Belief and unbelief

With apologies to Michael Novak, who once wrote a book with this title, I keep coming back to this topic, both to make sense of the different stages in my own life and to understand better what may be needed to hold a society together.

As a young Jesuit I was as strong a believer as they come, even if intellectually I found myself a nascent agnostic and emotionally I never experienced the warm and fuzzy feeling of rewarded faith. In my first book over three decades back I attempted to compare faith to a love affair: it can take hold without invitation and it can disappear without expectation. Of course, I was writing this with a somewhat greater experience of doomed love affairs than had been mine as a young Jesuit scholastic, but I still think the analogy accurate. Faith is not something one can will (the psychological reality that Augustine understood so well when he came to talk about faith as an unearned grace from God), and the hard truth of the matter is that faith can be assaulted so readily, unfair as it might seem to those who, like Mother Teresa (as we now know from her correspondence), find themselves calling out in the darkness despite lives of total dedication.

I thought of this today when I went over to Loyola-Marymount University to have lunch with an old friend still a Jesuit. I stopped in the campus chapel where, years before, I had attempted to attend Mass when another friend was pronouncing his final vows as a Jesuit and yet was unable to remain as a wave of depression came crashing in. Today a group of students were preparing for some type of service as one of the Jesuits guided them, and I thought how I could have completed my study for the priesthood and today been in his place. The question, though, is whether that earnest faith I had once held would have survived. The point had come as the ex-Jesuit when I no longer could say I believed as I had, and now I think it so likely it would have come even when I was the priest who was to set the example for those he led.

I still have the greatest respect for those who, like my remarkable Jesuit friend, remain believers, not because they have successfully weathered the storms that sank the rest of us, but because they are able to access a separate dimension in their lives that I am denied. Like those who find themselves still loving and in love, their relationship provides a basis for their identity. I wish I could be like them although I know it is impossible.