What My Father Told Me: A Final Word

 

Years ago in my first blogpost, I recalled how my father told me that he was a Christian because his father, the best man he ever knew, had been one. As one of the youngest of nineteen grandchildren, I barely knew Papa Green, but certainly he was a role model. At the time Daddy spoke, I had discarded my childhood religion because of factual doubts, so his statement was nonsense. How could an Alabama farmer's life validate the Apostle's Creed: the virgin birth, for instance, or the incarnation? And, if these doctrines weren't facts, how could Christianity stand?

Of course, out of respect for Daddy, I kept my mouth shut and, like Mary, pondered these things in my heart. Now, sixty years and 155 blogposts later, I no longer expect the kind of truth I expected back then, not from religion. I've knocked on too many doors of that kind to expect that I'll get an answer. I accept beyond reasonable doubt that religious language not factual, not in the sense that water is wet, the earth is round, and A+B=B+A. Rather, it is a tissue of metaphors, fuzzy lights in a fog signaling things not susceptible to analysis. I suspect that many religious people are ahead of me. They understand intuitively and don't analyze doctrines as long as they make life better, collectively and individually. When religions work, that's what they do.

Religions work using analogical language, rituals, rules, and symbols. Complex and organic, they aren't random stacks of unconnected truths, or even falsehoods. As Edward T. Hall said of cultures, religions are holographic: parts tend to be dim images of a whole. A lawyer friend of mine once told me that at law school he spent months memorizing isolated cases until suddenly they all coalesced into a unity. It all made sense. Religions, when they work, produce emergent properties--wholes greater than the sum of all of the parts, emergent from them.

This is why most people who practice a religion adhere, at least broadly, to traditions they were born into, or at least to traditions from their birth cultures. It's much easier to see a religious hologram projected from the inside, so many people, like my father, effortlessly regard the religion of their childhood as the true one, often as the only true one. This isn't because they've practiced all the other religions and found them wanting. Such experimentation, though logically necessary, is logistically impossible. Life is barely long enough to practice one religion well. People regard their birth religion as the only true one because it is the only one they see in its wholeness. The others seem incoherent, so they stick with their own, and why not?

I've studied all the major world religions but remain a practicing Christian, not because I reject the others. In fact, if there were a Vedanta Center closer than sixty miles away, I'd be tempted. And I'm Christian not because my teenage doubts have been satisfied. After many decades of inquiry, I regard questions of the literal truth of religious doctrines as nonsensical. I embrace the Jesus of the Gospels--Paul and the other Church Fathers less so--and accept the ancient tradition holistically as a pattern that, taken as a grand analogical trope, does for me what religion needs to do, functioning even better supplemented by the Bhagavad Gita and Heart Sutra.

So what do religions need to do? I see three essential functions, separable but conjoined, a trinity performed not just by churches, but by church-like gatherings of patriots, activists, and sports fans. When religions work, they give social cohesion, moral direction, and spiritual peace. 

Through the decades, but especially in my recent years of focused study, I have given up on transcendent truths that are mythologically or doctrinally explicit. Instead, I see tropes, actors pointing offstage. Thinking of my father, I don't know if he naively understood Christian doctrines to be true, if he asserted them regardless of their truth in a gesture of faith, or if he avoided skepticism to protect the life-values he cherished in his father. In any case, in my own way, I've come to agree with him. Religion is about living life. Belief in heaven, sin, sacraments, karma, reincarnation, and the like may guide us through life, but verifying this kind of belief is above our mortal pay grade. We can only get by the best we can with what little we know.

The social and moral functions of religion are obvious, but these are shared with many other institutions. Schools, governments, clubs, and employers, also give social support and enforce ethics. The third function is more obviously a religious one. It has to do with what may be called a state of mind, but something and more elusive and pervasive than that term usually references. It is a condition of peaceful, even joyful, acceptance of ultimate powerlessness. Not absolute, but ultimate. We must act. Indeed, a choice not to act is an act--maybe a disastrous one--but ultimate outcomes are beyond our control. 

In metaphorical sailboats, we chart courses and try to sail them, even against the wind, but typhoons happen. Nothing on earth is certain but death. Everything we gain, we lose. Even children gradually realize this, and it can infect life with feverish denial and futile activity. A good death is said to signify a good life, but not, I think, in the obvious way. The theater of dying isn't what matters, but the readiness that precedes it, embracing each year's existence without bitterness or preconditions.

This state of mind can be called salvation. It entails a dying before death, killing the power-mad ego, signing an unconditional peace treaty with Being. My favorite Christian phrasing of this is Friedrich Schleiermacher's feeling of absolute dependence. The Baptist phrase heard often in childhood, accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior, may mean the same thing, but it's weak phrasing, sometimes just meaning joining a Jesus-club and promising to behave. Of course, in its fullest sense, it does imply willing acceptance of absolute Being, and it clearly transforms people, but I can't take seriously the idea that the transformation is caused by magic name, a privileged story, or a stock ritual. In context, these do transform, but a more-than-comparable transformation is evident in Buddhist monks I've met, in religion with no supreme God, but rather an impersonal What-is. So I honor all religious terminologies that promote selfless action and interior peace, even as I struggle (a paradox) to practice something like them in my own questionable cultural space.

I have arrived at what Dylan Thomas called "that sad height," only two years younger than Daddy was when he died. He died well. His paternal religion seems to have worked. When he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, I asked him what he was going to do. He answered, "Live." The night before he died, he was smiling in his recliner at home with an oxygen tank, surrounded by family. To live fully, we need to become part of something much larger than ourselves. Call it God or not, maybe we already are. The challenge is to realize it.