Let the preacher say, you have permission to be sad!

In a book, When the Bartender Dims the Lights, Ron Evans writes:

“There’s a line I came upon in the musings of a preacher: On a Sunday morning many of the people sitting before you are the walking wounded, and you need to give them permission to be sad. In a world obsessed with happiness, where being great is all that matters, let the preacher say, you have permission to be sad. And in a world where old age becomes the golden years, where every problem can be fixed and every ailment cured, let the preacher say, you have permission to be sad. In a world preoccupied with prolonging life, where death is a forbidden word, let the preacher say, you have permission to die. And let the preacher say, you have permission to live in memories of a lonesome kind.” 

Today neither our culture nor our churches give us sufficient permission to be sad. Occasionally, yes, when a loved one dies or some particular tragedy befalls us, we are allowed be sad, to be down, tearful, not upbeat. But there are so many other occasions and circumstances in our lives where our souls are legitimately sad, and our culture, churches, and egos do not give us the permission we need to feel what we are in fact experiencing – sadness. When that is the case, and it often is, we can either deny how we feel and go through the motions of being upbeat, or we can give way to our sadness, but only at price of feeling there is something wrong with us, that we should not be feeling this way. Both are bad.

Sadness is an unavoidable part of life and not, in itself, a negative thing. In sadness, there is a cry to which we are often deaf.  In sadness, our soul gets its chance to speak and its voice is telling us that a certain frustration, loss, death, inadequacy, moral failure, or particular circumstance or season of our lives is real, bitter, and unalterable. Acceptance is our only choice and sadness is its price.  When that voice is not listened to, our health and sanity feel a strain.

For example, in a particularly challenging (raw) book, Suicide and the Soul, the late James Hillman states that sometimes what happens in a suicide is that the soul is so frustrated and wounded that it kills the body. For reasons too complex and many to know, that soul could not make itself heard and was never given permission to feel what it was in fact experiencing. At an extreme, this can kill the body.

We see this in a less-extreme (though also deadly) way in the phenomenon of anorexia among young women. There is an irresistible pressure from the culture (often coupled with actual bullying on social media) to have a perfect body. Unfortunately, nature doesn’t issue many of those. Thus, these young women need permission to accept the limitations of their own bodies and to be okay with the sadness that comes with that.  Unfortunately, this isn’t happening, at least not nearly enough, and so instead of accepting the sadness of not having the body they want, these young women are forced (no matter the cost) to try to measure up. We see its sad effects.

Psychotherapists, who do dream work with clients, tell us that when we have bad dreams, the reason is often that our soul is angry with us. Since it cannot make itself heard during the day, it makes itself heard at night when we are helpless to drown it out.

There are many legitimate reasons for being sad. Some of us are born with “old souls”, poets, over-sensitive to the pathos in life. Some of us suffer from bad physical health, others from fragile mental health. Some of us have never been sufficiently loved and honored for who we are; others have had our hearts broken by infidelity and betrayal. Some of us have had our lives irrevocably ripped apart by abuse, rape, and violence; others are simply hopeless, frustrated romantics with perpetually crushed dreams, agonizing in nostalgia. Moreover, all of us will have our own share of losing loved ones, of breakdowns of all sorts, and bad seasons that test the heart. There are a myriad of legitimate reasons to be sad.

This needs to be honored in our Eucharists and in other church gatherings. Church is not just a place for upbeat celebration. It is also supposed to be a safe place where we can break down. Liturgy too must give us permission to be sad.

D.H. Lawrence once famously wrote:

            The feeling I don’t have I don’t have.

            The feelings I don’t have, I won’t say I have.

            The feeling you say you have, you don’t have.

            The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have.

We need to be true to our souls by being true to its feelings.

As a child, I was taught that I had a guardian angel, a real angel given me by God to accompany me everywhere and protect me from danger. I remember a pious holy card given to me by my mother, showing a young boy playing dangerously close to the edge of a cliff and an angel protecting him there. Most Roman Catholics of my generation, I suspect, remember a pious prayer we prayed each day asking for the guidance and protection of our guardian angel: Angel of God, my guardian dear …

What’s to be said about guardian angels? Do such personified spirits really exist or are guardian angels simply creatures of our imagination created to be helpful in the religious development of children? Are we meant to outgrow our belief in them?

