Faith found and lost

Immediately after posting my gouge on the Pew Forum's latest research yesterday, I drove to work listening to On Point with Tom Ashbrook. He was interviewing William Lobdell, a former religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times and author of the book Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America-and Found Unexpected Peace, whose personal story of faith and religious practice is odd. The program website summarizes it well:

"Award-winning journalist William Lobdell grew up an indifferent Episcopalian. Drifted from faith. By age 28, his life was a mess. He couldn’t stand the person he’d become. A friend told him, 'You need God.'

"Lobdell found Jesus. Felt his heart split wide open. Was born again, to the tune of Amazing Grace. Was saved.

"And then, over fifteen years, it all fell apart. Now, Lobdell puts himself in the ranks of American atheists. And he’s telling the wrenching story of his journey into and out of faith."

It was an interesting interview. Lobdell is very honest about where he stands, but quite unclear as to why. One of the questions posed, which reduces faith to moralism, is "If Christians are no more ethical than atheists, why belong to a church?" While that is a good question, it is reductive and ignores the fact that Christians see the world and ourselves as fallen, but in the process of being redeemed, this is a very uneven process. I mean, if we were magically perfected by being baptized, or coming to faith in Christ, there would be no need for any other sacrament, least of all confession. In addition to Giussani, another antidote for this kind of reductive view is Timothy Radcliffe's What Is The Point of Being A Christian? Catholic Christianity is not now and never has been strictly binary, that is, either/or, but both/and, accounting for reality according to the totality of its factors.

I don't mind stating that I am suffering from blogger's blah. So, unless really moved, there will be much less filling this cyber space. It seems that unless you can state something in 140 characters or less, nobody's gonna take the time. Don't look for me on Twitter, I have difficult enough time convincing myself participate on Facebook. Call me a Luddite, but I stand opposed to reduction and exalting quantity over quality, our ability to reason is already short-circuited enough. I am very interested in what others think, should they choose to take the time. The end of a month is a good time to shift into a lower gear.

What does the survey tell us; trying to make some sense of the data

According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life report, Faith in Flux: Change in Religious Affiliation in the U.S., currently 44% of all adults in the U.S. do not belong to their childhood faith, the faith in which they raised, that amounts to roughly 95 million people, according to 2007 estimates from the CIA World Factbook. 9%, or some eight and a half million of these adults were raised Catholic, but no longer affiliate with the Catholic Church. 4% of U.S. adults who were raised Catholic and are now unaffiliated, with the other 5% now self-identifying as Protestants. It is also interesting to note that 9% of adults who practice the faith in which they were raised, at some point changed faiths, either being unaffiliated or affiliating with another group, before returning to their childhood faith. According to the survey, only 3% of those raised Protestant become Catholic. In fact, more people who were raised Protestant, 4%, affiliate with non-Christian religions than with Catholicism.

Unsurprisingly, Mass attendance seems to be the biggest predictor as to whether someone remains Catholic, especially during teenage years. 69% of Catholics who were born and raised in the church and are still Catholic attended Mass at least weekly during their teen years, compared to 60% of those who were raised Catholic and who now self-identify as Protestants, and 44% of those who are now unaffiliated. Even as a child, 86% of those who remain Catholic attended Mass at least weekly versus 79% of those who are now Protestant and 74% of those who are unaffiliated. This is a bigger predictor than either participation in children and youth religious education programs or attendance at Catholic schools, with 25% of those who remain Catholic having attended Catholic schools, compared with 16% who changed to being Protestant, and 20% of those who are unaffiliated.

Among the common reasons given by formerly Catholic respondents for leaving their childhood faith and now being unaffiliated, 71% said that they “just drifted away from religion,” followed by 65% ceasing to believe in the church’s teachings. They could give more than one reason leaving Catholicism. These are the only two general reasons identified by more than half of the previously Catholic and currently unaffiliated respondents. In their own words, 54% of the unaffiliated respondents who were raised Catholic cited religious and moral beliefs as their reason for leaving, the only reason to garner more than half among this group of respondents.

