“And when you pray, do not imitate the hypocrites: they love to say their prayers standing up in the synagogues and at street corners for people to see them. … But when you pray, go to your private room, shut yourself in, and so pray to your Father who is in that secret place.” (Matthew 6, 5-6)

For whatever reason, as churches and as individuals, we have been slow to take seriously Jesus’ warnings against displaying our piety in public.  Yet Jesus is very clear, and very strong, in warning us not to do intimate private acts of prayer, devotion, and asceticism in public.  Moreover, in this warning, he doesn’t distinguish as to whether these acts come from a sincere heart or a false one. Sincerity or insincerity is not the only issue that concerns him. Public display of piety, however sincere, is also the problem.

Why? What’s wrong with public displays of piety? Don’t they serve as an inspiration to others?

What’s wrong with putting our private hearts on display in public might be answered in one word: aesthetics. It’s bad art, art that irritates more than it inspires. It’s unhealthy exhibitionism. Why?

Because piety is a form of intimacy and intimacy needs propriety. Intimacy is a deep private bond between persons and that private bond demands that deep intimate expressions of affection should be done in private.

This isn’t abstract. We all know that love should be made behind closed doors. Intimacy, in its very structure, demands discretion, privacy, propriety, a shielding from public gaze, something which the early church called the discipline arcane. That’s why we find ourselves uncomfortable when we see people who are too openly affectionate in public. Our spontaneous reaction, to avert our eyes, to feel uncomfortable, to wish this wasn’t happening in front of us, is a healthy one because what we are seeing is an unhealthy exhibitionism, even if the affection between the two persons is healthy. It’s not the love that’s wrong; it’s the public display that’s unhealthy. Intimate affection needs to be more sacred in guarding itself with privacy and propriety.

The same is true for private prayer, private devotions, and private acts of penance. Whether sincere or not, public display of them is unhealthily exhibitionistic. When Jesus warns us to do our private prayers and our private penances behind closed doors he is, admittedly, warning against hypocrisy, against being seen as good as opposed to actually being good. But he is also warning against the public display of private devotion itself, no matter how sincere.

For example, the early church practiced something it called the discipline arcane. This was a practice within which any Christian who had been baptized and was participating in the Eucharist was forbidden to bring a non-baptized friend to the Eucharist or even describe to another person what happens at a Eucharist. The instinct here was not to create some kind of secret cult around the Eucharist, but to guard its intimacy. For them, the Eucharist was like making love, something done behind closed doors.

I was lucky enough to see this healthily enacted in my own parents, both in their prayer lives and in their relationship to each other. My mother and father had a deep affection for each other and clearly made love a lot behind closed doors. But they never put that affection on public display. Indeed, and the family smiles about this now, we would sometimes catch them holding hands and sitting together when they thought nobody was around. Their prayer lives were the same. Both had a deep faith marked by piety, but both were also careful to keep their more intimate acts of prayer and devotion private. Both too tended to cringe when they saw too overt a display of either affection or piety in public. Perhaps that’s why I have a certain genetic resistance to overt displays of piety.

But, for the most part, we have been reluctant to take Jesus’ warning on this seriously.  Sometimes in fact the reverse is true and public display of private devotion is held up as an ideal. To cite an example: Several years ago, I was at a Sunday mass which was being presided over by an Auxiliary Bishop. Just before he was to receive communion, in front of a congregation of more than 500 people, he, in all sincerity and reverence, put his arms on the altar, placed his face down inside his arms, and stayed in that posture of adoration for over a minute, while the entire congregation had nothing to do but to watch him make that private act of reverence. At the time, I was only irritated by something that I considered out of place, bad timing, bad art, but I was more taken aback afterwards by comments outside the church: “Wasn’t that wonderful!” “What a deep faith!”

Deep faith, probably.  Wonderful, no. There’s a good reason why we spontaneously squirm in the face of overt gestures of intimacy that are meant really to express private emotion.

The laws of mathematics and physics have forever been one of our great constants. They are predictable and reliable, not given to strange surprises. But now, more and more, scientists are finding that even the laws of physics sometimes offer unexpected surprises and exhibit a freedom that leaves us baffled. Freedom, it seems, is everywhere.

