The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [16]
The main danger for this group is that they sometimes expect God’s presence to be proven solely in an intellectual way. When something profound happens in their emotional lives, something that touches them deeply, they reject the possibility that it could be a sign of God’s activity. Their intellect may become a wall that closes off their hearts to experiences of God’s presence. They may also be unwilling to attribute to God anything that the believer might see as an obvious example of God’s presence.
It’s like the story of the atheist caught in a flood. The fellow figures that the flood threatening his house is the chance to prove conclusively whether God exists. So he says to himself, If there is a God, I will ask him for help, and he will save me. When he hears a warning on the radio advising listeners to move to higher ground, he ignores it. If there is a God, he will save me, he thinks. Next, a firefighter knocks on his door to warn him to evacuate. “If there is a God, he will save me,” he says to the firefighter. When the floodwaters rise, the man climbs to the second floor. The coast guard boat motors by his window and offers him rescue. “If there is a God, he will save me,” he says and refuses help from the coast guard.
Finally, he ends up on the roof, with the waters rising around him. A police helicopter hovers over the house and drops a rope to climb. “If there is a God, he will save me!” he shouts over the roar of the helicopter’s blades.
Suddenly a giant wave sweeps over him, and the man drowns and finds himself in heaven. When God comes to welcome him, the atheist is first surprised. And then furious. “Why didn’t you save me?” he asks.
“What do you mean?” says God. “I sent the firefighter, the coast guard, and the police officer, and you still wouldn’t listen!”
The Path of Return
This path gets more crowded every year. People in this group typically begin life in a religious family but drift away from their faith. After a childhood in which they were encouraged (or forced) to attend religious services, they find them either tiresome or irrelevant or both. Religion remains distant, though oddly appealing.
Then something reignites their curiosity about God. Maybe they’ve achieved some financial or professional success and ask, “Is that all there is?” Or after the death of a parent, they start to wonder about their own mortality. Or their children ask about God, awakening questions that have lain dormant within themselves for years. “Who is God, Mommy?”
Thus begins a tentative journey back to their faith—though it may not be the same faith they knew as children. Perhaps a new tradition speaks more clearly to them. Perhaps they return to their original religion but in a different, and more committed, way than when they were young.
That’s not surprising. As I mentioned, you would hardly consider yourself an educated adult if you ended your academic training as a child. Yet many believers cease their religious education as children, and expect it to carry them through adulthood. People in this group often find that they need to reeducate themselves to understand their faith in a mature way.
When I was a boy, for instance, I used to think of God as the Great Problem Solver who would fix all my problems if I just prayed hard enough. Let me get an A on my social studies test. Let me do well in math. Better yet, let tomorrow be a snow day.
If God was all good, I reasoned, then he would answer my prayers. What possible reason could God have for not answering them?
As I grew older, the model of God as the Great Problem Solver collapsed—primarily because God didn’t seem interested in solving all of my problems. I prayed and prayed and prayed, and all my problems still weren’t solved. Why not? I wondered. Didn’t God care about me? My adolescent