As I stand here before you, I am very nervous. I haven’t spoken in church since I was a child. I have no formal training in religion but I do have my experience. I am also comforted by the fact you want to be bored less than I want to bore you. I consider us to be a team in this whole venture and if you keep your end of the bargain, I will do my best to keep mine.
I came from a strong community of faith. The church I attended as a child held a central place in my life. Many of my friends were in my same Sunday school class and living in an area of the south where Catholics are still considered an oddity we were bonded together as outsiders often are. I had my first communion. I became a Eucharistic minister and lector. I went through all of the motions that a good Catholic should. Then it came time for my confirmation, one of the seven sacraments and seen by many as a rite of passage where a child becomes a full adult member of the church. As part of the ritual I was asked to choose a patron saint to be my spiritual guide. After several hours of looking through my church’s Saint Cards I settled upon Saint Sir Thomas Moore. I was enthralled by the idea of a man who despite pressure from King Henry VIII refused to compromise his own beliefs to do what was politically expedient.
A year later when I came to college and that loving and embracing community was stripped from me; I found that all I was left with was my faith. I was forced to grapple with difficult questions. Was I only a member of the church because of the sense of community it offered? Was I a Catholic only to be seen as a Catholic to my family? This whole process of questioning culminated in a philosophy course where the final paper assignment was to argue for or against the existence of God. I spent days mulling over the arguments on both sides and eventually found myself arguing against the existence of god. I believed that without a solid core of faith my religion was nothing more than a veneer of ritual on top of an ignored emptiness. Armed with too many unanswered questions I separated myself from the church that had meant so much to me as a child. In this contrarian frenzy I defied the tradition of my patron saint Thomas More and sacrificed the religion of my childhood for what was expedient and practical at the time. And although this act of defiance was meant to create calm in my life by removing what I saw as a lie, I became more restless than ever. I was consumed by emptiness. I searched for truth in my studies and sport and made hard work and achievement my new god. I drank in excess and I allowed friendships to wilt and die as I pursued my own ends. As I worked harder and harder I felt doors closing, opportunities missed, loved ones ignored to reach my goals, the emptiness that I sought to fill was replaced by a sense of injury and misanthropy. It was as if the harder I worked, the more myopic my vision became and eventually the sense of claustrophobia from the small world I had created for myself became suffocating.
CS Lewis the great Christian apologist describes a spiritual awareness that all humans experience. This awareness is like a thirst and just like our thirst for water shows us that there is water to be found so to does our thirst for the divine show its existence. People all over the world have tried to satisfy this thirst and often settle upon different truths, yet like birds resting on different branches of the same tree, they may have different and incomplete views but that doesn’t mean that everything that they see and believe about the tree is wrong. In fact when comparing several religions, Lewis was struck not by our differences but our vast similarity.
For Lewis there is a greater problem than the diversity of our own beliefs. We are constantly aware of this spiritual thirst, this restlessness, this pain of separation and we try to satisfy it with the profane rather than the divine. We try to fill the emptiness with alcohol, sex, fame, power or any number of worldly delights yet when we take something that isn’t divine and try to make it our god it also becomes our demon. Even things that are noble can become tormenting. Love of country becomes war and violence. The warm embrace of a loved one becomes base sexual desire. Ambition becomes a blinding myopia at the expense of all else. Instead of chasing our dreams we are chased by the constant threat of failure. We even try to drown this thirst with constant movement because it is in the stillness that we can hear God and are forced to confront ourselves.
If there is one conciliation it may be in the fact that although we may turn from God, God doesn’t turn from us. Like a man walking in the woods although we may stray from the path our compass still points north. We only have to listen. At a time when I was as spiritually blind as ever I found myself on a medical internship to India presumably for the selfish end of increasing my own credentials. The lion’s share of what I did in the clinic where I worked involved the cleaning of boils on the feet. It was rice planting season which meant that everyone was in the rice patties in standing water. A bit of dirt or grime would work into a pore or cut. People wouldn’t wash, and then several days later what would have been a small problem became horribly infected and quite painful. As I would clean and disinfect the feet of the villagers I was reminded of the Christian tradition of the washing of feet. It was hard to explain the feeling that I had when I would do this. At that point I understood deeply and profoundly what it meant to do something for someone else. The readings that I heard weekly as a child took on a tangible relevance. It was then that I embraced my faith and it for the first time became tangible.
Some would call this an act of cowardice to relinquish power but I disagree for nothing requires more courage for a man who thrives on a sense of control over his own life than to admit that he is not always in the driver’s seat. As I open my heart I find that God’s world isn’t such a dark and claustrophobic place as the world I had created for myself. So although I have read many arguments about the existence of God nothing has been more persuasive in my search than my own experience and in the end isn’t it reasonable to trust our own experiences.
Copyright © 2007
Will Canestaro
