Encouraging A Thinking Faith
	Preach the gospel and if necessary use words. St. Francis

The Faith of a Heretic

Matthew 28:16-17

 

They cannot scare me with

    their empty spaces

Between stars - on stars

   where no human race is.

I have it in me so much

    nearer home

To scare myself with my

    own desert places.

 

 

Those lines were written by Robert Frost. When I was a kid I used to scare myself to death, lying in bed at night thinking about eternity. I didn’t know it at the time but I later learned that I was wrestling with the problem of infinite regression. If the universe requires a cause, and if God is the cause, then what caused God? And if God doesn’t doesn’t require a cause then why does the universe need one? These are weighty issues for a kid still in grade school, but I couldn’t seem to help myself.

 

My mind was boggled.

 

The sermons at church didn’t help either. Not only did the preacher ignore the paradox of infininte regression, but he was always damning people to Hell for beliving the wrong stuff — an absolutely horrendous idea. The preachers never seemed to realize what a monster their God was, nor how trivial His concerns. The most important thing in the universe was believing the right stuff.

 

Would God burn harmless little me in Hell forever because I got the details wrong? For thinking the wrong thing?

 

It was pretty scary stuff. God patrolled my mind for wrong thoughts, and there I was, a little boy, having fantasies of being a girl. Nobody ever told me wishing to be a girl was bad thing, but then they didn’t have to. It just stood to reason. It turned out I was right. Ask any fundamentalist and he will tell you God doesn’t want me to be a girl. God doesn’t even want me to wish to be a girl.

 

I suppose I could have chosen to believe in a different kind of God, but as I grew older the very idea of God made less and less sense. Religion’s fear factor only served to crack the lid to a whole big can of philosophical worms. There was also the paradox of existence to deal with. Why was God’s existence necessary? As a young adult I toyed with a kind of pantheism, and a kind of deism, and several other isms that went nowhere. I experienced no sudden epiphany. Instead it happened very gradually — and I struggled against it. But by the time I was thirty I was calling myself an atheist.

 

Look, I know how awful that word sounds. If there was a better one I would use it. I just couldn’t figure out a way to say the words “I believe in God” without feeling like a liar. In fact I don’t often say it out loud for fear of scaring people or having them laugh at me. And I don’t tell just anybody this stuff. People seem offended by the very idea. People say things like, “There are no athiests in foxholes”; or they’ll say, “I hope I’m there when you’re dying and you change your mind.” One of my favorites is when they say, “It must take a lot of faith to be an atheist.”

 

After giving it some thought I decided, Well yeah, maybe it does take a lot of faith. I guess it depends on your definition of the word “faith.” When I rejected the fundamentalist God I was trusting the universe to make sense. In a way I was trusting in God not to be as petty and vindictive as they said He was. Sometimes people say, “What are you going to say to Him on Judgement Day?” My answer expresses a kind of faith, I suppose, for who better to understand my lack of belief than an omniscient being? God knows everything, right? If so He understands my motives better than I do. That’s what omniscience is.

 

If the universe is ruled by a higher power I am no longer afraid of it. For me, atheism, the absence of belief, was a liberation from fear. God no longer patrols my thoughts like a jack-booted prison guard. If there is such a thing, surely He, She or It doesn’t want me locked up in a mental prison. Back in the sixties philosopher Walter Kauffman called it “the faith of a heretic.”

 

So why am I here, at church? When I told my younger brother I was going to church he said, “Do those people know what you are?” Which is funny because even he doesn’t know all of what I am. He once told me I was the most ethical person he knew, then a few sentences later called me a god damned atheist. He said it with love, though.

 

It puzzles a lot of people — why I’m here. Even liberals. As Walter Kauffman points out, part of the confusion may be due to the elusive character of religious terms. There is no definition of God, for instance, that is universally agreed upon. You can claim you believe in God without having to explain what you mean. Even the meaning of the word “religion” is elusive. F. Forrester Church was a Unitarian minister who defined it this way: “Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.” Theologian Paul Tillich offered this: “Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.”

 

If these definitions are valid then no thoughtful person can avoid being religious. For some thinkers it doesn’t seem to matter if you believe in God or not. Religion is a question, not an answer.

 

Is that right? Is religion is a question, and not an answer?

 

When I was in my twenties I came across an essay by C. S. Lewis in which he spoke of his conversion from atheism to Catholicism. He made the comment that an atheist can’t be too careful about what he reads. I thought: Hmm, okay. So after that I became a reckless reader. Eventually I came across the novelist Walker Percy. It turned out he was a believing Catholic too, like Lewis. Why is it always Catholics who are challenging me? Anyway, I was led to Walker Percy’s nonfiction book Lost In the Cosmos. Now who could resist a title like that? Lost in the Cosmos was, in part, a response to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, which I adored. In his book Walker Percy spoke of:

 

The Strange Case of the Self, your self, the Ghost which Haunts the Cosmos . . . Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos — novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes — you are beyond doubt the strangest?

 

Why indeed. In a few lines Percy managed to sum up my own sense of alienation, and he did so without ever mentioning gender. I was feeling pretty strange at the time. I think Walker Percy would say that this sense of alienation relates directly to the quest of religion. He might say that the case of the self, the Ghost that Haunts the Cosmos, is what religion is all about.  Religion is existential in its concerns.

 

What that means, I think, is this: Here we are, mere specks amid all this mind-boggling vastness, with no idea how we got here or what we’re supposed to do about it. We live for a moment and then we die, all the while asking, why, why, why? If you think about it just so, it seems a miracle that anything exists at all. Why is there something instead of nothing? And how is it that a thing like me, composed of ordinary matter organized in a particular way— how is it that a thing like that comes to know that it knows? How is it possible for mere matter to have thoughts? To be self aware enough to ask these questions about meaning? A thought, after all, is far less substantial and more elusive than any quark, or superstring, or any particle of dark matter.

 

It pretty much takes your breath away when you think about it. And against the backdrop of all this, of billions of wheeling galaxies within a universe vast beyond reckoning, are my little concerns about my gender that big a deal? Does the God of all that not have better things to worry about?

 

I remember driving over to the hospital to meet my new doctor, to talk to her about starting hormone therapy. I was sitting at a signal light at King's Drive when I was struck anew by the gravity of what I was about to do. I was about to make permanent changes to my body. There I was, all my efforts to understand it, to analyze it, had come to naught; all my efforts to ignore it, bargain with it, deny it and cure it and come to this. And looking at the hospital building in the distance I thought: Maybe the only rational thing to do is surrender to the mystery of it. Maybe sometimes the only rational thing to do is something irrational. Since then I have often wondered if this is what is involved in a "leap of faith." Think of the implications: It is possible for a diehard atheist like me to make a leap of faith, to step beyond all the reasoning and all the fears and do something that fulfills a mere feeling; a plain old, irrational, gut feeling that somewhere inside me there lurks something womanlike that needs to be expressed?

 

Can an atheist make a leap of faith? Does this mean it takes a lot of faith to be an atheist? Does faith have anything to do with religion? Does religion have anything to do with believing in God?

 

I don’t know. I don’t even know if I’m sane. All I know is this: HERE WE ARE. Here I am, here you are, all sharing the same space, the same predicament, the same moment in eternity, and all of us equally lost in the cosmos, and each of us the most mysterious thing there is.

 

Here we are.

 

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