Whether or not we are meant to outgrow that belief, the fact is that today for the most part we have outgrown it. Most adults, within all Christian denominations, either see the existence of guardian angels as pious fantasy or are simply indifferent to the idea.

Are we still meant to believe in guardian angels? If yes, in what exactly are we meant to believe? Are angels real personified beings or simply another word for God’s presence in our lives?

Scripture scholars don’t give us a definitive answer but rather suggest that the question can be answered either way. In scripture, the word ‘angel’ might be referring to a real personified spirit or it might be referring to a special presence of God in some situation. Church tradition affirms more strongly that angels are real. Here angels have a rich history and for the most part are taken to be real persons (albeit spirits). Christian iconography and music abound with angels, and the Roman Catholic Church has major feasts celebrating angels and guardian angels. The Fourth Lateran Council (taking place in 1215, long before the Protestant Reformation) stated that belief in guardian angels is implicit in scripture. The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms that “from infancy to death human life is surrounded by their [guardian angels’] watchful care and intercession. Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life.”

Where does that leave us? Divided. Conservative Christians generally assert the existence of angels as a dogmatic teaching. Angels are real.  Liberal Christians tend to doubt that or at least are agnostic about it. For them, ‘angel’ more likely refers to a special presence of God. For example, they take the statement in the Gospels where the evangelist tells us that while Jesus was praying “an angel came and strengthened him” to mean that God’s grace came and strengthened him.

Who’s right? Perhaps it doesn’t matter since the reality is the same in either case. God gives us revelation, guidance, protection, and strength and does so in ways that are “angelic”, that are beyond our normal conceptualizations.

Those who believe that angels are real have a strong case. Even if we just look at the origins and dimensions of physical creation (whatever scientific version of this you subscribe to) mystery immediately dwarfs our imaginative capacities. It is all too huge to grasp! We know now that there are billions of universes (not just planets) and we know now that our planet earth, and we on this planet, are the tiniest of minute specks inside the unthinkable magnitude of God’s creation. If this is true, and it is, then this is hardly the time to be skeptical about the extent of God’s creation, believing that we, humans, are what is central and that there can be no personified realities beyond our own flesh and blood. Such thinking is narrow, both from the point of view of faith and from the perspective of science itself.

However, the agnosticism of those who doubt the existence of angels is ultimately benign. When scripture tells us that the Angel Gabriel appeared to Mary to announce her pregnancy and when it tells us that after Jesus had exhausted himself with struggle in Gethsemane, an angel came and strengthened him, it makes little difference whether this occurred via the modality of a personified spirit or via some other modality of God’s presence. Either way, it was real. Either way, it was a particularized, real entry of God into someone’s life.  

So, do we have guardian angels? At birth or at baptism does God assign a particular angel to journey with us throughout our lives, giving us invisible, heavenly guidance and protection?

Yes, we do have a guardian angel, irrespective of how we might imagine or conceive of this. God is closer to us than we are to ourselves and God’s solicitous love, guidance, and protection are with us always. At the end of the day, it matters little whether this comes through a particular personified spirit (who has a name in heaven) or whether it comes simply through God’s loving omnipresence.

God’s presence is real – and we are never alone, without God’s love, guidance, and protection.

We need to pray even when that seems the most lifeless thing to do. That’s a counsel from Michael J. Buckley with which we need to challenge ourselves daily. In the face of real life, prayer can often seem like the most lifeless thing to do. What difference does prayer make?

I will pray for you! Please keep me in prayer! Know that you have my prayers! We use those expressions all the time. I suspect not a day goes by that most of us do not promise to pray for someone. However, do we really believe our prayers make a difference? Do we really believe that our prayers can stop a pandemic, ease tensions within our communities, erase centuries-long misunderstandings among various religious denominations, cure someone dying of a terminal disease, bring our children back to church, or help someone forgive us? What can prayer do in the face of our own helplessness in a situation?

Jesus said there are certain demons that can only be cast out by prayer and fasting. I suspect that we find that easier to believe literally, in terms of an evil spirit being cast out of a person, than we believe that our prayer can cast out the more earthily demons of hatred, injustice, misunderstanding, division, war, racism, nationalism, bigotry, and bodily and mental illness. These are the real demons that beset our lives and even though we ask for God’s help in prayer, we don’t often do it with a lot of confidence that our prayers will make a difference. How can they?