For those who were raised Catholic and now identify themselves as Protestants, 54% of those who now identify themselves as Evangelicals and 53% of those who are mainline, denominational Protestants said they just drifted away from religion. Presumably, when they came back, they affiliated differently for any number of reasons. 62% of Evangelicals and only 20% of mainline Protestants said that they stopped believing in the church’s teachings.

Getting more specific, 56% of the now unaffiliated, compared with 20% of self-identifying Evangelicals, and 31% of those who now consider themselves mainline Protestants, report their unhappiness with the church’s teachings on abortion and/or homosexuality as reasons no longer affiliating with the church. 48% of the currently religiously unaffiliated, 12% of former Catholics who are now Evangelicals and 26% of former Catholics who now affiliate with mainline Protestant denominations cite the church’s teaching on birth control as a reason for leaving. Divorce and remarriage also factor in with 33% of the now unaffiliated, 23% of Evangelicals and 31% of formerly Catholic mainline Protestants, saying it is a reason that they left.

Of the 48% of those adults who have left the Catholic faith, having been raised Catholic, who cited the church’s teaching on birth control as a reason they left the Catholic Church, 23% of those who now identify as mainline Protestants, 9% of those who are self-identifying Evangelicals, and 46% of the currently unaffiliated say that the Catholic Church is “[t]oo strict and conservative.”

It also bears noting that 36% of those who change religious affiliation from the faith of their childhood change twice, and 26% change three or more times, leaving 38%, thus constituting a plurality, who only change once.

A few tentative and preliminary observations:

I am one of the 44% of adults in the United States who no longer belongs to the faith in which I was raised, having changed only once. I became Catholic at the age of 24 in 1990. I consciously quit affiliating with the LDS at 22. By way of comparing a rough outline of my own experience with that of others who have changed religious allegiance, for whatever that might be worth, I am among the 79% of people who left their childhood faith before turning 24. However, I am slightly over the age at which 71% of those who change affiliation join their current faith, which is also prior their twenty-fourth birthday, though I did begin RCIA when I was twenty-three. These numbers are overwhelming. Only 21% of adults who change religious affiliation do so after age twenty-four! This gets back to religious practice and the late teen/early adult years. These are vital years. It is a time of transition for people from being children to adults. Hence, it is not a time merely for faith formation, but for faith transformation! St. Paul wrote: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways” (1 Cor. 13:11).

Helping people in their mid-to-late teens and early twenties see that maturity in faith, as in all aspects of life, is vital. To aid them in discerning that faith in Christ, which of necessity is mediated to us by the church, conceived of as the whole communio sanctorum, of which they are a part, can withstand rigorous intellectual and existential scrutiny, is our pastoral challenge. This means assisting people in getting over much silliness, like believing that the mystery of the triune God, formulated as one God in three divine persons, somehow consists of believing that at the heart of Christian faith is a gross arithmetical error, namely that 3=1, which reason tells us differ by exactly two. It also means helping people get beyond the temptation, as Fr. Carrón put it, to reproach the Lord because, even though we are Christians, bad and unexpected things happen to us. Such things happen to everybody, just as it rains on the just and unjust in equal measure. We must also do a better job of engaging young people in the area of morality, especially in the always delicate area of sexuality. This is no small challenge, there are no easy answers here, especially given that against which we are forced to contend, but you do not meet a challenge by shrinking away from it. As with success in all education, the role of parents, who are the primary catechists of their own children, a task that cannot be delegated, is crucial.

Liturgy features centrally in all of this, it was not just a theological, but an anthropological assertion by the fathers of Vatican II that the euchartistic liturgy is the source and summit of our faith. However, we must strive for good liturgy, which is not liturgy that tries too hard to be relevant. Substantial preaching is also a must. People are not stupid, especially those adults who attend Mass each week and are serious about following Christ. In no two aspects of church life do we need to put away childish things than in liturgy, which includes preaching, and catechesis. On the whole, there needs to be far more adult formation on offer.

