thinking that there might have been something we could have done or not done to avoid those journeys. 
As painful as this is for my daughter and her husband, I should tell them that it likely will be the first of other such occasions as their two young sons grow to adulthood.
If you have kids you know what I’m talking about. 

I guess that we’re all trying to understand God as we struggle through life trying to find the reason for our own existence. Or, better yet, we’re all trying to find if God exists and if so for what purpose. 

Of course this entire quixotic journey is bound to result in either self delusion or futility and frustration. This is neither an intellectual nor an emotional journey, but rather one of experience. We experience our god through the way we live and in how we relate to our fellow creatures rather than finding this life force through words, logic or raw emotion. 

As humans we can rationalize almost any position that our emotions and psychological predisposition lead us to. God in the sky on a cloud… If that works for you… fine. Seeing god in a slice of pizza… even that might yield great emotional or psychological satisfaction. 
But to find the “authentic god “, all of the emotional and psychological constructs we make in our own minds must be accompanied by good works. To the extent that God or gods are anthropomorphic creations of our own minds, the best way to discover him or them is to live our lives the way our god(s) would have us do that (assuming that the Roman god Mars is not in the mix) Then in the end, if there is life after death we’ve touched the relevant bases. If not, we’ve lost nothing and experienced a good deal of satisfaction in life. 
Sounds a lot like Blaise Pascal, doesn’t it?

The thought just occurred to me that religious tradition and ritual, though often times nice and comforting, should not be a time capsule that prevents us from appreciating and participating in the dynamic and ongoing act of creation.
Tradition anchors the belief system in time and place and ritual serves as an identifying symbol of group membership. Together they do provide a link creating a fellowship or communion among previous and current generations of believers, though it is true that both tradition and ritual do evolve and change over time.  

The historic origins of our faith traditions and ritual seem less important though than how we live our present lives in conformity with those traditions. The microscopic examination of biblical texts (lectio divina) will do less to further the plan of our creator than using our limited time and energies to treat other sentient beings with loving compassion and care. 
Engaged listening, charitable acts and universal respect for others will go a long way to further the development of the Kingdom of God on this earth. 
Tradition and ritual – nice and comforting, but only a part of the story of faith. 

So, how do we experience the God within us? To say that we search for this internal God is a misnomer. The more we search , The less likely we are to find the object of our search. It is paradoxical though nonetheless true that the only way to “find” the God within us is to stop searching, to let go of all the temporal images, beliefs and legalisms and open ourselves to the awareness or presence of this life force, the life force we label “God”. 
We experience the awareness of God when we are truly present to others… when we open ourselves with compassion to the needs and the suffering of others. As a precursor to experiencing the presence of God within us, this empathy for others will lead us to that God. And then, sitting alone in the dark of the night, fully alert and open to God’s presence, the awareness of that life force will come from deep within us and remain with us. 
Our God does not come to us through the babble and confusion of daily life. This life force, deep within comes only through the stillness of our minds, through the quiet emanating from out of those depths and is present to us as we live our daily lives even as those lives would, on the surface, appear to be frenetic, random and sometimes driven. 
We each conceptualize God in different ways. For some of us the faith of our childhood remains real and comforting. While others are alienated from and hostile to an anthropomorphic God. But, God is beyond conceptualization, whether the god of children or the anthropomorphic God of the alienated.
The God beyond conceptualization…. the god within waits for us to drill down to open ourselves… to empty ourselves so that this God may find us… may reveal itself to us… may enfold us… may permeate our very being. Whatever image we may have in our minds of our God, we must go to that place within ourselves to experience the fullness and presence of that God. 

There are lots of comings and goings in our family, almost too many to recall. 

 With each going or leaving there is a bit of melancholy and with each coming there is much anticipation and subsequent gladness on arrival. 

As I write this Sheila and I are traveling from Durham, up near the Scottish border to London. We just spent about a week with our son, daughter-in-law and our three grandchildren. As exciting as it was to arrive, it was sad to leave. 

We arrived at the staton early for the 11:41 East Coast train from Edinburgh to London and waited in the terminal with our son and his 16 month old daughter Sarafina. We were playing peek-a-boo with her and anticipating the impending loneliness starting to creep up on us. She had finally gotten comfortable with us even to the point of allowing me to pick her up a couple of times. 

Fina needed her lunch and a nap so they had to go back to the car. I walked them out to the parking lot as the sadness of departure swept over me, wanting to hang on to them until the last possible moment. I kissed her and hugged her father tightly. I waited at the station and waved as they drove by, beating the meter maid dressed in black with a scowl on her face by about half a minute.  
Slowly the anticipation of returning to Durham began to creep into me as I thought of the excitement of our arrival, looking forward to that time when again we’re together at our next coming. 