The long history of Judaism and Christianity has taught us that God is not in the easy habit of positively interfering in nature and human life, at least not in ways that we can see. Miracles do happen, perhaps by the millions in ways that we cannot perceive. But, if we cannot see miracles, how are they real?

Reality has different modalities. There is the empirical and there is the mystical. Both are real, though both are not equally observable as an action of God in history. If a dead body rises from its grave (the Resurrection) or if a race of people walks dry shod through the Red Sea (the Exodus) that is clearly an intervention of God in our world, but if some world leader has a change of heart and is suddenly more sympathetic to the poor, how do we know what prompted that? Likewise, for everything else for which we pray. What inspired the insight that led to the discovery of a vaccine for the pandemic? Pure chance? A touch from above? You can ask that same question vis-à-vis most anything else we pray about, from the world situation to our personal health. What is the source of an inspiration, a restoration to health, a melting of a bitterness, a change of heart, a correct decision, or a chance meeting with someone that becomes a grace for the rest of your life? Pure chance, simple luck, or a conspiracy of accidents? Or does God’s grace and guidance positively touch you because of prayer, someone else’s or your own?

Central to our faith as Christians, is the belief that we are all part of one mystical body, the Body of Christ. This is not a metaphor. This body is a living organism, just as real as a physical body. Inside of a physical body, as we know, all parts influence each other, for good and for bad. Healthy enzymes help the whole body to retain its health and unhealthy viruses work at sickening the whole body. If this is true, and it is, then there is no such thing as a truly private action. Everything we do, even in our thoughts, influences others and thus our thoughts and actions are either health-giving enzymes or harmful viruses affecting others. Our prayers are health-giving enzymes affecting the whole body, particularly the persons and events to which we direct them. This is a doctrine of faith, not wishful thinking.

Earlier in her life, Dorothy Day was cynical about Therese of Lisieux (The Little Flower) believing that her isolation in a tiny convent and her mystical “little way” (which professed that our smallest actions affect the events of the whole world) was pious naiveté. Later, as Dorothy gave herself over to symbolic actions for justice and peace that in effect seemed to change very little in real life, she adopted Therese as her patron saint. What Dorothy had come to realize through her experience was that her small and seemingly pragmatically useless actions for justice and peace, were not useless at all. Small though they were, they helped open up some space, tiny at first, which slowly grew into something larger and more influential. By slipping some tiny enzymes into the body of the world, Dorothy Day eventually helped create a little more health in the world.

Prayer is a sneaky, hidden antibiotic – needed precisely when it seems most useless.

Recently at a workshop, a woman shared her anxiety about the death of her brother. Her older brother had died from the Covid virus before there were vaccines for it, and had died because he had dangerously exposed himself to catching the virus. However, he had exposed himself to that danger for a worthy reason. A military veteran, living alone, he used much of his salary and savings to cook meals and take them to feed homeless people living under a bridge in his hometown, Austin, Texas.

That certainly seems like a noble, Christian death, except that in his adult life he had lost any explicit faith in God and in Jesus, and self-defined as an agnostic (though with no antipathy towards religion). He simply didn’t believe in God or go to church anymore. His sister who shared this story, loved him deeply, admired his feeding the homeless, but worried about his dying outside of an explicit faith and the church. Her anxiety was compounded by her other brother, a Christian fundamentalist, who is firm in the belief that dying outside of the church puts one eternally outside of salvation; in brief, you end up in hell. At a gut-level, his sister knew that this could not be true. Still she was anxious about it and wanted some assurances that her fundamentalist brother was wrong and that her anxiety about her brother’s eternal salvation was a false fear.

What does one say in the face of that?  A number of things might be said. First, that the God who Jesus incarnated and revealed is a God who is in every way the antithesis of fundamentalism and of this sort of false fear about salvation. Jesus assures us that God reads the heart in all its complexity, including its existential complexity. A fundamentalist reads only a written rubric, not the goodness of a heart. As well, scripture describes God as ‘a jealous God’. This doesn’t mean God gets jealous and angry when we are preoccupied with our own things or when we betray God through weakness and sin. Rather, it means that God, like a solicitous parent, never wants to lose us and seeks every possible means to keep us for slipping away and hurting ourselves. Moreover, in the abstract language of academic theology, God has a universal will for salvation, and that means for everyone, including agnostics and atheists.

