A rationale for faith

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. -- 1 Corinthians 13

For the better part of my life, I have wrestled with the concept of God. The product of a union between a part-time Catholic and a part-time agnostic, I was not indoctrinated into any particular faith. However, as a child, I did ponder God, and professed to believe in Him.

As I came into physical (as opposed to emotional) manhood, and the flower of my youth, when the world seemed to be at my feet, I came to believe that God was unnecessary to me. I read all the classics of literature (including the Bible) to enhance my understanding of the world; I maintained my health with vigorous exercise; I was a stranger to defeat. I drew strength from my ability to live what I considered a moral and informed life without relying on what I believed to be a crutch for weaker men.

But then, of course, life dealt me a lesson or two: divorce (the dissolution of my first marriage), death (my grandparents, my father, my aunt), and the suffocating triumph of ignorance and fear (the Iraq war and the beguilement of the American people by the Bush administration). Gradually, I came to realize that there were many things in this world that were greater and more powerful than was I.

Dad

When my father passed, in 2001, his wish was that I would be baptized in the Catholic church. In accordance, I contacted the local Catholic parish and undertook to study their faith with an eye toward conversion. To my surprise, the lessons I derived from this experience did not conflict with my secular humanist views. Rather than interpreting the Bible literally, I was encouraged to view the stories as metaphors....metaphors from which we interpret meaning in our lives today. Whether or not there was actually a Great Flood that drowned everyone except for Noah and his family is unimportant. The importance of the story (myth?) is the meaning that we derive from it.

Of course, many Bible-thumping Evangelicals will shriek "Heresy!" at such a notion. The idea that the Bible is subject to interpretation is a frightening prospect for those that feel they must have concrete, moral absolutes to guide them through the perils of the modern world. But, for me, it is an acknowledgement of what has become obvious: I am just a man; just a tiny part of the Great Creation.

There has been no sudden epiphany (at least, so far). Only a gradual realization that God is something so vast and beyond comprehension that no one faith (Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, et alia) can define Him, can claim to know Him. And how can one deny something that is beyond definition?

One might scoff at my father's end-of-life return to the church. A larger-than-life figure, who scorned weakness and stupidity, he had rediscovered the church at perhaps his weakest moment: after being diagnosed with Lupus. In short, his conversion came as he faced his own mortality. But when in one's life is one likely to confront the truth of one's existence? As Leonard Cohen so beautifully wrote:

And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water

And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower

And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him

He said, "All men are sailors, then, until the sea shall free them;"