Novelists have always known this.  A novelist creates an imaginary character, begins to write a story, and then discovers that this character doesn’t always want to follow what the author had in mind for her. She becomes her own person, develops her own attitude, goes her own way, and shapes the story in a way that the novelist never intended. In the end, partly independent of the author, each character writes his or her own story.

In a new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller takes this concept and uses it to offer a wonderful challenge within which each of us is invited to edit our own life so as to make our story a better and more noble one.

He does this through a series of autobiographical essays within which he challenges himself to write a better story with his own life and then invites his readers to each edit our own lives so as to build a story which is more interesting and more noble, one which, like a great movie, will leave its audience in tears and longing to do better things with their lives when the final credits roll.

Here’s how he describes this: “So I was writing my novel, and as my characters did what they wanted, I became more and more aware that somebody was writing me. So I started listening to the Voice, or rather, I started calling it the Voice and admitting there was a Writer. I admitted that something other than me was showing me a better way. And when I did this, I realized the Voice, the Writer, who was not me, was trying to make a better story, a more meaningful series of experiences I could live through.” 

His writing is brilliant but deceptive. Because of his particular genre, he can seem almost superficial at times, but, in the end, what you get is a combination of David Sedaris (wit, playful self-effacement), Annie Lamott (earthy, disarmingly direct), Kathleen Norris (outstanding common sense, intelligence), Henri Nouwen (an honest look at yourself) and Ignatius of Loyola (good rules for discernment and a bit of a guide to everything). Donald Miller runs all of this through a blender.

Initially, as I read the first chapters, I was taken only by his language and not by his content. He sounded more the comic wit than the wise elder. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, and this is his genius,  depth, idealism, Christian vision, disarming common sense, and his real challenge begin to seep through, becoming clearer and more inviting as his story goes on.   

Here’s an example of both his writing and his depth. In this a passage he shares how he discerns the real voice of God from the many false, neurotic voices that he, and most everyone else, commonly can confuse with God’s voice:

 “As a kid, the only sense I got from God was guilt, something I dismissed as a hypersensitive conscience I got from being raised in a church with a controlling pastor. But that isn’t the voice I’m talking about.  … The real Voice is stiller and smaller and seems to know, without confusion, the difference between right and wrong and the subtle delineation between the beautiful and the profane. It’s not an agitated Voice, but ever patient as though it approves a million false starts. The Voice I am talking about is a deep water of calming wisdom that says: Hold your tongue; don’t talk about that person that way; forgive the friend you haven’t talked to; don’t look at that woman as a possession; I want to show you the sunset; look and see how short life is and how your troubles are not worth worrying about; buy that bottle of wine and call your friend and see if he can get together, because, remember, he was supposed to have that conversation with his daughter, and you should ask him about it.”

And that Voice, he says, is forever saying to us: “Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create it even as I have created you.”

In the end, this book is a healthy apologetic for faith, morality, decency, and God, the kind of challenge we badly need today. I was given the book by friend who has a twenty-something daughter who has long protested her doubts about God and, not least, her agnosticism about the church. This young post-Christian, my friend said, found the book on the kitchen table, picked it up out of curiosity, and then read it cover to cover, admitting that she was much challenged by it.

Now that’s not a bad endorsement!

Focus on your image, because image is everything! Those words or at least words to that effect, were the caption of a famous ad several years ago. I remember being taken aback by its crass and shallow message, but not many people reacted, perhaps because the caption is so true to our time.

We are a people obsessed with appearance, with image, with looking good, with being good-looking. For us today, by and large, it is more important to look good than to be good, to look healthy than to be healthy, to say the right things than to do the right things, to be connected to the right persons than to be the right persons, and to be perceived as having character than to actually have character.

This is evident in our obsession with physical appearance, in the hagiography we accord to our celebrities, in the importance we give to style and fashion, and in our efforts to be perceived as connected to the right things. Image really is everything!

We see this, for example, in politics: In public life today image trumps substance. Invariably we are care less about someone’s policies than about his or her appearance and we elect people to public offices more on the basis of persona than on intellect and character. In politics today it is more important to have the right image, to be able to surround yourself with the right energy, than it is to have substance and character.

