A lot of people my age take health issues more seriously than the bigger moral, political and religious issues. The prospect of mortality will do that. When I or someone I love gets a serious diagnosis, I typically go into survival mode and try to soldier on regardless -- but that's followed sooner or later by cold fear and deep anxiety, and it takes a lot to shift out of those places. What helps? In my experience, three things help: information, time, and perspective. The more information I have, the more powerful I feel, especially if the knowledge comes with options. As to time, even bad news loses some of its punch as time passes. Perspective? Viewpoint can be everything sometimes; the day before my 82 year-old Irish grandmother died, my mother told her to hurry up and get well, "so we can take a trip to Paris." Not missing a beat, my grandmother replied, "Sure, and I can buy a bikini!" Her wit and attitude seriously helped us cope with our grief and sadness.
Does faith help? I think so. Experience suggests to many of us that bad things pass. Good may come out of bad. And, sadness diminishes (even if only bit by bit). Is there good reason for our faith and hope that losses aren't the last word? In the late 1990's and early 2000's, I taught a class at Fordham entitled, "Faith and Critical Reason." I used to tell each new group of students that my personal governing asumption for the course was, "faith is not non-sense." Together we read Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Nietszche and Bertrand Russell and The Humanist Manifesto -- that latter document a powerful and creditable path of belief although it unecessarily caricatured "the supernatural" in an effort to promote a vigorous appreciation of the natural world. In the course, I didn't grade for opinions, but for intellectual honesty and courage in tackling the Big Questions. Tackling the conversation at all without caricaturing people of different views seems a rare commodity in this age of instant messaging and debate by sound bite. And I wanted the students to consider giving theism as much weight as atheism and agnosticism as intellectual choices.
A college course is a bit of a hot house environment, rareified in atmosphere and tone, not quite like the booming, buzzy stuff of everyday life. I think we can get closer to our daily experience to look at faith and belief as viable options. Here's one of my favorite stories:
An exhausted father is awakened in the wee hours of the morning by his crying and frantic 5 year-old son coming out of a kiddie nightmare."Everything's going to be all right," the father says soothingly as he hugs the distraught child and rubs his back gently. After a few minutes, the father, desperate to return to bed, says, "OK, now, son... time to go back to sleep. I'm going to tuck you in, turn out the light, and go back to bed." The boy immediately bursts back into tears and says, "No! No! Don't shut off the light -- I'm afraid of the dark! I don't want to be alone!" Near the end of his patience and definitely on his last nerve, the father pulls out one of the Big Guns of parental rhetoric: "You're not alone son... God is with you." The little boy looks up at his father and says, "Where's God? I don't see God!" Praying for patience and hoping against hope, the father says. "Of course you can't see God, son... He's invisible." The boy looks skeptically up at his Dad and says, "I want a God with skin on!"
To be continued.
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