We must assist people in forming a faith that is not only an understanding of but a relationship with God, through Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, a house built on a rock, strong enough to withstand the storms of life. Belonging to a community in order to help each other out is also vital; you know, that whole God and neighbor dynamic? In fact, 10% of the formerly Catholic and currently unaffiliated cite not enough feeling of community as a reason for leaving. An identical 10% of those who were raised Catholic, but who as adults belong to Protestant congregations also gave not enough feeling of community as reason for leaving the Catholic Church. That computes to roughly 850,000 leaving because they do find the community that they seek, either giving up the search altogether, or seeking it elsewhere.

Living, not ossified, faith

It is far too easy to over generalize about the experience of others. It is reductive and so is not helpful, as it tends to rob people of their humanity, at least in our eyes, to reduce them to a type, which is a caricature. On the basis of such an assessment, we could all arrive at the conclusion that, somehow, we are so very different from everyone else, that our experience is of a different order. After having arrived at this conclusion we are prone to privilege our experience over that of others and use it as an excuse to stay apart, to withhold ourselves because "They just don't get me."

The reason we can perform this feat is because we have immediate and continuous access to our own experience, to our own inner life, an access we do not have when it comes to others, even those close to us. We fool ourselves if we think that there is such a life that is a uniform Catholic life, even among those who share the same state of life (i.e., married, single, clerical, religious). There is no following Christ that is not a journey to destiny, a pilgrimage, and there is no road to destiny without its treacherous patches, even for those who have believed all their lives. In fact, those who have always believed have weathered many storms. To take such a view is in stark contrast to our call to be companions on the way.

I cannot begin to tell you how many times people have asked to meet with me about their desire to be involved, only to tell me "No" at every opportunity afterwards. I am usually pretty available to people, but when it comes to this matter these days, I just give them ways to be involved on the phone, or in an e-mail and who they can contact to do this. I use the Nike slogan- Just do it and spare us all the hand-wringing and the pseudo-discernment, as you "discern" your way into eternity. I do not think it necessary to wrestle all night with an angel in order to decide to teach a third grade religious education class, or make sandwiches for the parish outreach program.

If I have one lament about my own experience of church, which I am careful these days not to universalize (I was not always so judicious and I still lapse, as parts of this post probably demonstrate), it is that we talk real good about community, but we are often bad at living it, choosing instead to be alone together. This why I am grateful for the Movement, which has enabled me to light a candle instead of contenting myself with the all too easy alternative of cursing the darkness. So, for me, the Movement is a positive hypothesis. Loneliness and longing for community, for communio, is also what initially prompted me to seek the companionship of certain saints. My companionship with them is a true companionship, not an imaginary one. I would invite anyone to verify this themselves through their own experience. All of this is why I was deeply moved by Fr. Louis-Marie Chauvet, when he wrote that "on the basis of the incarnation of God in Jesus... [our] encounter with God goes through [our] encounter with others" (The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body, pg. 38). As I preached last Sunday: "This 'encounter with others' is to be taken in its twofold sense: our encounter of others and an experience that we share with them."

In other words, for everyone who believes and seeks to follow Christ, there is an inherent tension, a tension that is necessary in order to grow, to become who God created, redeemed, and now sanctifies you to be. This cannot happen in a vacuum, it requires other people and authentic community.

As far as what we believe, there is much we are free to dismiss, to bracket, to not believe. For example, we are not obligated to believe even in those Marian apparitions that the church has investigated and to which she has given her imprimatur and nihil obstat. In fact, I think a healthy skepticism is necessary when it comes to claims of private revelation. On other hand, we must not become skeptics and dismiss the very possibility of such things. Hence, this is one example of a dialectical tension inherent to faith. Cardinal Martini, in his wonderful book, compiled and translated by his devoted student, Marsha Daigle-Williamson, The Gospel According to St. Paul: Meditations on His Life and Letters, says that faith itself is living the dialectic tension between the seen and the unseen. Certainly, what the church proposes dogmatically is perfectly consonant with human reason. It is possible to reject it, but it can't be rejected on the basis of there being no possibility of it's being true, even according to reason.

