“Lost in the Stars …”

So sang Tony Bennet, decades ago: “But sometimes I think maybe God’s gone away/And we’re lost out here in the stars.” The song was prophetic for this age when loss of faith is the norm.  The causes of that loss have been discussed at length over the decades, in too many venues to count. It’s been “talked” to death, and believers concern themselves now not so much with analysis as with defense.

Yet the very defense of the faith can be more dangerous than any cultural offense. What happens in the arts and entertainment, the political and social milieux—nothing, really, in public life—can destroy personal faith. Faith’s greatest enemy is not science, ideologies, progressivism in education, etc. It’s always personal: Perhaps a believer feels his faith weakening and speaks to his priest. Sometimes a crisis in faith is accompanied by serious trouble, like sustained unemployment or injustice, chronic pain, illness or diagnosis of a terminal disease, the loss of a loved one, or a severed relationship—all sorts of really serious trouble. The believer feels abandoned by God, and the pastoral response to that plaintive complaint goes:  God has not abandoned you; it is you who have abandoned God. You must have faith. So the believer clings to his faith as one clings to a life preserver, and it saves him from the stormy sea.  

But what may happen underneath is that this believer makes that life preserver an idol. They forget, like St. Peter, to keep their eyes on Jesus. They begin to have faith in their faith, and not in him. “Why did you doubt?” asks the Lord. Why did you cease believing in me and believe instead in your own faith? For as soon as the sea became safe for you, you abandoned me.

“I almost wish,” said a friend to me recently, “I really do almost wish I had cancer again. I’ve never been so at peace, because I had no choice but to have faith. When I had cancer, I also had God. Now I don’t have cancer, but I don’t have God either.” What that means is this: Her faith was her God. When she no longer needed that faith, her God abandoned her. She is lost now in the stars.

It’s the calm sea that is truly perilous. It proposes the smooth-surfaced idol of faith as an appealing alternative—a comfortable conviction rather than an intimate relationship, with all its rough uncertainties. For all their fearsomeness, storms don’t do that. What makes a woman run from cancer? Fear of death, of course. But what would make her “almost” want it back? Something she suspects, rightly, is more fearsome than death. The loss of faith is merely the loss of a gift. Far worse is the loss of the Giver.