Thinking About Religion

When I became a Catholic in 1996, the Boston Globe had begun its several year series on priestly abuse in the Catholic Church for which the newspaper would win a Pulitzer Prize. Many of my friends commented that the timing of my conversion was typical: always going in the direction which everyone else had left.

At the time, I held a prestigious position at an academic medical center in Massachusetts, a position I had moved from Houston to take: the fact that I had become a Catholic did not go unnoticed, I think because almost all of the men and women with whom I worked considered themselves Catholic in spite of the fact that few practiced their faith. I found that interesting, akin to many of my Jewish friends who claimed their Jewish heritage but not their faith.

I recall a luncheon with a colleague; like me, he was a Hospital Director and was curious about the new kid on the block. Early in our conversation, the fact of my conversion came up and I briefly explained my "story" in response to his questions. Like almost everyone else in Massachusetts, it seemed, he had been an altar boy, gone to Catholic schools and somewhere along the way, stopped going to church.

I recall that he had looked at me somewhat strangely while I'd explained my search, the reasons behind it and my joy at having found peace-finally-then he said, "Well, I guess it makes sense if you like living in the 5th century." And he smiled.

I have come to understand that coming to faith in mid-life is far different from being handed it in childhood- like everything, it is both a gift and a burden. The gift is that I don't see ours as all that different from the 5th century. Sure our technologies and our living conditions are far superior to those of the 5th century. As a woman, I am deeply grateful to be alive in the 21st century rather than the 6th. But the real questions which keep us all awake at night are unchanged, all these thousands of years later. Unlike my friend, I had found those answers in Catholicism.

And yet the fundamental questions of faith: suffering, death, and evil come no more easily to me than to my formerly Catholic friend. Recently, I read a small book: When Worlds Collide by R.C. Sproul. Written just after 9/11, Sproul begins his arguments innocuously: gives a history of the deistic history of our country which created a God who was above all of our silly human experiences. Then he reviews the changes brought about by the 60's and the consequences to our culture. All fairly simple, no challenges.

Then wham, Sproul returns to his subject which I had thought was terrorism and all of its attendant evils. But that is not the subject of When Worlds Collide, it is simply subtext.

In dealing with the evil of that day Sproul does not claim, rather he proclaims God's sovereignty. By that he means that God was not asleep at the switch when those planes dove into the twin towers and killed close to 4000 people: Christianity is not Deism. He knew what was happening and allowed it, claims Sproul: He is either God or not- we cannot have it both ways.