Very often, in the comment boxes of a blog, I’ll come across a reference to a “sky fairy”, or a “sky god.” Supposedly, we Catholics worship such a deity, at least according to the beliefs of the atheists who post their comments.
I’ve been a Catholic for a good many years, and I’ve never come across anyone who believes in a sky fairy. I keep imagining a meeting with these commenters in which I ask them, “Do you know much about Catholicism?” Perhaps it will happen one of these days.
God does not live on a cloud. He is not a fifty-thousand-foot tall man with a forty-thousand-foot beard. Somehow, although He transcends all human perceptual categories of time and space, He also presents Himself to us on Earth as the consecrated Host, the consecrated wine. He lived on Earth as a young man who worked, taught, performed deeds, and died in an earthly city called Jerusalem.
I find that more mind-blowing than anything I can imagine, because the mixing of categories, the merging of what we know and what we can intuit, is just what I would expect of the mystery of reality. And as I and you were formed out of dead matter and came to life, so He recapitulated that miracle for us by coming to life once more, for once and for all.
THE GIFT
Appointments with the Great Amen
On Sunday mornings
How like small children on a visit
To an old relation
We bring small gifts of string and paper
To wrap our souls within
Wrapped so artfully
Fastened tightly so
It takes some time for us to loosen them
Daily nightly
We pull the wrapping strings and make the gift
Unsightly
He wraps them up again
So patiently, the Great I Am, amen
I love the poem. I have been on a journey seeking to go home to Mother Church. It reminded me of what I am missing – thank you.
God bless you, Marilyn. We’re all on a journey. The One you look for, Jesus of Nazareth, resurrected in the flesh, has never left you.
He travels with us, and at the same time He waits for us, because He is our destination and our home.
Your poem’s a lovely present to
He Who breathed the air we do…
God bless you.
God bless you, Paige. I hadn’t quite thought of it so directly, but Our Lord did breathe the air we breathe, drink the water we drink, and see the sunlight we see.
Thank you for the insight. He is close to us even in that material way, that inner way.
There’s no such thing as an atheist. There are people who have been conquered by fear. They don’t believe in God because they’re afraid to believe. It’s like fear of love, it makes you vulnerable, you can be hurt, disappointed, abandoned. Childlike trust can be betrayed. Your dependence can be disregarded. Faith is fraught with danger, even more than love. Better to live without it, make jokes about it–you can always diminish anything by ridiculing it.
The pity is that they don’t know that it’s not faith that kills, but fear.
Dena, I strongly suspect that lack of faith starts very early in people’s lives as a reaction to an insecure emotional environment. The culture one grows up in can reinforce this lack of trust, and a sort of blindness to the transcendent force around us and in us can develop.
God is not hidden, but as you say, He can be hidden from.
I once heard a young priest say in a homily, “You will believe in God if you want to bad enough.” I think that’s true. I know of no survey that would provide “proof,” but I suspect that the harder one’s life is (or has been), the more likely one is to believe. Holocaust survivors, I’ve been told, believe in God. Those who’ve always lived in physical and emotional comfort are less likely to believe, maybe because they have less need to. Makes one think of the Beatitudes, doesn’t it?
One *chooses* to believe, finally. There’s no hard evidence either way (despite the miracles), and so it comes down to: how much do you want to believe? or perhaps: how badly do you need to believe?
Dialogue once overheard: “I don’t have any friends, but I don’t care. I wonder why I don’t care.” Response: “Because you don’t need anyone else.”
A universe without God is not a place I’d want to live in. I believe I might even be suicidal in a godless universe. But there are others, I know, who are content with life without him. A European youth told me: I don’t believe in God. I’ve just never felt the need to believe.
In deprivation there is blessing. (Truth is always paradoxical.) “I shall not want” means literally, “I shall have,” and one decides whether one shall want or have. You can’t do both. It’s a choice. The miracle is that we are given the choice.
Is belief a matter of willing one’s self to believe? I think belief and faith are graces sent by God, but God permits us to go towards Him or not to go towards Him. At least I’ve found that to be true in my own experience. I can’t speak for other people, because that sort of deep interior life in other people is inaccessible to me.
I don’t know whether or not one can choose to believe. I think that one can choose to love or not to love, assuming that there’s freedom of choice and not some form of spiritual illness.
Those who can love are capable of belief.
“Those who can love are capable of belief.”