More specifically, Jesus gives us three interpenetrating perspectives that expose the narrowness of all fundamentalist thinking regarding who goes to heaven and who goes to hell.

First, he gives us a parable of a man who has two sons and he asks them both to work in his field. The first son says that he will not do it, but in fact ends up doing it; the second son says he will do the work, but ends up not doing it. Which is the true son? The answer is obvious, but Jesus reinforces the parable with this comment: It is not necessarily those who say ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but those who do the will of God on earth.

What this parable highlights is what theologians (from John Henry Newman through Karl Rahner) have tried to teach, namely, that someone can have a notional faith that in fact rings hollow in the light of true faith. Conversely, someone can explicitly deny what we hold in our notion of faith and yet in the light of what a genuine faith demands, have real faith since this is not necessarily manifest in one’s notion of faith but in the fruits of one’s life.

As well, we have Jesus’ shocking warning in Matthew 25 about how we ultimately will be judged for heaven or hell, namely, on whether or not we served the poor. This warning does not suggest that explicit faith and church attendance are of no consequence; they have their importance, but it is warning that there are things that are more important.

Finally, and perhaps most far-reaching in this regard, Jesus gives us the power to bind and loose. As parts of the Body of Christ, our love, like Jesus’ love, keeps a loved one connected to the community of salvation. As Gabriel Marcel puts it, to love someone is to say, you can never be lost. This woman’s love for her brother assures that he is not in hell.

All of this I might have said, but instead I simply referred to a wonderful quote from Charles Peguy the noted French poet and essayist. Peguy once suggested that when we die and appear before God, each of us will be asked this one question: “Where are the others?” (“Ou sont les autres?”). I assured the anxious woman she need not worry about her brother’s eternal salvation, despite his dying outside of an explicit faith and the church. When he stood before God and was asked the question (Where are the others?) he had a very good answer: They are under a bridge in Austin.

In a recent issue of Comment Magazine, Timothy Keller, theologian and pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, wrote an insightful essay entitled, The Fading of Forgiveness, within which he highlights how, more and more, forgiveness is being seen as a weakness and a naivete.

He begins by pointing to a couple of highly publicized incidents of forgiveness. In 2015, Dylann Roof shot nine members inside an African American church in South Carolina and was publicly forgiven by the relatives of his victims. And in 2006, when a gunman shot ten Amish children in a school room in Pennsylvania and then killed himself, the Amish community there not only forgave him, they went to visit his family and expressed sympathies to them for their loss. What was the general response? Admiration for extraordinary selflessness and virtue? No, not that. More generally, these instances of forgiveness were judged as naïve fundamentalism and as unhelpful.  Why? Why would these instances not be recognized instead both for what is most noble within humanity and for what is highest within religious virtue?

Keller suggests that there are a number of reasons for this, but he singles out two in particular. We are a “therapeutic culture” (where only our own truth and feelings matter) and a culture that has a “religion without grace” (its vision and virtue go no further than what echoes in our emotions and willpower).  Hence, our culture sees forgiveness more negatively than positively.  For it, forgiveness allows oppression to maintain its power and thus permits the cycle of violence and abuse to go on. Like a family refusing to stand up to an alcoholic member, it enables rather than stops the abuse and allows a sick situation to continue. Forgiveness then is a further injustice to the one who has been violated and can lead to a form of self-loathing, an acceptance of a humiliation destructive of one’s self-image, a further loss of dignity. Moreover, the moral pressure to forgive can be a further burden on the victim and an easy escape for the perpetrator. Is this logic correct?

From a purely emotional point of view, yes, it feels right; but it is wrong when scrutinized more deeply. First, it is evident that vindictiveness will only produce more vindictiveness. Vindictiveness will never soften a heart and help change it. Only forgiveness (analogous to dialysis) can take violence and hatred out of a relationship. As well, in the words of Martin Luther King, anyone devoid of the power of forgiveness is also devoid of the power of love. Why? Because each of us will get hurt by others and will hurt others in every one of our relationships. That is the price of community inside human inadequacy. Hence, relationships at every level, personal and social, can only sustain themselves long term if there is forgiveness.  

