Praying to a Human God

                                       

I don’t want to pretend that things have been going smoothly all the time since I converted. There was a moment when too much introspection made it difficult for me. I was standing as a sentinel to my own feelings, anxiously waiting for my faith to assert itself in the face of adversities. The result was, of course, an excessive attention to myself. Instead of praying for my problems to be solved, I was trying to get ready for a potential disaster. Was I going to remain steady in my faith if something bad should happen? Peace of mind was not welcome, for I felt it was synonymous with egoism: If my son and husband were going to suffer, I wanted to suffer too. In the midst of these conflicting thoughts I shut down my heart. Probably something like this went through my mind:  If loving Jesus means that I’m going to love my family less, then I won’t love Jesus. But in time my love for Jesus has grown to the point of no return. I know that only in him I can find peace. I keep thinking about what he said:

“Ask, and it will be given to you.”

What did he mean? Should we ask him to increase our faith or are we allowed to ask for what we need in our everyday life? In The Four Loves  C. S. Lewis wrote:

“It would be a bold and silly creature that came before its Creator with the boast ‘I’m no beggar, I love You disinterestedly…’. God addresses our Need-love: ‘Come unto me, all you that travail and are heavy-laden…’. Thus Need-love, the greatest of all, either coincides or at least makes a main ingredient in man’s highest, healthiest, and most realistic spiritual conditions.”

But according to Jesus, asking is not enough. We need to believe that our request is going to be granted. He said:                                                                                                                                          

“If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to the mountain,’ Move from here to there’, and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

And yet, we can’t turn against God if He doesn’t answer our prayers. As St. Ignatius of Loyola said, we need to feel a “holy indifference” towards the things of the world. Therefore, we must firmly believe that what we desire is going to happen but at the same time we must not care if it doesn't. I struggled a lot with this paradox, but in the end I was able to overcome it through shear trust. I pray and I’m positive that Jesus will deliver, but deep down I’m aware that what I truly need is to be close to him. All the other things I ask for, no matter how necessary they might be, would be of no importance without his love. And, so, ultimately, I put my life into his hands.

Surprisingly, none of my pleas is as deeply felt as the one for my husband and my son to find faith. I’ve actually been moved to tears more than once while I was praying for Jesus to reveal himself to them. I want this to happen because a life lived in the awareness of the divine is a life worth living, but also because I feel they are the ones who truly need comfort.

My husband is inclined to acknowledge that there is a reality beyond the one we know, which may or may not include what we call God. As I said before, people have the most dissimilar notions of God. There is the personal God, who listens to our prayers and may intervene in our lives. Or the Aristotelian First Principle who, after creating the universe, sat back and didn’t care anymore. There is the biblical God, who made the world in a few days and chose the Jews as His people. Or the omniscient and omnipresent Primordial Energy that is contained in every atom. And I know of people who believe in a superhuman alien race that occasionally attempts to put us inhabitants of the Earth on the right track. 

But Christians don’t have to be at loss for words to speak about God. For them God is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, through the mystery of the Incarnation. He became a PERSON, someone we can feel close to our hearth, mind and even our to body. Someone who is easy to love.

Who is God?

The last comment kindly left by my most faithful reader seems to imply that atheists enjoy the same degree of serenity of the people of faith. But I have achieved  peace of mind only after my conversion. 

My inner transformation didn’t happen because I thought that Jesus was a great moral teacher and that I should have conformed my behavior to his message. Rather, his love gradually permeated my being and took over, independently from my will. I believe that he was fully man when he lived on this earth and is fully divine now, powerfully touching the lives of each and every person who opens his or her hearth to him.

 If we open our minds to the Gospels we find a monumental figure of never heard wisdom and courage, who definitely doesn’t sound deluded (as some atheists like to affirm). When he prayed in the garden of Gethsemane he was connecting with a higher power, so I have been trying to come up with my idea of it. 

In fact, my belief in God is still very raw, but perhaps that's how it should be. After all, we can't figure out God, can we? 