Yes, but we can’t equate the two–belief and love. There are professed atheists who love more and better than believers; there are believers who don’t love.
“Is there God?” has only three possible answers, and everyone answers–everyone. The ones who answer “I don’t know” also must answer, sooner or later: how much does it matter? The comfortable and happy European youth I mentioned would answer: not much. And that’s the answer that so many good, moral secularists/humanists would have to give nowadays.( I have all I want, I don’t need God, I don’t need to believe.)
But there are those less blessed (I mean by this much more than mere physical blessing) who would answer: It’s the difference of life and death (and I mean much more than physical death.) This group chooses to believe.
It’s the Beatitudes again. I’ve found that all questions of faith are answered there.
Is there God? is not a personal question, and it doesn’t involve choice. Free will doesn’t matter here. “I can’t force myself to believe” is an honest answer and probably the most common.
But, How much does it matter? is completely personal and involves nothing but choice. Free will here is everything.
We should not ask, “Do you believe in God?” We should ask, “Does it matter?”
Your poem is lovely.
Thank you, Dena.
I knew a person in Russia who was not a believer because of the country and culture she had been raised in, but she was certainly a loving, self-giving person. I feel almost certain that she will believe in God at some point in her life – perhaps she is a Christian even now. I haven’t seen her in many years.
What does St. John say?
“Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us.”
1 John 4
Is someone who does not yet believe, but loves, far from God, and is someone who professes belief but has no love close to God?
What good is belief to someone who doesn’t love? One might describe a devil in hell that way.
How can anyone tell from observation who believes and who does not? I think St. John gives us at least a clue.
I might add that a little love goes a long way. Perhaps one loving, self-giving act in a lifetime would be enough to bring a soul to God.
I’ve never heard that the Church teaches that. Nor does anyone but God know who may be damned and who not. I hope, no one.
Try the Catechism and see what it says.
It has always troubled me that, according to our Church, good and loving people can be damned by unbelief.
I can’t make peace with that.
Dena, whether or not someone loves or doesn’t love, whether or not they believe in God or don’t believe, and whether they even know themselves well enough to be sure, is understood only by God. I think we’re told not to judge because there is only one Judge who perceives perfectly what is in the human heart, mind and soul.
I believe that God’s mercy and love, based on His perfect understanding and wisdom, are so great as to be beyond human comprehension.
(Please note: God’s love, not ours. But our love is a reflection of His love.)
God’s love is something all believers can depend on, and that even unbelievers will encounter.
What happens then is not up to us, and is really not our concern. Pray for other people as much as you pray for yourself. Love as much as you can. Leave the rest up to God. You might call that faith.
“Jesus often speaks of ‘Gehenna,’ of ‘the unquenchable fire’ reserved for those who to the end of their lives refuse to believe and be converted, where both soul and body can be lost.” 1034, p. 270, first ed.
You’re right, of course, in saying that no one but God knows who will be damned. The Catechism affirms that via refuting predestination (same section).
But I must say that I also find it equally hard to accept that just loving means salvation. Hitler loved Eva Braun, and a few other people, too, I think. And crazy or not, he loved his country. That’s an extreme example, I know, but it’s still true that really evil people love as much as good people do.
I think that the humanist credo of human love as the whole meaning of goodness has been wrongfully incorporated into much Christian thought. “God is love”, yes, but love is not God. My dog loves better than most people I know. (But then, someone told me that a mystic said dogs go to heaven. It wouldn’t surprise me.) I’m just not sure that any emotion qualifies one for the beatific vision, not even love–St John, notwithstanding.
I’m saying these things, Pavel, because it’s the topic, but it doesn’t mean that I ponder them. I’ve always been very grateful that I don’t have to know the answers to these hard questions. I know I’m not very good at loving, but I hope I go to heaven anyway–after a few thousand years of purging, of course.
Yes, Pavel. We have nothing of our own, really, not love, not works (and who knows for sure? maybe not even faith–as we understand it). All we have ever really had–any of us–is the hope that is in his promise of mercy. All the rest was always his, and so “We bring small gifts of string and paper/To wrap our souls within” as you so beautifully (truthfully) say.
Amen.
I used to wonder why he always gives us back ourselves. Then I realized that it was so that we would “have” something to offer him (again). But it’s a father’s indulgence to his children: we were never our own to give. We were always his.
Thank you for the poem–and for this lovely little conversation.
Thank you, Dena. God bless you and be with you.