Moreover, with Jesus, forgiveness becomes singularly the most important of all virtues. It decides whether we go to heaven or not. As Jesus tells us when he gives us the Lord’s Prayer, if we cannot forgive others, God will not be able to forgive us. Why? Because the banquet table, eternal community of life, is only open to everyone who is willing to sit down with everyone. God cannot change this. Only we can open our hearts sufficiently to sit down with everyone.

Recently, given some of our ecclesial infighting, various groups have attempted to single out one specific moral issue as a litmus test for Christian discipleship. For many, this litmus test is abortion; others pick church attendance or some other issue. What might serve as a litmus test for Christian discipleship? Precisely this: the willingness to forgive. Can I forgive someone who has wronged me? Can I forgive someone whom I hate and who hates me? That challenge lies most central in Jesus’ teaching.

That being said, it must also be said that forgiveness is not simple or easy. That is why in the Judeo-Christian spirituality of Sabbath, there is a (too-little-known) spirituality of forgiveness. As we know, the command to celebrate Sabbath asks us to honor this cycle in our lives: Work for six days – rest for one day. Work for 7 years – rest for one year.  Work of seven times seven (forty-nine) years – have a major rest (sabbatical). Work for a lifetime – and then be on sabbatical for eternity.

Well that is also the cycle for forgiveness.  In the spirituality of Sabbath: You may hold a minor grudge for six days – then you need let it go. You may hold a major grudge for seven years – then you need to let it go. You may hold a soul-searing grudge for forty-nine years – then you need to let it go. You may hold a grudge that ruined your life until your deathbed – then you need to let it go. That is the final Christian moral imperative. Desmond Tutu once said, “without forgiveness there is no future”. True – on both sides of eternity.

Reading the Letters of Dorothy Day recently, I ran into this line, “doubtless we need a Savonarola as well as a St. Francis.” She was speaking about what spirituality needs in order to be healthy and balanced. That triggered something inside me, something I have never been able to sort out. I have always been comfortable, perhaps too much so, in both circles of piety and circles of iconoclasm. I’m drawn to the warmth of the Sacred Heart even as I am stimulated by Nietzsche, and I see Merton’s raw sense of humor as issuing forth from the same unique place within him as his faith, one leaning on the other.

One of my favorite spiritual writers is the Italian monk and hermit, Carlo Carretto. When you are reading a Carretto book, you are never sure what you will meet next in terms of either piety or its (seeming) opposite. On one page, he might be offering a handmade toy to the Blessed Virgin Mary to give the infant Jesus and a page or two later he will be offering a blistering critique of clericalism or calling on the Pope to shut present-day seminaries because he believes those training for the priesthood should be living with everyday families. Many of us are familiar with his “Ode to the Church” within which both his piety and his iconoclasm are manifest.

How much I must criticize you, my church and yet how much I love you!
How you have made me suffer much and yet owe much to you.
I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence.
You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness.
Never in this world have I seen anything more obscurantist, more compromised, more false, and yet never in this world have I touched anything more pure, more generous, and more beautiful.
Many times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face – and yet how often I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms!

Not many spiritual writers have this range on their keyboard. As Ernst Kasemann once said, the problem in the church and in the world is that the pious are not liberal and the liberal are not pious. Carretto was both. He could love the church, fiercely, piously, with childlike devotion, even as inside of that very devotion he could critically acknowledge and speak out against her faults. That’s a rare capacity, seen in some saints.

Dorothy Day, not unlike Carretto, was an exceptionally pious woman, a unanimity-minus-one defender of chastity in the circles she moved in, and a woman who believed that reverence was a non-negotiable moral virtue. Yet, like Carretto, she could be blistering in her criticism of piety whenever it was blind to injustice, racism, violence, and war. Small wonder her favorite saint was Therese of Lisieux, a pious nun tucked away in an obscure convent in France, writing mystical treatises on how much Jesus loves us.

Moreover, that patron saint Therese was herself a wonderful example of a piety that can look saccharine and yet have a disarming capacity for critical insight. Therese of Lisieux is the same person who, while posturing in her writings as a little girl, someone of no consequence, the Little Flower, can pivot radically and suddenly become the wise, aged Sophia, dishing out hard spiritual counsel: “Be careful not to seek yourself in love, you will end up with a broken heart that way.  I felt it more valuable to speak to God rather than to speak about Him, for there is so much self-love intermingled with spiritual conversations. There are no miracles, no raptures, no ecstasies – only service.” Therese had a keyboard that could play very diverse melodies.

