The Rights to Being Right: Religious Belief Versus Being with God

I can remember the day:  it was sunny, and windy enough for the long ends of my scapular, the hood that formed my habit’s outermost component, to whip around like a wind sock.  I was making my way along the sidewalk that abuts Mepkin Abbey's senior wing, stewing on a difference of opinion I was having with one of the brothers.  I don’t remember what it was about.  Only that I was troubled by it.

Suddenly I was confronted by a capital-T Truth.  To this day it guides my choices:  At some point, I realized, holding exclusive rights to the Truth and living with others are mutually exclusive.  Those who are totally right, I saw, usually end up alone.  And so would I, if I wasn’t careful.  I will always remember the words of Brother Vincent:  “Everyone is right, and everyone is wrong.”  If we think anything else, he said, we’ll drive ourselves nuts.

Belief is permanently filtered, for me, through the lens of prayer.  The prayer journey is self-emptying, as life itself is.  The apostles failed, Jesus failed, and prevailing messianic hopes failed before Christianity found its footing in earnest.  I have failed in the name of religious zeal, and it modifies the strength of my intellectual adherence to any particular creed.  As a person with mild tendencies to obsessive-compulsive thought patterns, my own forcefulness has exhausted me, turned belief in selfish, self-protective directions.  This cuts me off from God and others, as often as I let it have its head.

Robin Williams, the only celebrity whose death I ever truly mourned, said “I used to think that the worst thing in life was to end up alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel alone.”  That’s true, and I have taken it a step further.  The worst-est thing, I would argue, is to believe things that isolate me, then believe that isolation to be God’s will. 

Since realizing this, I found it to be true of both individual and corporate belief.  So I am over-sensitive, I think, to any form of organizational coercion.  In former times Church has been strong in proclaiming not only that Christ is the definitive revelation, but that its own way is a privileged, if not the exclusive way to God.  

One day, during a period of early morning class prep, I had a thought about this that scrambled my perspective: there may be one path for me, I mused, but there are certainly many paths for God.  If we acknowledge that it’s not our job to force God’s will on another, we can assert the primacy of Christ while remaining pluralist enough to share the sandbox well with others.  We can say there’s one way for us without, on God’s behalf, trying to demean another person’s way.  

To see things from this divine flip-side puts my own beliefs on their heads.  Ghandi said something like “I used to believe that God is love.  Now I believe Love is God.”  I’ve experienced something like that.  Before I entered the monastery, I believed Jesus saved me.  Now I believe that what saves me is Jesus.

This stands to reason.  In architecture, form follows function.  So, too, for the living stones that comprise God’s building: what began as a love of cruciform buildings gets internalized.  A helpful term here is “Cathexis—” in short, the process of internalization. What was once a being or a maxim outside of us, moves inside us and becomes something self-knowledge alone can unlock.  In the evolution of the soul, God becomes the love he gives.  In our life with others, Christ becomes what saves.  

The Church’s beliefs are evolving in a similarly more inclusive direction too.  “Outside the church there is no salvation” used to mean you had to be Catholic to go to heaven.  The second Vatican council flipped it on its head.  If someone has been saved, it’s because of Christ.  The only further move I would make is to equate Christ with “conscience.”  If slippery slopes are a concern, Christians could avoid concerns of relativism by saying that Christ is anything that conscience reveals that serves a good and unitive purpose.  It would explain why both salvation and revelation are opening up to the wisdom of other traditions.  The catechism says that “non-believers” can be saved by following their consciences.  It also says paying attention to the bits of wisdom in other traditions is, for Catholics, compulsory.  I hold this precept close to my heart. Without Buddhism, I’d never have learned the strains of Catholicism that led me to the monastery.

I was raised Catholic. To be a Catholic, there are about 5 beliefs with which one has to be on board. (Belief in the Father, The Son, The Spirit, The Church, and a catch-all clause about baptism, sin, resurrection and everlasting life).  

I still count myself a Catholic.  A gluten allergy has relativized the importance of the Eucharist and my years of consistent prayer practice have interrupted my need to equate self with belief.  As I live in less and less denial of the fear that drives egotism, some of the energy belief supplied has diminished too.  Who I am depends less and less on markedly Catholic thought processes; being involves believing, but doesn’t depend on it.  

Brad Warner, author of “There is no God, and He is Always with You” says something like “People ask me if I believe in God.  That depends what they mean by words like ‘I’ and 'believe' and ‘God’”  For my part: I don’t know who I am.  And I’ve wrecked belief by divinizing my Ego, and doing so till recognizing true divinity would be difficult at best.  I agree: it also depends on what people mean by belief.  I intellectually buy many of the things said about God in Catholicism.  But I intellectually buy many of the things said about God in Judaism and Islam.  I intellectually buy many of the things said about the transcendent causes that drive Buddhism and membership in AA.  Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, AA and Buddhism have all impacted the direction of my life significantly.  I will admit not knowing what belief truly is, and how the intellectual adherence I give to Catholicism is different than that I give to Buddhism and Islam.  I openly doubt intellectual adherence to be the most important part of faith.

My journey has led me to a single assertion: that religious belief is one thing, trust in God another.  It has made me an anthropological absolutist: that is, it’s true that there are basic life-facts, universal human truths.  This, in my view, is true for all: when seen through the stained glass window of the human condition, questions of being are questions of transcendence.  Of the many paths in which God could potentially come to us, each of us will progress toward God in only one circuitous way.   But it’s not true that one way is better for all people.  The movement mentioned above, in which the “form” of a belief is determined and eclipsed by its “function,” is true here too.  God calls me to serve him and others in a particular way.  Not responding will make me miserable.  And if I don’t know what God calls me to, it will suffice simply not to do or believe things that make me miserable.

These days I believe in humility, mercy and non-attachment.  I cherish religious content that conveys that message, regardless of the tradition through which it comes.

Humility marks the life of one who trusts God.  Trust is formed when teachers, disciples and philosophies fail, and the disciple still has to wake up the next morning, put on his pants one leg at a time, and continue the business of living.  To the humble, God supplies more right-questions than he does right-answers.  There’s an egotistical security that’s lost there.  I have  often wished wholesale denial of my pride was still possible for me.  As it is, I am aware enough of my pride to make me unsure of myself, oblivious enough to occasionally have to eat my hat.

Mercy's a disposition of the religiously healthy.  To say I believe, or to argue about the finer points of religious practice certainly suffices the human need for ego-stroking.  In order to convince me it also serves the purpose of the Transcendent,  since a tree is known by its fruit, religious belief would have to lead to mercy and arguing would have to bring about visible good.  Evil is as slippery a pitfall to a saint as to a bodhisattva.  Through mercy, God uses our well formed consciences to break down the false distinctions we’ve made about God, others and ourselves.  

Non-attachment is the identifying characteristic of one upon whom prayer has done its work.  I know the visible good that deep meditation causes, but to me those benefits are just as available or avoidable to a Catholic as they are a Buddhist.  It was a Buddhist who taught me that a man whose steps are heavy experiences his beliefs as heavy too.  It was buddhism that taught me: a Catholic who slams doors has not yet experienced the quiet of contemplation.

I would rather be wrong in community than right and alone.  I believe in God, but I don’t know who I am, who God is or whether the mechanics of belief are really working in me.   Pundits and saints have said a supplicants’ prayers eventually yield to God: God prays in our hearts, and we listen.  I hope that he’s the one driving what belief I have left, that I listen well, that we can sit together in the end, laughing.

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