The academic world follows suit: For example, more and more of our universities are giving honorary degrees to celebrities and justice advocates. There’s nothing wrong with that, especially in recognizing and honoring men and women who have given their lives for justice, except that I doubt that the universities handing out those degrees actually care much about the poor or that they intellectually endorse what the entertainment and sports industries (who produce most of these celebrities) are doing. But the face of a celebrity, a Nelson Mandela, an Angelina Jolie, a Meryl Streep, a Michael Jordan, or a Derek Jeter looks really good on the public face of the university giving that degree: Just look at how caring, energetic, and beautiful we are!

Unfortunately many of those same universities are not exactly models of care and justice when dealing with their own students and employees, but they are very caring in how they are perceived from the outside. Giving a doctorate to someone who has given his or her life in the struggle for justice doesn’t in fact do much for the poor, but it does do a something for the institution that is honoring him or her.

But before we judge this too harshly, we should admit that what is happening in the public sphere is also happening in our private lives. More and more, in our lives, appearance is what we are most concerned about. For many of us, how we look is the first thing, the whole thing, and the only thing. It’s not so important that we be good, only that we look good. It is no small irony that we are so outraged and indignant about how much money our governments spend on their defense budgets, even as we live in a certain blissful ignorance of what each of us, personally, spend on our personal defense budgets, cosmetics and fashion.

Sadly we are paying a high price for this. Our concern to look good is crucifying us. We are growing ever more dissatisfied with our own bodies, even when they are healthy and serving us well. A healthy self-image today is more contingent upon looking good than on actually being healthy. The prevalence of anorexia, among other things, is a symptom of this and, too often, our dieting and exercise have less to do with health than with appearance.

Granted, not all of this is bad. To be concerned about physical appearance is healthy, as are (most times at least) dieting and exercise. We are meant to look good and, in fact, we feel better about ourselves when we do look good. It is a healthy thing to feel good about your body and your health. A healthy concern about how we look should never be denigrated in the name of depth or sanctity. Indeed one of the first signs of clinical depression is lack of concern about appearance.

The same holds true for how we are perceived from the outside. A good reputation is thing to be guarded and defended. It is important to look good.

But appearance and reputation should never replace character, depth, and integrity, just as the claim of substance and character is never an excuse for a shoddy and sloppy appearance. Today, however, I suggest that we have lost the proper balance and stand in a certain peril. Of what?

When image is everything, gradually, without us noticing, appearance begins to look like character, celebrity begins to look like nobility of soul, and looking good becomes more important than being good.

Sometime after his 70th birthday, Morris West wrote an autobiography which he entitled, A View from the Ridge. By ridge, he meant the angle that 70 years of living had given him.

And what he offers is an exceptionally mature perspective on life.

When you get to be 75 years old, West says, your vocabulary should be pretty simple. You only need to have two words left: “Thank you!” Gratitude is the real mark of genuine maturity, of spiritual health. Don’t ever be fooled about this.

Moreover, for West himself, gratitude wasn’t easy to come by. His life, as his autobiography makes clear, had its share of hurts and rejections; not least by the church which he loved. So his story also highlights that gratitude is predicated on forgiveness, on letting go of hurts, on not letting the past bitterly color the present. To be grateful is to be forgiving.

And we all have hurts, deep hurts. Nobody comes to adulthood, let alone to old age, without being deeply hurt. Alice Miller, the renowned psychologist, puts it this way: All of us, from the time that we are infants in the cradle until we are self-possessed enough to write an autobiography like Morris West’s, are not adequately loved, not adequately cared for, not adequately recognized, not adequately valued, and not adequately honored. Moreover all of us also suffer positively some rejection and abuse. None of us is spared life’s unfairness. She calls this the drama of the gifted child, namely, the drama of being a unique, sensitive, intelligent, deep, and gifted person who in this life is never quite loved enough, recognized enough, respected enough, or honored enough, and who is sometimes positively rejected and abused. Small wonder that it is easier to be bitter than grateful, paranoid than hospitable, angry than gracious.

What can we do about this, beyond first of all admitting that we do nurse a grudge against life?

Miller suggests the most important task of mid-life and beyond is that of grieving. We need, she says, to cry until the foundations of our life are shaken. At a certain point in our lives the question is no longer: “Am I hurt?”. Rather it’s: “What is my hurt and how can I move beyond it?” It’s like having been in a car accident and carrying some permanent scars and debilitations. The accident happened, the limp is there, nothing is going to reverse time, and so our only real choice is between bitterness and forgiveness, between anger and getting on with life, between spending the rest of our lives saying “if only!” or spending the rest of our lives trying to enjoy the air, despite of our limp.

