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.

Belief in the Supernatural

My coming close to Christianity was not a conversion, in fact I was raised Catholic. It was not an epiphany, for I wasn’t struck by a sudden perception of universal truth. It was an assent and a relationship. It had its moments of adrenaline running through my blood when I thought that I had finally grasped something important. It was so pervasive that I had to put down notes, then entire pages. Should I jump to the conclusion that my interest deprived me of any objectivity? My enthusiasm wasn’t typical of my personality: I had never felt so passionate about anything before. Do I have to assume that this passion has impaired my

judgment? Or would it be more reasonable to take my feelings into consideration as the factor that allowed me to direct my cognitive energy in the proper way?

                 

I had been reading about Jesus for some time when one night I woke up sensing an imminent danger, an unusual occurrence for me. I hesitate telling you what happened next, for I’m fully aware of how silly it sounds. I haven’t felt so stupid since I was nineteen and I had to sleep with my mother for a week after having seen the movie The Exorcist.

I felt a strong pressure on my chest and between my shoulders, as if someone was squishing my body with both hands. I registered the peculiarity of that sensation, but at the same time I felt so tired that I fell asleep again. Several times during that night I found myself half-awake, experiencing that pressure in a sort of stupor. The following morning I wondered what had happened  and I got scared. I must admit that the thought of an evil presence crossed my mind. When night came again I didn’t dare to turn off the lights around the apartment. Luckily I didn’t have to be ashamed to tell my husband that I was afraid and why, because I knew he would understand in spite of his professed  rationality.

A day later I run to church. I almost couldn’t bring myself to talk to the priest, although I knew that if anybody in the world would believe my evil perception, it would be precisely a priest. Nevertheless, I was embarrassed. I quickly asked him if he could give me something, anything to make me feel safe at night. He offered me a Bible and a cross that doesn’t look much like a cross, being a reproduction of an Irish one from the 8^th century. Had it looked more like what it was, I wouldn’t have had the courage of hanging it on the bed. A crucifix in my room? It was just too weird.      

For several nights I was still afraid, although I did believe that the cross was protecting me. I don’t know what I experienced and I don’t feel the need to investigate it. But if that was the Devil trying to get a hold of me, he obtained the opposite result, for I started reading the Bible all over again, this time the English version that the priest gave to me

Having failed his attempts to corrupt Jesus, in the Gospel of Luke Satan “departed from him for a time”. The Devil will give it another try, as he always does. In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus was tempted not to embrace his cross, but he carried it to the very end. That was his victory over evil.. Instead, we limited human beings are not even aware that Satan is ruling our lives. Those moments in time when he wins us over are often the moments when we feel his domaine less than ever. I was not aware of his presence until I become aware of God’s presence. Initially I thought that the reason for this combination was quite banal, that is: Once you start believing in the supernatural you start believing in all sort of things. But later I understood that this is just a  simplification of a larger problem. I concluded that there is more than a simple belief in the

supernatural to the simultaneous perception of good and evil powers. They are both deeply rooted in our psyche and, if we start listening to our soul, they come to the surface at the same time. Evil involves our sense, whereas God speaks to our hearts. The latter brings a spiritual dimension to our lives. The first brings deception.

During his forty days as an ascetic Jesus fasted. It’s hard to imagine how fasting for a day might feel, let alone for a long period of time. I’ve read that while the body weakens the spirit is strengthened. Freed from the daily attachment to flavors, the will acquires power. The mind becomes sharper, more detached. Initially the craving is hard to suppress, but then it vanishes.The conscience is enlightened, but at the same time subjected to the risk of believing in its omnipotence. It was at that moment that Jesus was tempted. The allure of infinite power was before him, but he chose the humble ways of a wandering preacher. He wasn’t going to be a

warrior and he wasn’t going to free his people by the sword. Instead, he would be the Lamb of God and our Lord.

                                                                                                                                           

                                                 ___________________________