At the end of the day, the criterion of truth is your heart, what genuinely corresponds to your deepest desire. This is why there is no substitute for honesty because without integrity there can be no faith, which is a way of knowing. In other words, as Anselm of Canterbury wrote: "we do not seek to understand in order to believe, but we believe in order to understand." Authentic faith is never a reduction, it is always an expansion of ourselves, of our view of the world, and of others. Seeing with the eyes of faith is precisely what enables us to see people as they are and to engage reality according to the totality of its factors, which is to see things neither through gray-tinted nor rose-colored glasses, but clearly.

l'affair Notre Dame redux

Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon announced this morning that she is declining the award of Notre Dame's highest honor, the Laetare medal. She did so by making public a letter she wrote to university president, Fr. John Jenkins, C.S.C. In light of a trend UND seems to have set, with the announcements over the weekend that Xavier University, a Catholic school in New Orleans, has invited Donna Brazile and that St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia has invited Chris Matthews, both pro-choice Catholics, to give commencement addresses and to be honored, Ambassador Glendon's decision strikes me as the right one.

Bishop D'Arcy has confirmed in recent days the concern I expressed at the beginning, namely that UND never consulted him about the decision to invite and honor Pres. Obama, nor did they inform him before the public announcement that they had made these decisions. However, they did consult presidents of other Catholic universities and, oddly enough, other bishops. In my humble opinion, this shows a troubling disregard for the communion of the church, both local and universal. In her letter, Ambassador Glendon calmly, succinctly, and eloquently explains her reasoning in refusing this very high honor. I think it bears mentioning that by unwittingly dragging Ambassador Glendon into this controversy, Notre Dame demonstrated a distinct lack of charity toward her.

Year B 3rd Sunday of Easter

Readings: Acts 3:13-15.17-19; Ps. 4:2.7-9; 1 John 2:1-5a; Luke 24:35-38

In our Gospel today, the resurrected Lord appears as Cleopas and the other disciple, who hurried back to Jerusalem from Emmaus, are recounting to "the eleven and those with them" how Jesus had walked the road to Emmaus with them and how he "was made known to them in the breaking of the bread" (Luke 24:35-36). In the middle of their report, the suddenly appearing Lord says words similar to the ones he said to the two while they were on the road: "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures" (Luke 24:35-36. 44-45). The minds of the eleven and the other disciples are opened to receive the same enlightenment as the two disciples who walked with the unidentified stranger.

What the resurrected Jesus gives them is the key to unlock the mystery of God’s plan, namely that "the death and resurrection of the Messiah" is "the key to understanding God’s whole plan according to the Scriptures" (Chauvet, The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body, 24). This is exactly what Peter faithfully preaches in our reading from Acts, pointing out that both the law and the prophets are fulfilled in the person of Christ Jesus when he declares that "[t]he God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus" and that "God has thus brought to fulfillment what he had announced beforehand through the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer"(Acts 3:13.18).

"In the background of this account," observes Fr. Louis-Marie Chauvet, is a question, "which is that of any disciple of Jesus, today as yesterday: 'If it is true that Jesus arose and is alive, how is it that we cannot see/touch/find him'" (23)? Indeed, does this question not arise in your mind as you think about the resurrection, especially living in a time and culture that seeks to reduce what you can know to what you can empirically verify? The truth of the matter, my dear friends, is that "you cannot arrive at the recognition of the risen [Lord] unless you renounce seeing/touching/finding him by undeniable proofs" (25). Nonetheless, as philosopher Roger Scruton maintains, "[t]here can be no motive for pursuing truth in abstract empty praise of it: Truth must be incarnate in a person... who calls us to obedience through love" (Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life).

Faith, which is a method of knowledge mediated to us by means of a witness, necessarily begins with our "renunciation of the immediacy" of needing to see and touch in order to know (Chauvet 25). Hence, faith starts with your "assent to the mediation of the church," of which the sacraments, which we celebrate together, especially baptism and Eucharist, are the primary means. The Scriptures, which never reach their "truth as word of God as fully as in the liturgical act of [their] proclamation," are fundamental to the church’s sacramental mediation of the real presence of Christ (Chauvet 47).