An important idea within the Jewish and Christian concept of the Sabbath is the notion that, while the celebration, rest, enjoyment, and prayer of the Sabbath is largely for its own sake, these are also in function of something practical, namely, forgiveness. We are meant to rest regularly, pray regularly, celebrate regularly, and enjoy life regularly both because this is what we will be doing in heaven and because, by doing these, we might find within us the heart we need to forgive.

It’s no accident that, often times, our vacations don’t really do for us what they should: We get over-worked and tired and we look forward to a vacation, some time away to rest, to relax with friends, to drink wine and enjoy the sun. Then we take a vacation and do, in fact, very much enjoy it. Sadly though, within days or weeks after we return we find ourselves as tired as we were before the vacation. What happened? Why didn’t our vacation work?

Our vacation didn’t work because we didn’t forgive anybody. We didn’t let go of any grudges. The most tired and stressed part of us didn’t get to go on vacation, didn’t get to let go and relax, and didn’t find itself warmed by wine and friends. It stayed cold, anxious, stressed, over-worked. There’s a tiredness that cannot be cured by a good sleep, a good vacation, or by the right time with the right friends with the right wine, and it’s the deepest tiredness inside us. It’s the tiredness that stings because of hurt, that’s cold because it hasn’t been loved, that’s calloused because it has been cruelly cut, and that burns with resentment because of the neglect and rejection it has experienced. This is a bone, deep tiredness that isn’t cured by a vacation, but only by forgiveness.

There is only one ultimate imperative in life: Before we die, we need to forgive. We need to forgive those who hurt us, to forgive ourselves for not being any better than those who hurt us, to forgive life itself for some of the things that it dealt us, and, not least, to forgive God for the fact that life is unfair, so as not to die with a bitter and angry heart.

Gratitude is the fruit of that struggle.

Many of us today tend to be intimidated by any kind of knowledge that makes scientific claims. Who dares argue with science? Who dares argue with the experts? Very few, and those who do are easily dismissed as backward or ignorant.

And so inside of our lives, objectified expertise generally trumps moral insight or, worse still, is simplistically identified with it. Truth is truth, science has the truth, and science trumps our moral concerns (which can be made to appear parochial and fear-based in the face of scientific claims). Thus the idea is prevalent that we should listen to the scientific experts when it comes to discerning the truth.

But is it really that simple? And who really are the experts? What makes someone an expert? A post-graduate degree? Being a mother who’s raising her family well? Being a respected researcher? Living a good life? Being steady and faithful? There are various kinds of experts.

Moreover there is also the issue of personal integrity and how this relates to “expertise”. What’s to be said for the truth of someone who produces scientific insight but who leads an unhealthy life? Does man or a woman’s personal life affect his or her research and professional expertise?

Many great thinkers – philosophers, theologians, and even scientists – would say that it does. Truth can never be divorced from moral insight since truth and morality are really one at their base. Hence personal integrity or lack of it in any researcher or scholar in some way does color his or her expertise, however imperceptible this might be on the surface. How?

Aristotle, for example, had a concept he called phronesis, which taught that it is impossible to separate the teaching of truth from the practice of virtue. For Aristotle, genuine knowledge, the type that ultimately makes you a better human being, could not issue forth from someone whose intellectual theory and personal moral life were radically out of sync.

Albert Einstein, in effect, said that it is impossible to do research that does not include a lot of me-search. Who we are and what perspective we have on reality will always help determine how we see the world and articulate any theory about it. And who we are and our perspective on reality is always partly shaped and deeply colored by our own moral lives. Our moral lives deeply influence our research because they help shape our eyesight.

The medieval mystic, Hugo of St. Victor, had an axiom for this: Love is the eye! For him, our eyesight is largely shaped by either the love or bitterness that is inside of us at any moment. When I look at the world with love, I see it one way; when I look at the world with bitterness, I see it another way. That’s also true for every researcher. Granted mathematics is beyond emotion, but the realities to which we apply it aren’t.

Finally, and not least, Jesus teaches that we see the world accurately only to the extent that we are pure of heart. When he said this he wasn’t just talking about having purity of heart in order to see straight religiously, he was affirming that purity of heart is a pre-condition in order to see straight in every way, religiously, morally, practically, and scientifically.