The late Irish biblical scholar Jerome Murphy-O’Connor used say (partially tongue in cheek) that consistency is the product of small minds. What he was highlighting of course was that great minds aren’t simple, that they know the importance of nuance, that they don’t work in terms of black and white, that they can hold things in tension without prematurely resolving that, and that they can shock you equally in their capacity for reverence and for iconoclasm.

Jesus fits that description. He scandalized his contemporaries and continues to scandalize us with what seem like inconsistencies, but are really the capacity of a great mind and heart to hold truth in paradox, in tension. Small wonder there are so many Christian denominations today. We, his followers, cannot hold the whole truth together as he did and so we live out pieces of it rather than the whole Gospel. The same might be said for other great figures in history, like St. Augustine, who is cited alternately as the root for both orthodoxy and heresy in theology.

There are indeed real contradictions and genuine inconsistencies; but there is also the paradox seen in great minds, minds who know exactly when to honor an icon and when to smash it.

I wrote my doctoral thesis on the value of various philosophical arguments that try to prove the existence of God. Can there be such a proof? Brilliant philosophers, from Anselm, through Aquinas, through Descartes, through contemporary intellectuals like Charles Hartshorne, submit that the existence of God can be proven through rational argument. Except, except, a lot depends upon what exactly we mean by the word “prove”. How do we prove something?

There’s a legend about St. Christopher that’s pertinent here: Christopher was a man gifted in every way, except faith. He was physically strong, powerful, goodhearted, mellow, and well liked. He was also generous, using his physical strength to help others, but he found it hard to believe in God, even though he wanted to. For him, the physical was what was real and everything else seemed unreal. And so, as the legend goes, he lived his life in a certain honest agnosticism, unable to really believe in anything beyond what he could physically see, feel, and touch.

However, this did not prevent him from using his gifts, especially his physical strength, to serve others. This was his refuge, generosity and service. He became a ferryboat operator, spending his life helping to carry people across a dangerous river. One night, as the legend goes, during a storm, the ferryboat capsized and Christopher dove into the dark waters to rescue a young child. Carrying that child to the shore, he looked into its face and saw there the face of Christ. After that, he believed for he had seen the face of Christ.

For all its piety, this legend contains a profound lesson. It changes the perspective on the question of how one tries to “prove” God’s existence. Our attempt to prove God’s existence has to be practical, existential, and incarnate rather than mainly intellectual. How do we move from believing only in the physical, from believing only in the reality of what we can see, feel, touch, taste, and smell, to believing in the existence of deeper, spiritual realities?

There’s lesson in the Christopher story: Live as honestly and respectfully as you can and use your gifts to help others. God will appear. God is not found at the conclusion of a philosophical syllogism but as the result of a certain way of living. Moreover, faith is not so much a question of feeling as of selfless service.

There’s a further lesson in the biblical account of the apostle, Thomas, and his doubt about the resurrection of Jesus. Remember his protest: “Unless I can (physically) place my finger in the wounds of his hands and stick my finger into the wound of his side, I will not believe.” Note that Jesus offers no resistance or rebuke in the face of Thomas’ skepticism. Instead, he takes Thomas at his word: “Come and (physically) place your finger in the wounds of my hand and the wound in my side; see for yourself that I am real and not a ghost.”

That’s the open challenge for us: “Come and see for yourselves that God is real and not a ghost!” That challenge, however, is not so much an intellectual one as a moral one, a challenge to be honest and generous.

Skepticism and agnosticism, even atheism, are not a problem as long as one is honest, non-rationalizing, non-lying, ready to efface oneself before reality as it appears, and generous in giving his or her life away in service. If these conditions are met, God, the author and source of all reality, eventually becomes sufficiently real, even to those who need physical proof. The stories of Christopher and Thomas teach us this and assure us that God is neither angered nor threatened by an honest agnosticism.