When my son wasn’t around trying to convince me that I was wasting my time, I tried to read St. Augustine and St. Thomas, but it didn’t help, because their faith generated their philosophy and shaped their thoughts. For someone like me, who didn’t feel the presence of God but only the presence of Jesus (if we want to forget about the Trinity for a moment), their certitude about His existence was incomprehensible.                                

I tried meditation, but it didn’t get me anywhere. I can shut down my mind, at least up to the point where my thoughts become very silly,  stare at the sky and marvel at its beauty. I can feel  very peaceful, but nothing more than that.

                                                                                                        

Strangely enough, I was able to take a glimpse into a possible idea of God when I watched a video about the universe on the Internet. Later I learned that I was not alone in thinking of God as revealed by modern physics. One of the most fascinating implications of Einstein’s special relativity is that time as we conceive it is a creation of our mind. Apparently, our universe originated from the great explosion known as the Big Bang and was initially smaller than an atom. Space and time as we know them belong to our universe, so if God is not in our space He’s also not in our time. This makes a lot of sense to me, for it means that we can stop wondering, for example, why He allowed Nazism to go on for twelve years.

 As Brian Leftow writes in Time and Eternity, God’s time is simply not equivalent to ours: “If God is timeless, then everything he does, he does all at once, in a single act…But that one act might have effects at different times. He might in one volition will that the sun rise today and the sun rise tomorrow, and this has effects today and tomorrow…”

Just as well, He might will that good wins over evil, and this has effects in time, but not in time as we know it. Twelve years is a long time for us, but imagine a timeless Being…twelve years might be a meaningless quantification for Him.

 If God is outside of our space-time, then He can’t act in time according to our perception of it. My husband thinks this is a contradiction: If God is omnipotent, He should be able to intervene in our time. If He’s good, He should want to intervene. I don’t agree. We can’t humanize God applying to Him our own measures of judgment. Our son’s opinion is that if we can’t understand this hypothetical God, then we also can’t talk about it. Again, I don’t agree. If we are looking for God, we must inevitably wonder about Him. Doesn’t matter how close we get to the truth, it’s enough to try.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

 I realize that my attempt to make sense of God stems from my need for coherence, and that I  shouldn't demand of myself to pin down the ineffable. Nevertheless, I know that I will try again and again, just like I did with Jesus.

                                                                                                                                          

Do We Use Religion for Comfort?

                                                                                                                                           

My husband and I are sitting on the sofa while our son is pacing the living-room, as he usually does when he’s arguing with us. Following his movements, our heads turn steadily from left to right and vice versa. He gives us a headache, but there is no way to keep him still. 

“People‘s beliefs are usually based on evidence and reason, but when it comes to God they use a different mindset.”  he says. “The scientific mindset and the religious one are incompatible.”

“Really?” I replay.  “And how do you explain, for instance, the fact that the physicist who first theorized the Big Bang was a Catholic priest?”

 “People can hold opposite beliefs simultaneously, without even realizing it,” he answers.“Scientists who are also religious accept opposite standards of evidence to understand the same reality. I call this hypocrisy”.

 "Remember that in physics some theories are supported only by mathematical models, and not by empirical evidence.” his father intervenes. “The mechanism of belief is one, and it’s independent from the object of belief. This means that ’I believe that God exists’ and ’I believe that the continent of Asia exists’ share the same mental mechanism, although the method of verification in one case may be psychological and in the other empirical. We may say that one belief is based on the perception of the external reality and the other on an internal reality. One involves sense data, the other does not.”

But what does our psychology tell us about God? People hold wildly opposite opinions about Him. Some believe that everything that comes from God must necessarily be good, because He is Love. Others, on the contrary, think that God imposes suffering, not as a punishment but as a form of therapy, for humans need to reach the bottom in order to blossom.

Of course God can‘t be theorized, let alone understood. This is precisely the reason why, according to my son, it is absurd to live by faith.

“We can only talk about what we experience,” he says, “If you are unable to explain to me the nature of God, then you are wasting my time.”

 “Wait.”  his father answers, “Let’s say that I am depressed. I can talk about my depression, but I can’t make you feel it. Yet it’s real, it is a condition that I perceive clearly. The person of faith probably perceives God in the same way, but she can’t share it with you.”