In truth and in essence each of us is a theologian as we look for the purpose and meaning to our existence. You don’t need the Didache or the letters of Saint Paul to lead to the God within each of us. 
Searching for your god in semantics is destined to be either an exercise in futility or a quixotic quest of self-delusion.
Likewise, attempting to corral or limit your god through the use of a personal pronoun to describe “him” “her” or “it” is equally futile. 
There is an essence to our lives, the life force within us, the life force of creation, that to which we owe our existence and that which we share with all creation. Words are inadequate to describe this life force which we call God.
As a lawyer, I have spent my life’s work creating and shaping concepts using words, both oral and written, to create a visual image in the minds of the persons hearing or reading them. I know the inadequacy of semantics to capture even the mundane arising from our daily lives. 
Words are wholly inadequate as a vehicle to approach the ultimate meaning and purpose of existence. 
Especially when we base the search for our God on the words in biblical stories and other texts we are ultimately ordained to come up unfulfilled. Simply stated, words cannot capture the God within us.
We usually look at the stories that religion is founded on with a willing suspension of disbelief. We do not apply the same standards of critical intellectual and logical analysis to religious stories that we would otherwise use in everyday life.  
The stories themselves purport to evidence the workings and teachings of the god among us, the reputed God/man Jesus Christ. For certain, Jesus was a wonderful person, wise and spiritual, in touch with the God within himself as he is the “son of the Father”, to use words attributed to him. In such a way, perhaps we are all sons and daughters of this “Father”, creatures of this life force we define as the “Father.”
In seeking our God through semantics we willingly ignore the foibles of human recollection and communication.
The words we want to believe in to capture our God we call “divinely inspired “, dismissing the fact that people attending a meeting, a performance, a lecture or any such human intercourse are likely to come away with different impressions or interpretations of what they saw, heard our experienced. Was this tendency of human nature any different at the time of Jesus?
When we consider the circumstances under which these alleged stories and actions by Jesus occurred and the methods by which they were communicated, eventually recorded in written form and ultimately transmitted through different languages and cultures over centuries we can see that it it is plausible, even likely, that some distortion has taken place. 
Initially, whatever occurred did so within the then contemporary culture which alternatively seemed to be looking for a messiah warrior king, a god of power and might, a god who sought all honor and glory unto himself and/or a loving and humble God, a self-effacing God, an all knowing and all caring God of love who was concerned with all of the creatures of his creation. This loving God is also the god of the super computer who keeps tabs on each of us throughout history and in every aspect of his creation.
At the time of Jesus people saw in him what they wanted to see, this populist king of the Jews with a message that resonated with his followers however they perceived it. His image spread far and wide throughout the Judeo world and after his death far beyond to the then known world carried through the diaspora of his followers. 
His was a message consonant with what those who believed in him wanted to hear, though it was a message transmitted over time and distance and subject to all the imperfections of human communication. His was a message or story delivered initially in Aramaic, the contemporary language of Jesus, the vernacular of his culture, then likely further translated after his death into and through Greek, Hebrew and Latin and eventually into the myriad languages of our current era. 
These stories containing fragments of the life and teachings of Jesus are nice; they are good stories passed generation to generation, language to language by people who were inspired by them and who perceived them in a way consonant with their own spiritual needs and beliefs. 
Were there distortions of the facts as orally reported and transmitted over time and distance for generations? Our human experience of both perception and communication would suggest that this likely occurred.
If you want an all-powerful crusading god of wrath and vengeance who will separate “the wheat from the chaff”on the last day you can find him in Scripture. If on the other hand you seek a god of love tenderness and mercy, he’s there too.
What you want is what you get when you look for your god through semantics. Using words to search for the god within you is sure to result in either futility or self-delusion.

If the greatest commandment of the Christian God is to love then the actualization of love is through empathy. Empathy and compassion… recognizing and understanding the humanity in each person we interact with over the course of our lifetimes and acknowledging the pain and suffering of others beyond those with whom we have a relationship. 
We’ve all heard the story of the little girl standing in the middle of a school of beached starfish, stranded on the sand. As she’s throwing them one at a time back into the water an older man approaches her and says: “Young lady there are hundreds of fish stranded here; you can’t possibly make a difference.”
Picking up a starfish, she throws it back into the water and turning toward the stranger says: “I guess I made a difference for that one.”
We should all strive to make a difference where we can, to look on others who are struggling or suffering and try to help as best we’re able. Empathy is recognizing that another’s problem is our problem too. Compassion is being concerned with what you can do to help another deal with their problems.