Faith is never certainty. Neither is it a sure feeling that God exists. Conversely, unbelief is not to be confused with the absence of the felt assurance that God exists. For everyone, there will be dark nights of the soul, silences of God, cold lonely seasons, skeptical times when God’s reality cannot be consciously grasped or recognized. The history of faith, as witnessed by the life of Jesus and the lives of the saints, shows us that God often seems dead and, at those times, the reality of the empirical world can so overpower us that nothing seems real except what we can see and feel right now, not least our own pain.

Whenever this happens, like Christopher and Thomas, we need to become honest agnostics who use our goodness and God-given strengths to help carry others across the burdensome rivers of life. God does not ask us to have a faith that is certain, but a service that is generous and sustained. We have the assurance that should we faithfully help carry others, we will one day find ourselves before the reality of God who will gently say to us: “See for yourself, that I am real, and not a ghost.”

Can we prove that God exists? In theory, no; in life, yes.

Several weeks ago after giving a lecture at a religious conference, the first question from the audience was this one: How can you continue to stay in a church that played such a pivotal part in setting up and maintaining residential schools for the indigenous people of Canada? How can you stay in a church that did that?

The question is legitimate and important. Both in its history and in its present, the church has enough sin to legitimize the question. The list of sins done in the name of the church is long: the Inquisition, its support for slavery, its role in colonialism, its link to racism, its role in thwarting women’s rights, and its endless historical and present compromises with white supremacy, big money, and political power. Its critics are sometimes excessive and unbalanced, but, for the most part, the church is guilty as charged.

However, this guilt isn’t unique to the church. The same charges might be leveled against any of the countries in which we live. How can we stay in a country that has a history of racism, slavery, colonialism, genocide of some of its indigenous peoples, radical inequality between its rich and its poor, one that is callous to desperate refugees on its borders, and one within which millions of people hate each other? Isn’t it being rather selective morally to say that I am ashamed to be a Catholic (or a Christian) when the nations we live in share the same history and the same sins?

Still, since the church is supposed to be leaven for a society and not just a mirror of it, the question is valid. Why stay in the church? There are good apologetic answers on this, but, at the end of the day, for each of us, the answer has to be a personal one. Why do I stay in the church?

First, because the church is my mother tongue. It gave me the faith, taught me about God, gave me God’s word, taught me to pray, gave me the sacraments, showed me what virtue looks like, and put me in contact with some living saints. Moreover, despite all its shortcomings, it was for me authentic enough, altruistic enough, and pure enough to have the moral authority to ask me to entrust my soul to it, a trust I’ve not given any other communal entity. I’m very comfortable worshipping with other religions and sharing soul with non-believers, but in the church in which I was raised, I recognize home, my mother tongue.

Second, the church’s history is not univocal. I recognize its sins and openly acknowledge them, but that’s far from its full reality. The church is also the church of martyrs, of saints, of infinite generosity, and of millions of women and men with big, noble hearts who are my moral exemplars.  I stand in the darkness of its sins; but I also stand in the light of its grace, of all the good things it has done in history.

Finally, and most important, I stay in the church because the church is all we’ve got! There’s no other place to go. I identify with the ambivalent feeling that rushed through Peter when, just after hearing Jesus say something which had everyone else walk away from him, Peter was asked, “do you want to walk away too?” and he (speaking for all the disciples) replied: “We’d like to, but we have no place else to go. Besides we recognize that, despite everything, you still have the words of everlasting life.”

In essence, Peter is saying, “Jesus, we don’t get you, and what we get we often don’t like. But we know we’re better off not getting it with you than going any place else. Dark moments notwithstanding, you’re all we’ve got!”

The church is all we’ve got! Where else can we go?  Behind the expression, I am spiritual, but not religious (however sincerely uttered) lies either an invincible failure or a culpable reluctance to deal with the necessity of religious community, to deal with what Dorothy Day called “the asceticism of church life”. To say, I cannot or will not deal with an impure religious community is an escape, a self-serving exit, which at the end of the day is not very helpful, not least for the person saying it. Why? Because for compassion to be effective it needs to be collective, given the truth that what we dream alone remains a dream but what we dream with others can become a reality. I cannot see anything outside the church that can save this world.

There is no pure church anywhere for us to join, just as there is no pure country anywhere for us in which to live. This church, for all its checkered history and compromised present, is all we have. We need to own its faults since they are our faults. Its history is our history; its sin, our sin; and its family, our family – the only lasting family we’ve got.