Faith’s
Soft Proofs
Introduction
Week
of faith and doubt
These last couple of weeks
(Holy Week and Easter Week) has really been heavy on us. All day long the media
placed before us the frantic living and the much disputed dying of Terri
Schiavo. Sine fine the media also
placed before us the courageous attempt of Pope John Paul II to keep living
until he died. We have all been on a kind of spiritual retreat these past weeks
faced with vivid sights of life and death and also with inevitable questions of
faith and doubt.
That was especially true
this past week when Holy Mother Church paraded the adorned but very lifeless and faded body of John Paul II through the long corridors of the papal palace out
into the square of St. Peter’s on a beautiful spring day in Rome and then into
the basilica. The procession passed into St. Peter’s right under the very
loggia where 26 years before on
Just before entering the
basilica, the procession bearing the bier turned around as a final salute and
goodbye to the throngs in the square. Then it entered St. Peter’s and carried
the dead pope to the Altar of the Confession to be viewed by a river of
humanity endlessly flowing down the Via Conciliazione.
That unabashed display of a
dead body is not culturally comfortable, and it raised questions, spoken or
unspoken, about life and death, and about faith and doubt. John Paul’s death
during Easter Week was indeed very timely, for faith and doubt are the running
themes of the Easter season. Last Sunday we heard Jesus scolding Thomas saying,
“Shame on you for doubting just because you didn’t see me raised from the dead
when I appeared to the other Apostles. Blessed are those who have faith even though
they don’t see” (Lk
On
the road to Emmaus today, two of Jesus’ disciples were having their doubts
about Jesus risen from the dead. They weren’t
singing Easter alleluias. Their faces were very downcast. Their heads and shoulders were drooping. They
were “hoping that Jesus would be the glorious Messiah who would set
A documentary
After Islamic terrorists
drove two commercial airliners as weapons of mass destruction into the Twin
Towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, after the mushroom cloud
of soot and ashes finally settled, and after one whole year of hauling away 2
million tons of debris from ground zero, there appeared a documentary aired on
TV entitled Faith and Doubt at Ground
Zero.
There
was, indeed, doubt at ground zero. In the documentary Tim Lynston, a security
guard, who lost more than thirty friends that day, said, “It was so barbaric
the ways their lives were taken. Now I look upon God as a barbarian, and I
probably always will. I thought I was a
good Christian, but I have a different image of God now, and I can’t replace it
with the old image.”
Marina
Fontana, too, had her doubts at ground zero.
Her husband David was one of the 343 firefighters killed that day. She said, “I can’t bring myself to speak to
God anymore because I feel so abandoned. I guess deep down inside I know that
he still exists, and that I have to forgive him and move on, but I am not ready
to do that yet.”
But
there was also faith at ground zero. Another contributor to the documentary was
Terry McGovern. She is one of those many alienated Catholics whom we see all
over the place these days. 9/11 actually
helped to take the edge off her God-problem.
She said, “I guess 9/11 made me reexamine all my feelings, and I wonder
if I don’t need to reenter the church community. On some very deep level I want
the church’s teachings on spiritual life after death to be true. I need them to
be true.”
A mad
universe
In
a little volume entitled A View from the
Ridge, Morris West, a noted Australian novelist, writes that the strongest
compulsion to belief is not reason. It is not intellectual arguments or
rational proofs. It is need. We believe because we need to believe. “We cannot endure to live in a mad universe,” he
writes. “For our own sanity we need to make sense out of it.”
In
the same little volume West, who describes himself as an optimist, succinctly
proceeds to spell out this mad universe of ours. He writes, “We are conceived
without our consent and come whimpering into a mad universe with our death
sentence already written on the palms of our helpless hands: a cancer will eat
our guts, a fanatic with a sword will cut off our heads, a drunken fool will
mow us down with an automobile. There might be deferment of the death sentence
to a ripe old age of 80, but there is no amnesty from it.”
To his litany about this
mad universe of ours we add a litany of our own. On the day after Christmas
2004, a tsunami of astronomical proportion swept away 140,000 human beings. We
call these violent acts of nature “acts of God” because we don’t know what else
to call them.
And to those violent acts
of God we add also the violent “acts of man”: kids shooting up a whole high
school in Littleton, Colorado; skinheads beating
up Matt Shepard, a gay student from Wyoming University and leaving him to die
tied to a fence out in the country; white racists dragging a black man from
Jasper, Texas, behind their pickup until his head fell off; sociopaths like
Scott Peterson killing off his pregnant wife on Christmas eve or John Couey
abducting little Jessica from her bed to molest and kill her. And now the
latest violent “act of man”—Jeff Weise, a neo-Nazi, polishing off ten human
beings in another school massacre in Red Lake Minnesota.