What we see through a microscope is partly colored by how we are feeling about life in general and how we are feeling about life in general is deeply colored by how we are living morally.

And so what’s the lesson?

The lesson here is not the one that you sometimes hear in circles of fundamentalist religion, namely, that we should stop listening to scientists, academics, and technological experts and should try to dispute their insights by using scripture. Our task is not to become defensive about the findings of the various professional academies, to stop studying.

Rather, these are the lessons:

First, honor the findings of genuine science and research even if you aren’t always enthralled about their source. All truth has one author, God. Thus God is the source of the bible and God is also the source of science and its findings. Accept truth in all its guises, but be less intimidated by the teachings of those experts who claim scientific objectivity without acknowledging their own limits, their own hidden judgments, and their own biases, particularly when their truth touches questions of health, meaning, morality, and happiness. A good researcher admits elements of me-search, is humble about the truth.

Next, recognize that expertise is a wide charism that issues forth from many circles. There are experts in science, but there are also experts in goodness, in love, in friendship, in kindness, in fidelity, in hope, in peace-making, in courage, in prayer, in honesty, in chastity, in aesthetics, in practical sanity, and in humor.

When you are looking for stars by which to guide your life scan the heavens widely. Don’t lock-in on one narrow corner. There are many stars, each with its own particular expertise in giving off light.

G.K. Chesterton once said that one of the reasons he believed in Christianity was because of its belief in the trinity. If Christianity had been made up by human person, it would not have at its very center a concept that is impossible to grasp or explain: the idea that God exists as one but within in three persons.

How do we understand the trinity? We don’t! God, by definition, is ineffable, beyond conceptualization, beyond imagination, beyond language. The Christian belief that God is a trinity helps underscore how rich the mystery of God is and how our experience of God is always richer than our concepts and language about God.

This is already evident in the history of religion. From the very beginning, humans have always had an experience of God and have worshipped God. However, from the very beginning too, humans have also had the sense that God is too rich and too-beyond any one set of categories to be captured in any human conception. Hence most ancient peoples were polytheistic. They believed in many gods and goddess. They experienced divine energy and the need to celebrate divine energy in many different areas of their lives and had gods and goddesses to accommodate that. Thus they had gods and goddesses for every longing and every circumstance, from war, through growing crops, through sex, through understanding why your father wouldn’t bless you, there was a god or goddess to whom you could turn.

Sometimes they believed in one supreme god who ultimately ruled over lesser gods and goddesses, but they sensed that divine energy was too rich a reality to be contained in a single being. They believed too that sometimes the gods were at war with each other. As well, their gods and goddesses often times messed around within human lives, making special deals with humans, having affairs with them, and sometimes even having children with them.

Many of the most powerful myths ever told arose out of the experience of God’s overwhelming richness and the ancient peoples’ incapacity to conceptualize God and God’s activity in any singular way. Whatever else might be said about polytheism and ancient myths about the gods and goddesses, ancient religious practices and the incredible canon of mythology that these produced speak of how rich, untamed, and beyond simplistic imagination and language is the human experience of God. The ancients believed that their experience pointed to the existence of many deities.

And then a massive shift took place: Judaism, soon followed by Christianity and Islam, introduced the strong, clear, doctrinaire idea that there is only one God. Now all divine power and energy was seen as coming from a single source, monotheism, YHWH, the Father of Jesus, Allah. There were no other gods or goddesses.

But from the time of Jesus’ resurrection onwards, Christians began to struggle with simple monotheism. They believed that there is still only one God, but their experience of God demanded that they believe that this God was somehow “three”. Stated simply, when Jesus rose from the dead Christians immediately began to attribute divinity to him, yet without identifying him as God the Father. Jesus was understood to be God, but somehow different from God the Father. Moreover, inside of their experience, they sensed still a third divine energy which they couldn’t fully identify with either Jesus or God the Father, the Holy Spirit.

This experience left them in a curious and sometimes perplexed state: They were monotheists, God alone was God. Yet, Jesus too was God, as was the Holy Spirit. Their experience of grace and God’s action in the world was at odds with their simplistic conception of monotheism.

