Belief: The Dreaded B-Word

     As children, my best friend Robert Stacy and I didn't doubt that a Father in Heaven had sent his only-begotten son that we shouldn’t perish but have everlasting life. The Bible was true as surely as Truman was President. How did we know? The grownups told us so, and (Santa Claus notwithstanding) they were usually reliable. The Good News was like Mutual Radio News. The Kingdom of Heaven was like a geography lesson—a public fact, not a private belief. Of course, we did puzzle over some things, but, heck, adults said a lot of puzzling things.

    Then, somewhere in our precocious teens, we read adult books and discovered that pulpit theology wasn't fact at all. It didn’t take many paperbacks from the college bookstore to expose that Christianity was one of several conflicting religions and that most modern intellectuals weren't believers. Riddled with self-contradictions, the Bible was only one of a library of scriptures that contradicted each other. Theology wasn't science. If you asked a serious question about Christianity and waited for an answer backed by proof, you’d be waiting all day.

     Christian teachings, we realized, were ontological fiat money. Faith-based. Floating on air. This had been an open secret, hidden from the children, who were taught blessed assurance without a leap of faith. Turning away from sin seemed applicable only to pagans and bad adults, not school children. But suddenly, there was the emperor, naked. Paul himself admitted that the gospel was “unto Jews a stumbling block, and unto Gentiles foolishness” (1 Corinthians 1:23), in other words, that it was nonsense to critical thinkers. And then there was the outrageous demand to believe before we can understand, sign a contract in gibberish. The preacher was a salesman demanding payment in full before unboxing the merchandise. “Would you buy an invisible used car from this man?” All that the folks who promised eternal life had was hope and an old book. 

     Of course, this hit us as teenagers, a time when there's a special delight in rebellion, but it still hurt, a gut punch. We had never been in terror of hell, even when we believed in it. The gentle brand of Christianity we’d been taught assured us that we’d avoid the fiery pit, but disbelief brought with it a stronger assurance of oblivion after death. It was frightening, but not enough to drive us back to religion. You don’t jump from a sinking boat onto a floating sheet of paper, and childhood religion seemed paper thin. Besides, there was our basic honesty and the conviction that God—if He did exist—must be the God of Truth and might be insulted if we parroted rot about Him that—as best we could figure out—was a moldy pack of lies. 

     We were boy philosophers, apostles of reason, and understood the grim fact (one I still can’t deny today) that the more you desire a thing to be true—the more it pleases, completes, delights, satisfies, uplifts, and fulfills you—the more likely you are to be wrong about it. Desire to believe is evidence against belief. A soul-completing revelation may be ego-stroking garbage.

      Late high school and early college were times of deep angst, and Robert and I, though we remain close sixty years later, took divergent paths. My path was to change churches, read in comparative religions, and fight on a battlefield of creeds, while he left the field. The cheerful, know-nothing born-againism of First Baptist revolted me, but I was fascinated by spirituality and swayed by devout parents, so my solution was to walk over to the Episcopal Student Center and “worship” there.

     I rummaged through all religious flavors—anything to try to make sense—from a beloved blue hardbound Paradise Lost to the “Mentor Religious Classics." The book that made the deepest impression was the Bhagavad Gita. The synchronistic analysis of world mysticism in Aldous Huxley’s "Introduction" along with the Vedantic theology of the Gita was a breakthrough, almost a conversion—and might have been a conversation if there had been a Vedanta Center in Alabama. In the Gita I read about a religious practice that wasn’t mired in blood-drenched mythology, that was openly metaphorical and loosely equated with Christianity. Here was an empirical claim about a Godhead that could be tested in a practice—but, more importantly, not a tribal warlord thundering in the sky, but a secret treasure in the human heart.

     I read a lot about mysticism during those early years, drawn by its promise to prove God by direct experience, but my hormone-filled young life prevented meditation, and, besides, I soon suspected that mystical experience might be indistinguishable from interior enthusiasm, which I didn’t trust. It’s like this: seeing a ghost doesn’t prove that ghosts exist because hallucinations happen. I’ve had mild hallucinations in dim rooms. I accept that many people falsely believe they’ve seen ghosts, so if I saw one, that might change nothing. I might be hallucinating. 

