2 January 07
End
Death has been much on my mind lately. My father died in December seven years ago; James Brown, Gerald Ford and Saddam Hussein just died. The 3,000th American military casualty in Iraq was just announced, surrounded by scores and scores of Iraqi deaths. The ten thousand candles lit on New Year’s Eve in Davis’ Central Park were a stark reminder of it all. So much death.
I attended a healing ceremony following Mass at a Franciscan church in Sacramento yesterday. A friend is about to undergo surgery. It’s a fourth knee reconstruction (the first, over 30 years ago, was occasioned by a motorcycle accident). But this friend is not well, so very not well that 7-8 hours of anesthesia for the surgery are a real concern. For her, naturally, but also for the medical team and particularly her cardiologist. Her femur is now hollow; if they don’t operate, she’ll lose her leg. If they do, it’s a risk whose odds I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with.
But it’s win-win, said brown-robed birkenstocked Father Anthony, cheerfully. If she dies, she will be with God; if she doesn’t, she gets to be with us.
Yes, he really said that. In exactly that way. You have to hand it to these chaps for not bothering to sugar-coat the issues.
It is so long since I swam in circles of that kind of certainty, though, that I hardly remember what it’s like. They wouldn’t really call it certainty; they’d call it faith.
The prayers yesterday were like a dim echo. I knew them all. I said them. I even said “we look to the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come amen.” I said it. To say it marked me as a member of the Tribe of Catholic. To say it was also meaningless and therefore hypocritical.
To those who operate in this realm of certainty, it wasn’t meaningless, my repeating the words. He’s there even if you don’t believe, they’d say. He hears it anyway.
Which sounds like Pascal’s wager, to me. Operate on the assumption it’s all true and what have you got to lose? Like Thomas, though, I’m after a bit more evidence. There’s an awful lot of evidence against, at the moment…
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All my best wishes to your friend.
The buddhist monk I spent Christmas with is just as brusquely cheerful and certain that it’s all okay as Father Anthony, without the belief in God. I’m glad someone is. The occasional moments when I can share this feeling are brought about by the open hearts I know, like yours.
The existence of death, violence, and cruelty have never been proof that God doesn’t exist. In fact, what challenges my doubts are the responses of real human beings who face those things square-on, and embody their opposites. I don’t think it’s useful to torture ourselves over what comes next, or to live in anticipation of it, either – what matters is how we live here and now – and you do this, Pica, every day.The more we can try to be a light in this world, the better it will be for us and for others, and what comes later will either not matter at all, or take care of itself. (You can take those prayers metaphorically and not feel quite so hypocritical. We are all looking for resurrection and new life, every day, out of the death of the spirit that this awfulness inspires.)My best wishes for your friend, too.
I’m of that tribe too, as you know, Left Knee Syndrome and all. I remember believing. I was utterly sincere, wholehearted, open to it all. I remember feeling physically lighter, coming out of the Confessional, and the brilliant ecstatic transcendence I felt when the 90 or 120 or so of us in my gradeschool chorus (i.e., everybody in the three grades being confirmed that year) sang the ceremony.
But I don’t remember that it made death any easier to bear, any less painful. Somehow, for all those abstract promises, loss was still loss. Maybe some believers can actually make themselves feel that way, but I never did manage.
My best to your friend — and to you two too, in the new year.
For some of us, faith takes many forms when it comes to rationalizations — including that of reason. For Spinoza (about whom I am reading), logic was that which explained all — as well as itself. Instead of evidence, it is knowledge that saved both the “soul” and faith. Suffering in the world, and evil … these were the problems of ignorance.
But, as you say, everything lately seems to work against evidence — as well as against certainty, even in knowledge. Like Beth, I am wanting to focus on “light,” on being both a “light” and light in this world.
Best wishes for your friend.
Beth: I disagree with your first sentence. The only way “death, violence and cruelty” wouldn’t disprove the existence of God would be if the God in question were, in actual fact, deadly, violent and cruel. And I don’t really understand what you mean by your second sentence.
I too, am with St Thomas. No, I’m worse: I don’t doubt, I disbelieve. I’m not looking to be persuaded.
The awful truth is so much better, so much less awful, than the other thing—that Allah has rewards awaiting us in paradise, or the Jesus himself will wipe every tear from my eye, or whatever. I’d take my oblivion please, thanks very much.
p.s. But I’m struck, also, by how very difficult it is to say this sort of thing without sounding unkind. No unkindness intended, to you Beth, or to any other believer who might be reading this.