To this end, it is essential in order for us to grasp the instruction Luke seeks to impart, that the eyes of Cleopas and his companion only recognized Jesus after "he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them" and that as soon as they recognized him, "he vanished from their sight" (Luke 24:30-31). In other words, our encounter with Christ arises from our shared experience, from which we learn "on the basis of the incarnation of God in Jesus, that [our] encounter with God goes through [our] encounter with others" (Chauvet 38). This "encounter with others" is to be taken in its twofold sense: our encounter of others and an experience that we share with them.

Let us make no mistake, the certainty about our future, which we call hope, is not rooted in "simple human reasoning, but on a historical fact of faith: Jesus Christ, crucified and buried, is risen with his glorified body" (Pope Benedict XVI, Urbi et Orbi, Easter 2009). St. Paul, in correcting an erroneous view of Christ’s resurrection that had arisen among the Christians in Corinth, vigorously declared: "If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain" (1 Cor. 15:14). He goes on to say: "If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied" (1 Cor. 15:19).

Our experience of the risen Christ, to whom we turn in the face of the inevitability of our own death and in response to the pain brought about by the absence of a loved one, who it seems we have lost to death, is better expressed in poetry than the language of either scientific or philosophical discourse, as this passage from a poem, Dream of a dead friend, written by Christian Wiman, shows:

"If I say the world is real
And outside my window is a dawn;
If I say the proof of love is grief
And trees are greener being gone,
Why, oh why
Will none of this be true
But in the moment I reach for you
Saying no, no."

Our participation in the Eucharist has implications for our lives, implications that give meaning to our mortality precisely as it is and not as we wish it to be, a meaning that points us toward the fulfillment of our desire, which is infinite. We are called to verify, to make true what we both celebrate and receive in and through this most Blessed Sacrament, the sacramentum caritatis, the sacrament of love. Love is the key that unlocks the mystery of faith, the mystery of one God in three divine persons, the paschal mystery of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, by virtue of which we, through our baptism, confirmation, confession of our sins, and sharing this Eucharist, participate. By coming to share in the mysterium tremendum, this overwhelming mystery that constitutes reality at its most fundamental, we recognize that there is often an abyss between our knowledge and our desire, an abyss that can only be filled by love made real.

To really know Jesus Christ is to desire to make him known to others. Let us take heed of what the old song says, "they will know that we are Christians by our love." Many good people who do not share our faith in Christ serve others selflessly. So, what makes our service Christian is not its matter, but its form, "which is given it by love understood as a response to God’s love, which [always comes] first" (Chauvet 41). As we read in 1 John, the same letter from which our second reading is taken: "In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another" (4:10-11). My dear sisters and brothers in Christ, what the Scriptures declare is true: "The way we may be sure that we know him is to keep his commandments" (1 John 2:3).

He who taught us to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, also commanded us to do what we are gathered here to do in memory of him (Luke 22:19). Beloved, Jesus Christ is alive and as with Cleopas and his companion, he walks with us to unfold for us the mystery of faith, which is nothing less than the mystery of our lives. In the end, "[o]nly those who give thanks are able to rejoice, for only they are conscious that life, freedom and well-being are not rights but gifts" (Scruton, Gentle Regrets).

I also posted my Vespers homilette, on the reading from 1 John, over on The People of St. Mary Magdalene.

"We must not abandon faith! Faith is the most important thing"

KBYU, of all television stations, is showing Inherit the Wind late tonight. I saw this movie for the first time when I was a high school sophomore. I went on that same year to perform this scene as a dramatic reading at a high school speech competition. Frankly, it was liberating.