     So, out of distrust of my own subjectivity, I was and may remain what Muhammed described as “an ass bearing a load of books." But the mystery (one I’m driven to solve today) is why--if I remain a hopeless agnostic—I have, except for brief hiatuses, knelt in one pew or another gazing up at Sunday-morning crosses for half a century? Why have I read the Bible through repeatedly and studied, for example, pretty near everything written by Thich Nhat Hanh even as an unbeliever on the rim of a featureless void? Why do I call out to an inchoate God?

     Of course, childhood programming explains a lot, a struggle to get back to the Garden identified with dogtrot house in Bibb County and the white clapboard Baptist church on land my great grandfather donated at the bottom of that Abercrombie hill. But maybe I’d still have wandered away like Robert if, like him, I hadn't married. My first marriage began my senior year at Auburn and disintegrated in the middle of LSU graduate school—a codependent relationship with a needy woman, long-dead now, of whom the less said the better, except that we had two sons and she was Episcopalian, so I frequented the Episcopal Student Centers at both universities. I even studied Greek under the pastor alongside two prospective priests until the class disbanded when the padres-to-be lost interest. Even after the divorce I maintained ties with the Episcopal Center in Baton Rouge and staged a one-act play as the sermon in Evening Prayer. I attended services but never signed up, refusing to take communion on false pretenses. 

     A high point of my LSU years was meeting Bishop James Pike: “fewer beliefs, more belief.” I heard but did not understand.

     At LSU I met the woman to whom I’ve been married more than fifty years, a cradle Catholic from Louisiana. Because I was divorced, Catholicism wasn’t an option until my first wife died of cancer three years later—a guilty blessing—and conferences with a lovely, gentle retired priest before the birth of our first son (my third) led me to accept something like “belief of desire” and become a Roman Catholic. My confirmation name was Thomas (my grandfather’s name but also the doubting disciple). During the months before my confirmation, I gazed hungrily at the chalice as it floated down the aisle, seeming to glow with an inner light. The Baltimore Catechism, a children’s book, was more rigorous than anything Baptist. I fell in love with the Catholic mysteries, the admission that essentials of the faith made no sense. My print guru was G. K. Chesterton, my personal one a secular priest and Aquinas scholar who taught at the college where I was assistant professor. A dense scholarly history of patristic Christology, read through twice, authorized free-floating, unorthodox devotion to the Son of Man.

     So I regarded myself, like Chesterton, as a convert to a flawed but holy Mother Church. I didn’t like its sexism and the legalistic morality, but the Roman church seemed to be—if not the One True Church—at least an authentic one in contrast to the improvisations of Protestantism. I knew enough history to know that the Church had evolved through the centuries (including cruelly corrupt times in its long past) and to imagine that my own discomforts might be strands of DNA in its evolution. It was my church, mine as much as the Pope’s. So I sang in the choir, even taught youth classes, across four decades in six congregations in four cities, and even Cardinal Ratzinger’s elevation to Pope didn’t shake my half-believing affiliation.

     When we moved to northern Virginia, my truce with Rome unraveled. Apparently, the bishop of the diocese was a tyrannical archconservative. I know that we visited four congregations over several months, even driving deep into the country, and every sermon was a display of curmudgeonly rigidity that left me muttering counterarguments on the drive home. It was all anti-abortion, pro-bishop, anti-gay, all-politics, and no whiff of love or grace. Most alienating was the savaging of same-sex marriage--personal because I had a son, grandson, foster daughter, and close friends who weren’t heterosexual and understood sexual orientation to be God-given. Loving my neighbor implied, at the very least, sharing basic legal benefits. 

     Then we wandered into the St. George Episcopal Church and converted in an hour. Here was ancient and medieval Christianity—even the apostolic succession—without authoritarianism. No stiff-necked anti-Calvinism but not much Calvinism either. In a sudden loop back to the 1960s, I clicked into place again as a liberal Anglo-Catholic.

     There isn't much pressure to believe in a church that over fifty years ago refused to try Bishop James Pike for heresy when he openly doubted the virgin birth, hell, and the Trinity. Of course, this freedom has exposed anxieties. When religion ceased to be fact in the 1950s, an abyss of unknowing opened at my feet, an unhealed wound that festered for decades under a bandage of orthodoxy. For decades, a screen of ritual hazed over purest blankness as I crossed myself on a kneeler before invincible ignorance. What had it profited me? Why had I knelt in shrines of belief when I possessed none? Lately, I have adjusted the dreaded b-word toward a stance that transcends intellectual agreement and requires me to neither crush nor satisfy doubts.