God was one and yet God was somehow three. How to fit this together? It took Christianity three hundred years to finally arrive at a formula that somehow honored the richness of the Christian experience of God. The Council of Nicea in 325 gave us the creedal formula we profess today: There is one God in three persons; except they wrote that formula in Greek and the words there state literally that God is one substance in three subsistent relations.

That formula isn’t meant to give us perfect clarity. No formula can ever capture the reality of God because God is too rich to ever be captured, even half adequately, in imagination, thought, and word. The God that atheism rejects is precisely a conceptualized God, a God captured in a picture. In the end, atheism is less faithful to human experience than was polytheism which more rightly sensed deity, gods and goddesses, hidden under every rock.

To what does this call us?

To humility. All of us, believers and atheists, need to be more humble in our language about God. The idea of God needs to stretch, not shrink, the human imagination. Our actual experience of God, just as for ancient polytheism, is forever eating away at all simplistic conceptions of God. Thank God, for the complexity of the doctrine of the Trinity!

Several years ago, William Young wrote a novel which was both much-read and much-debated. Entitled “The Shack”, it told the story of a man whose young daughter had been kidnapped and brutally murdered. The man, struggling with a bitter anger, is invited by mysterious note to come alone to the shack within which his daughter had been murdered. Expecting to find the murderer there, he prepares himself for brutal struggle. But he meets God in the shack instead.

What follows is wonderfully warm and theologically fertile portrayal of the trinity. But the wonderfully open, warm, embracing, nurturing, all-forgiving God that William Young’s character meets does have one, hard, non-negotiable condition for getting to heaven: He has to forgive, not just his daughter’s murderer, but everyone, absolutely everyone, if he is to ultimately join the community of the blessed. He can go to heaven, but not if he continues to carry his anger.

Whatever ecclesial deficiencies Young’s critics have accused him of, he is dead right and powerfully challenging on this central point, letting go of anger and bitterness is a non-negotiable condition for going to heaven. Indeed, I’m convinced that there comes a point in our lives where we need only three words in our spiritual vocabulary: Forgive, forgive, forgive. Morris West, in a short autobiographical essay that he wrote to celebrate his 75th birthday, phrases this more positively. He states that, upon arriving on your 75th birthday, you should only have one phrase left in your vocabulary: Thank you!

Gratitude is the opposite of anger and we have too little gratitude in our lives. We are generally more angry than grateful. Moreover, to the extent that we even admit that we are angry, we tend to rationalize this by either dogma or cause: “I’m angry, but with cause! Mine is a righteous anger, like Jesus’ when he upset the tables of the money-changers in the temple!” “Sure I’m angry, but why shouldn’t I be, given how the conservatives have killed the openness of the past generation, re-entrenched a new intolerance into both the church and this country, and have no conscience for the poor!” “Sure I’m angry, but why shouldn’t I be, given what the liberals are doing to this church and this country! Just look at abortion and gay marriage!”

We should be cautious in flattering ourselves in this way: Unlike Jesus crying over Jerusalem, our tears are generally not warm tears of love and sadness over division and misunderstanding. Our tears, when there are tears are all, are generally cold tears of bitterness and anger at the sense of having been wronged or of having to live in our churches and our society with people whom we consider ill-willed, lazy, small-minded, or just plain ignorant. We are more like the older brother of the prodigal son, doing mostly the right things, outwardly faithful in our religious and moral duties, but shackled with bitterness and a deep-down anger that makes it hard, or even impossible, for us to enter the dance, to let go, to forgive.

Too few of us admit that we carry a lot of anger inside of us, that there are places in us that are bitter and resentful, and that there are still certain persons, incidents, and events in our lives that we haven’t forgiven.

As well, to camouflage our anger we like to make a public display of our generosity and goodness. We tend to make a show to family and friends of how nice we are by praising someone lavishly and then, almost in the same sentence, call someone else a name, slander someone, or speak viciously or sarcastically about someone. This proclivity to divide others into either “angels” or “demons” is a sure indication of anger inside of us. We make a display of praising certain people (a display meant more to publicly exhibit how nice we are than to highlight someone else’s virtues) and then bitterly complain about how awful some other people are and how we are forever surrounded with idiots. Both the praise and the complaint testify to the same thing, we are living with anger.

Honesty and humility should eventually bring us to admit this. We all carry some angers and we should not deceive ourselves on this. We need courage and honesty to face up to this.