I do not agree that we must abandon faith in Genesis, though, not being a person of "the book", at least not in any strict sense, the Bible is not the object of my faith, but God and His Christ, who is Risen and accompanies us even now. We certainly must give up believing that Genesis tells us how things came to be, instead of, not only why things came to be, but why we came to be. It is amazing how many church fathers addressed issues that we see as exclusively issues of our own age. For example, we have St. Augustine's De Genesi ad litteram (i.e., On the literal meaning of Genesis). In this work, he wrote: "Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances,... and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, lest the unbeliever see only ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn." As believers, we, too, must hold knowledge certainly from reason and experience, especially when we understand faith as a form of knowledge, in which revelation, properly apprehended and comprehended, plays an indispensible role.

All of this reminded me of something I posted on our parish blog more than two years ago: Doing "all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situtation". This is a response to the so-called new atheists, whose writings only serve to demonstrate that "[w]hat has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun" (Eccl. 1:9 ).

I also think Drummond's speech in this scene is fraught with false dilemmas. After all, are not architectural, engineering, and construction techniques necessary to erect a cathedral? In fact, it is often man's desire to erect cathedrals that leads to technical and artistic advancement. Creating beauty is essential to culture and beauty cannot be separated from our desire for what is transcendent. In other words, ideas that lead to authentic human advancement do not arise in the solitary vacuum of an individual human mind, including the mind of Charles Darwin. As Dr. McNamara reminds us, posting a quote from the late Fr. Vincent McNabb, OP: "Art is beauty made a sacrament. Art is finite human expression made infinite by love."

The extreme represented in Drummond's speech, apart from being a reaction to Brady's thoughtless biblical literalism, is a good indication of what occurs when we turn to ideology, putting it before a sincere desire for truth: polarization. Once we find ourselves at polar extremes, we can only shout at each other across the distance that separates us. Besides, faith cannot be reduced to mere belief, to giving assent to a set of propositions. By its very nature, conceiving of faith in this way is static and defensive. To reduce faith to belief is to render faith uncompelling, not fascinating, unattractive. I keep coming back to our National Diaconia's judgment on the Notre Dame commencement controversy, A New Commencement, particularly to: "For us faith is not an ethical code nor an ideology but an experience: an encounter with Christ present here and now in the Christian community. Christian faith gives us a freedom and a passion for living that express themselves above all in the form of questions as we face reality, and an inexhaustible openness to everything human."

Of course, as a sophomore, my favorite line from the movie was when Henry Drummond, played by Spencer Tracy, who is a fictionalized version of Clarence Darrow, is reprimanded by his opponent, Matthew Brady, for swearing, quipped: "I don't swear just for the hell of it. Language is a poor enough means of communication. I think we should use all the words we've got. Besides, there are damn few words that anybody understands." Needless to say, my parents were neither impressed nor amused.

"Whoever troubles his own household will inherit the wind, and the fool will be servant to the wise of heart" (Pro. 11:29).

J.S.Bach

Bach's Brandenburg Concerto, No. 5, i. Allegro played by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra is our traditio for this Easter Friday.

Oh, and my Jazz won one from the Lakers last night! Since I have introduced this bit of miscellania, why not a little more?

I do not shy away from matters of sex and sexuality in this cyberspace. So, I appreciate very much what Steven Crowder writes over on the Big Hollywood blog - Appreciate My Indifference To Your Sexuality. I linked to Crowder's post via The Anchoress, who adds "I think the gay community does not really understand that most folks don’t care who they sleep with - they just resent having it all shoved in their faces, so they’re forced to react - it’s a set-up." I would add that such a desparate need for socio-religious approval is a pretty good indication that something is not quite right. Again, to reduce yourself or anyone else to their sexuality is dehumanizing. Very often our sexuality is the most difficult part of our personality to integrate. We live in a society that presents every imaginable obstacle to such a healthy integration. Herein lies the set-up: instead of being able help each other, we get into knock-down, drag out arguments that do not leave any of us better for it, just weary and resigned. The kind of weary resignation exhibited by Doug Kmiec and others, who are seriously advocating that there should be no such thing as state-recognized marriage. In other words, "I don't care if you don't care."