The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [14]
Others sometimes envy people who walk along the path of belief. “If only I had faith like you!” one friend often tells me. While I understand her sentiment, that perspective makes faith seem like something you have rather than have to work at keeping. It’s as if you’re born with unquestioning faith, like being born with red hair or brown eyes. Or as if faith were like pulling into a gas station and filling your tank.
Neither metaphor is apt. Ultimately, faith is a gift from God. But faith isn’t something that you just have. Perhaps a better metaphor is that faith is like a garden: while you may already have the basics— soil, seeds, water—you have to cultivate and nourish it. Like a garden, faith takes patience, persistence, and even work.
If you envy those on the path of belief, don’t worry—many people go through a period of doubt and confusion before they come to know God. Sometimes for a long time. Ignatius finally accepted God’s presence at an age when many of his peers were well on their way to raising a family and achieving financial success.
None of these six paths is free from dangers. One pitfall for those on the path of belief is an inability to understand people on other paths and a temptation to judge them for their doubt or disbelief. Certainty prevents some believers from being compassionate, sympathetic, or even tolerant of others who are not as certain in their faith. Their arrogance turns them into the “frozen chosen,” consciously or unconsciously excluding others from their cozy, believing world. This is the crabbed, joyless, and ungenerous religiosity that Jesus spoke against: spiritual blindness.
There is a more subtle danger for this group: a complacency that makes one’s relationship with God stagnate. Some people cling to ways of understanding their faith learned in childhood that might not work for an adult. For example, you might cling to a childhood notion of a God who will never let anything bad happen. When tragedy strikes, since your youthful image of God is not reflected in reality, you may abandon the God of your youth. Or you may abandon God completely.
An adult life requires an adult faith. Think of it this way: you wouldn’t consider yourself equipped to face life with a third-grader’s understanding of math. Yet people often expect the religious instruction they had in grammar school to sustain them in the adult world.
In his book A Friendship Like No Other, the Jesuit spiritual writer William A. Barry invites adults to relate to God in an adult way. Just as an adult child needs to relate to his or her parent in a new way, he suggests, so adult believers need to relate to God in new ways as they mature. Otherwise, one remains stuck in a childlike view of God that prevents fully embracing a mature faith.
Like all of the six paths, the path of belief is not without its stumbling blocks.
The Path of Independence
Those on the path of independence have made a conscious decision to separate themselves from organized religion, but they still believe in God. Maybe they find church services meaningless, offensive, dull, or all three. Maybe they’ve been hurt by a church. Maybe they’ve been insulted (or abused) by a priest, pastor, rabbi, minister, or imam. Or they feel offended by certain dogmas of organized religion. Or they find religious leaders hypocritical.
Or maybe they’re just bored. Believe me, I’ve heard plenty of homilies that have put me to sleep, sometimes literally. As the Catholic priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley once wrote, sometimes the question is not why so many Catholics leave the church—it’s why they stay.
Catholics may be turned off by the church’s teachings on a particular moral question, or its stance on a political question, or by the scandal of clergy sex abuse. Consequently, while they still believe in God, they no longer