 “Let’s say, then, that you are convinced that a demon is causing your depression.” our son answers. “This doesn’t make the demon a reality. Same thing goes with faith. Mom feels the presence of Jesus, but her feelings don’t make him real.”

 “You are wrong.” I answer. “Faith is not a feeling. To say it with Thomas Merton, faith is an intellectual assent. Your intelligence tells you that we can only achieve knowledge through science. Mine tells me that there is a reality beyond what we can see. This is the beginning of faith. Feelings appear after the intellectual assent .”

“You can deny it as much as you want, but I have no doubt that it’s psychology that tricks the faithful into finding comfort in religion” our states.

 "Comfort‘, this is the word that my son repeats over and over to explain my faith. So let’s analyze what brings me comfort and why I need it.

Do I need to believe in immortality? No, I’ve never been afraid of death. If this were my problem, my faith would be corrupted by the hope of a reward in the afterlife.

Do I want to feel safe? It would be nice, but God is not a warranty against trouble. Still, He can guide me and make things happen. On a rainy day, I could compare Him to a waterproof coat more than to an umbrella. I feel the rain pouring right on my head, but I don’t get wet.   

Do I find comfort in the Christian community? Sure, but it took me a long time to introduce myself to the people of my church. I had faith before I met them.

Do I need to fill up a void? I do, but this is not an argument. I could have chosen anything, Why religion? True, I was experiencing disillusionment, but I see this in a positive light. The moment we realize that what we have will never fulfill us is the moment when we finally turn to something above us. It’s a spiritual awakening, not a refuge. Before, I was engrossed in my material desires and in my ignorance. I didn’t even suspect the existence of a deeper dimension.

However, religion does bring comfort. Of course it does! It’s a relationship based on love. So I  am not a Christian for any of the reasons mentioned above; I am a Christian because I perceive the embracing presence of Jesus. I wish my family could feel it too. Our son is still so young, still so eager to engage life in a battle, but adults are often haunted by regrets and worries. I used to feel that way. Even now, once in a while, I wake up in the middle of the night with a sense of uneasiness. Before I met Jesus, I had to rely on

Xanax to go through the night. Now I wait for him to heal me. Peace immediately takes over, and I go back to sleep. I know there is chaos out there, but not in my room, not in my mind.

Italian Families and Faith

 

Our son graduated from college last spring.

After college he moved back in with us and took an humble job, not wanting to go back to school yet (what do you do with a bachelor in philosophy?). You probably think it’s amazing that our son is still willing to spend time with his parents, but you have to consider the fact that we are a typical Italian family, so by definition we have a hard time letting go of each other. We moved to the United States when he was ten and he truly feels in his  element here. In Italy children generally live with their parents until they get married, because it’s really difficult to find a place to rent and college campuses don‘t even exist. Italy is beautiful, but also very expensive and crowded.

 I considered myself an emancipated woman until I came to America and watched the Italian-American family of “Everybody loves Raymond” on TV. Unfortunately, I must admit that there are aspects of my motherhood that resemble Raymond’s mum behavior: I can’t stay away from my son for too long and I’m constantly trying to feed him. In my defense, I can say that he’s as skinny as a mosquito.

 On a different level though, we are a very atypical family.  Our son often arrives home all worked up, ready to engage in very intense debates with the two of us. My husband teaches philosophy to college students, and our sun shares his interest in the subject. Of course they agree on almost nothing, and sometimes they get so animated that I worry the neighbors might get tired of listening to these loud Italian men yelling at each other in their native language. I wonder what they think those two are fighting about. Alcohol? School
grades ? They would never guess.

After they have exhausted their argument for the day, it’s my turn to argue with our son. He wants to talk about religion. Here in the States religion is a hot topic. Creationists against evolutionists, a diversified society of people of different beliefs, and many branches of Christianity. In Italy, instead, everybody is Catholic, not many go to church regularly and they keep quiet about faith. I wasn’t interested either until five years, when I suddenly fell in love with Jesus. By then my son was already listening to debates between famous contemporary atheists and their religious opponents on the Internet, and he thought that the atheists sounded a lot smarter.