Perhaps we could take a lesson from groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and introduce ourselves to each other, or at least to our confessors, in this way:

“My name is Ron, and I’m an angry person. I rationalize this by telling myself and others that my anger is justified, that I’m like Jesus, kicking over the tables of the money-changers to cleanse God’s house. But I have come to realize that this is self-deception, simply a way rationalizing my own hurt. As I get older, I realize that I’m like the older brother of the prodigal son; I am standing outside the circle of warmth and community. But, the good news is that I’m in recovery.”

In certain circles it is believed that science trumps religion. The idea is simple and uncompromising: Religion cannot stand up to science. The hard facts of science ultimately render faith untenable. Coupled with this is the idea that faith and religion sustain themselves by naiveté and lack of courage, that is, if one ever looked at the hard facts with enough intellectual courage, he or she would be forced to admit that faith and religion go against the evidence of science.

Ironically, this conception finds itself most at home within the most arrogant circles of science and the most fundamentalist circles of religion. These groups may hate each other but they have this in common, both believe that science and religion are incompatible.

What’s wrong with that notion? Good science and good religion both suggest the opposite. Many respected scientists have religious faith and see no incompatibility between what they see through their empirical research and what they profess in their churches. Conversely many deeply religious people know, trust, and respect the insights of science and see nothing there that frightens them in terms of what they hold dear religiously. What’s best in science affirms clearly and humbly that what we can say about the world through empirical research in no way rules out or weighs against what can be said about the world through the prism of faith and religion. What’s best in religion returns the favor. Good religion cedes science its proper place, just as good science cedes faith its proper place.

Moreover, the idea that science trumps religion is generally based upon a misreading of the seeming conflict between the two. Charles Taylor, in his mammoth work, A Secular Age, suggests that people mostly abandon religion in the name of science not because science is more believable than religion (though that is what they may believe). Rather what they are abandoning is a “whole package”, one whole way of understanding God, of understanding the world, of understanding meaning, and of understanding our relationship to our religious past. They aren’t simply exchanging naiveté (religion) for maturity (science). They are exchanging one whole way of viewing life for another. And both options take faith.

What’s meant by this? Quite simply that it is as much of an act of faith to believe that God doesn’t exist as it is to believe that God does exist and to assert that one doesn’t believe because of science involves a lot of things that have little to do with science.

To say: I believe or I don’t believe involves a lot of things not derived from empirical evidence. What things?

First of all, a certain concept of God. Most atheism is, as Michael Buckley asserts, a parasite off bad theism. The God that most atheists reject should indeed be rejected since that God holds little in common with the God of Jesus Christ. The same holds true for many people who reject religion. What’s being rejected is self-serving religion, not true religion.

Then there is the question of how we conceive of God’s ways. Scripture assures us that “God’s ways are not our ways”, a truth Roman Catholics have tried to express philosophically with the notion of the analogy of Being and Protestants have tried to safeguard through emphasis on God’s otherness. When religion is rejected in the name of science, invariably the religion that is being rejected does not safeguard God’s otherness and has, however unintentionally, reduced God to something that can be grasped through human categories. Stripped of genuine divinity and mystery, such a God will inevitably not stand the test of hard human questioning.

Next, humility and arrogance also play into the tension between science and religion and their proclivity to reject each other. Unhealthy arrogance and unhealthy humility feed off each other to create illicit dichotomies that force people into false choices.

As well, faith and doubt are tied to moral integrity. Scripture tells us that we can only see God through purity of heart. Hence our moral lives will either help clarify or muddy our awareness of God. Sin affects our eyesight, as does virtue. Arrogance is an obstacle to genuflection, sin to a vision of God. This is a sensitive point. Doubt and unbelief may not simplistically be equated with arrogance, insincerity, or a bad moral life. All of us know wonderful persons who struggle with unbelief. Yet this still needs to be in the equation. All of us too know persons who are too proud and arrogant to see straight.

Finally there is also the question of our relationship to our religious past. When faith and religion are seen as childish and naïve more things go into that judgment than have to do with empirical evidence. In virtually every case, that judgment is colored and weighted by how one feels about his or her religious past.

Science doesn’t trump religion and religion doesn’t trump science since one God is author of all that is good, both inside of science and inside of religion.