And for many still living and who experienced
it in their own flesh or who, if they didn’t personally experience it, feel
morally bound to open themselves to its reality, the Holocaust puts the crown
on this mad universe of ours. The Holocaust is the ground zero of the twentieth century. Out of it loomed a mountain of doubt about
God as high as a pile of six million dead human beings—Jews. It was a pile of
doubt so high that it momentarily gave rise to a strange new brand of
theologians whose chief article of faith was that God is dead. He was killed by
the Nazis and is lying in the tomb which mad human beings built for him.
The
strongest compulsion to belief is not reason; it’s need. We need to make sense
out of a mad universe.
The leap of
faith
In the same little volume
Morris West, in his eightieth year, writes that he feels like a mountain climber
who after a long and arduous ascent has reached a height and then pauses to
catch his breath in order to muster up enough courage for last lap of his
journey. Thus his title, A View from the
Ridge.
Before me the
land falls steeply into a dark valley, beyond which I see (or I think I see)
the lights of the city which is the goal of my pilgrimage—the heavenly
Strange as it may seem, I am not afraid. I have accepted long since the fact that a
confession of faith is a confession of not knowing. I have accepted to trust
that the city does exist, that the lights are real, and that what awaits the
pilgrim is a homecoming. I cannot prove it. I accept it with trust.
“I
cannot prove it. I accept it with trust.” He’s speaking about what’s frequently
referred to as the “leap of faith.” But that’s sometimes conceived as a kind of
sheer shot in the dark, as a matter of closing our eyes and gritting our teeth
and believing with absolutely no proof at all, that the city—the heavenly
Jerusalem--does, indeed, exist and that its lights are real and that what
awaits the pilgrim is a homecoming.
At
the end of the day, there are proofs
for God and faith. But these proofs are found only by those who are in touch
with this mad universe of ours, and who have a need to make sense out of it.
For those who are slap-happy, or who are short on grey matter, or who aren’t
given to thinking, faith and doubt isn’t a problem. Such people don’t doubt
because they don’t think. Such people also don’t really believe because they
have never really worked hard at trying to make sense out of a mad universe.
A friend
trying to make sense
A close friend was battling
ovarian cancer which this mad universe imposed upon her for two long years. She
would scan the internet for medically scientific cures and bring them to her
oncologists to help them cure her. Being good doctors who knew that they didn’t
know everything, they took her seriously.
One Christmas she sent a
long canned letter about family members whom I barely knew. I rapidly cruised
through it and came to her bottom line. It gave me deep pause.
My struggle with ovarian cancer continues, and I’ve run out of options
in chemotherapy drugs. My body has become very weak, and I doubt that I would
be able to tolerate any more chemo. Tests show the cancer continues to grow. We
had a gathering of our family, and a hospice nurse came to speak to us about
the program. After the holidays, I plan to enter a home hospice program.
She had written previously at Easter,
I like spring a lot. It's a time when so many things are giving just
the slightest inkling, the smallest sign, that perhaps things aren't really
what they appear to be--dead. Trees aren't really dead at all. Seeds aren't
really lifeless pebbles. There is a lady
cardinal taking twigs, one at a time, to a secret place in the fir tree. It's
the merest whisper of a promise of things to come. The poet Milton, I believe, called them
“intimations of immortality.”
As I look back on those
words of hers I hear her struggling to make sense out of her mad world and the
cancer eating away at her.
Conclusion
Faith’s soft proofs
My
friend entered the hospice program after Christmas that year and died shortly
after. She didn’t die with a faith that was a sheer shot in the dark. She
didn’t die with her teeth clinched. She died with a smile on her face. Because
she needed to make sense out of her mad universe, she died with proofs down
deep within herself that the city towards which she was journeying—the heavenly
She
found her proofs not in creeds or catechisms or in pronouncements of the
ecclesiastical magisterium. Though she lived in a mad universe, she found her
proofs embedded in that very same universe--in breath-taking
panoramas, in awesome sunrises and sunsets, in nesting cardinals and robins, in
burgeoning springs, in glowing Easter vigils, in the blessed events in her
family, in Sunday assemblies that were veritable
Soft proofs they are. Beautiful proof they
are. Loving proofs they are. At the end of the day they’re the only proofs
powerful enough to overcome a mad universe.