The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [15]
Though they keep their distance from churches, synagogues, or mosques, many people in this group are still firm believers. Often they find solace in the religious practices they learned as children. Just as often they long for a more formal way to worship God in their lives.
One strength of this group is a healthy independence that enables them to see things in a fresh way—something that their own religious community often desperately needs. Those on the “outside,” who are not bound by the usual restrictions on what is “appropriate” and “not appropriate” to say within the community, can often speak more honestly.
The main danger for this group, however, is a perfectionism that sets up any organized religion for failure.
Not long ago, a friend stopped attending his family’s church. My friend is an intelligent and compassionate man who believes in God and whose parents had deep roots in Episcopalianism. But he believed his local church was too aligned with the affluent. So he decided to search for a community that recognized the place of the poor in the world.
After he left his church, he toyed with the idea of joining the local Catholic church, which he noticed many of the poor attended on Sundays. But my friend disagreed with their prohibition on ordaining women. So he rejected Catholicism.
Next he experimented with Buddhism, but he found it impossible to reconcile his belief in a personal God, and his devotion to Jesus Christ, with the Buddhist worldview.
Finally, he ended up at the local Unitarian church, which initially seemed to suit him. He appreciated their broad-minded Christian-based spirituality and commitment to social justice, as well as their welcome of people who feel unwelcome in other churches. But he eventually ran into a problem: the Unitarians didn’t espouse a clear enough belief system for my friend. In the end, he decided to belong to no church. Now he stays at home on Sundays.
My friend’s experience reminded me that the search for a perfect religious community is a futile one. As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in The Seven Storey Mountain, “The first and most elementary test of one’s call to the religious life—whether as a Jesuit, Franciscan, Cistercian or Carthusian—is the willingness to accept life in a community in which everybody is more or less imperfect.” That holds for any religious organization.
This is not to excuse all the problems, imperfections, and even sinfulness of religious organizations. Rather, it is a realistic admission that as long as we’re human, we will be imperfect. It’s also a reminder that for those on the path of independence—believers who have left organized religion—the search for a perfect religious community may be one without end.
The Path of Disbelief
Those traveling along the path of disbelief not only find that organized religion holds no appeal (even if they sometimes find its services and rituals comforting), but have also arrived at an intellectual conclusion that God may not, does not, or cannot exist. Often they seek proof for God’s existence, and finding none, or encountering intense suffering, they reject the theistic worldview completely.
The cardinal benefit of this group is that they take none of the bland reassurances of religion for granted. Sometimes they have thought more deeply about God and religion than some believers have. Likewise, sometimes the most selfless people in our world are atheists or agnostics. Some of the hardest working aid workers I met in my time working with refugees in East Africa were nonbelievers. The “secular saint” is real.
They also have a knack for detecting hypocrisy, cant, or lazy answers: a religious-baloney detector. Tell a person in this group that suffering is part of God’s mysterious plan and needs to be accepted unquestioningly, and he will rightly challenge you to explain