“No wonder,” I told him. “It’s too easy to make fun of people because they can’t put on the table any scientific proof of their belief. It’s empirical evidence against mystical experience.”

“That’s exactly the point,” he said. “Religious people don’t have an argument. One can have the best day of his life feeling one with the universe and call this a mystical experience, but the conclusions one derives from it are a construction of the mind. You people are afraid! Afraid of the nothingness after death, or of the emptiness of your lives without faith!”

“Again, it’s very easy to attribute faith to psychological deficiencies,”  I answered. “Your understanding of reality is very limited. The world is a mysterious place. There are so many things that we can‘t explain, and it’s fascinating to investigate them, to wonder about them.”   

“It’s just a waste of time,” he said. “You can wonder as much as you want, but you’ll never know the answer. You can only speculate.”

 We had this conversation over and over and sometimes we got mad at each other, but it never lasted more than a second. One of us would immediately say: “I love you anyway!”,  which is our formula to get past our problems. 
I remember the only time when I stayed mad at him for a few days over some proclamation of teenager indisputable rights. It made me feel terrible.

Luckily the teen years are almost over. These debates about religion have helped us to learn to communicate again after a time when, because he was living “those years”, he didn’t have much to say to his mother.

Two Memories

                                   

I was born in a coastal city in southern Italy. When I was a little girl my mother and I often walked by the shore, looking at the fishermen patiently unraveling their nets. The silvery fish were spread for sale on the wooden tables along the beach. My mother told me that fishermen go  out on their boats at night. They row their way out to the open sea careful not to make any noise,  for the fish would swim away if they heard them coming. Silently they cast their nets into the water, attracting their preys with a small light and a bunch of succulent worms. Then they sit, smoking cigarettes and eating tune, waiting. 

I came to look at those men with respect, as if they were the depositary of ancient secrets. Some of them looked very old, their skin shriveled by the sun. Darkness, starry nights, deep seas and troublesome waves were their universe, night after night, year after year. When someone asked me the usual question, namely “What do you  want to be when you grow up?” , I would answer:

 “I want to be a fisherman.”

 To me, they were the bravest people in the world.

A few decades have passed in the blink of an eye, and now I live with my second husband far away from our beloved Mediterranean Sea. Every Christmas, out of nostalgia, we build a typical Neapolitan Nativity village on the sideboard in our living-room. I remember last December. Against the night sky full of stars I had already painted high mountains dotted with small houses. Bruno was making papier-mache hills, a lake and of course the barn where, according to the tradition, Mary gave birth to Jesus. Dipping brown paper in a bucket full of glue, I asked him:

 “Did you leave enough space for the pizzeria?” 

 It might seem awkward to you, but the Neapolitan Nativity, which in Italy is called “Presepe”, always includes a restaurant complete with chunks of prosciutto and mozzarella hung from the ceiling. We brought our hand-made terracotta figures from our country, and besides the classic Nativity characters we have two little terracotta tables with people sitting around them, happily  having dinner. Jesus, as you probably know, loved to share good meals with his disciples, so the  pizzeria is not so out of place after all.

  

Etna, our son, was comfortably sitting in his armchair, watching us struggling with a piece of aluminum foil that was supposed to look like a stream. 

 “You know, “ I said, “this is the first Christmas in my life that actually has a meaning for me.”

Etna had watched us building the Nativity every Christmas for nineteen years, in good and in bad times, and we have certainly had both. When he was a child, it was his privilege to put the  baby Jesus in the manger at midnight on Christmas Eve. But of course when he became a teenager the care for this detail fell back on me. We kept building the Nativity because it’s our custom; it carries memories of our hometown and of our childhood. But this time there was more in it for me, namely the consciousness that we were getting ready to celebrate the birth of the Savior, the one who died to show us the way.

 Etna, on the other hand, was willing to keep the tradition going, but didn’t share my brand new view of Jesus.

“This year,” I went on, “I’m going to go to the Midnight Mass. Would you two like to come?”

 “Don’t even think about it,” was Etna’s answer.

“I’ll probably pass too,” said Bruno.