Do I Believe in God?

Do I Believe in God?

I was born Catholic. I was baptized as an infant, confirmed as a child and took my first Holy communion when I was in elementary school. I attended Catholic school until I was ten and went to confraternity of Christian doctrine classes (CCD)through my teens. Who God was, why he was and why we were was drilled into me during my formative years.

            In CCD, we studied the Baltimore Catechism where we were expected to memorize the questions and the answers to basic Catholic theology.

            Q: Who made us?

            A: God made us

            Q: Who is God?

            A: God is the Supreme Being, infinitely perfect, who made all things and keeps them in existence.

            Q: Why did God make us?

            A: God made us to show forth His goodness and to share with us His everlasting happiness in heaven.

            And so on and so forth. All of this was backed up with scripture. The Baltimore Catechism was a way to simplify the bible for Catholics. We were taught the Apostle’s Creed, Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Gloria and other basic prayers. Every Catholic family was encouraged to recite the rosary every day, and all of this was to be taken on faith. We were taught that God was omnipresent (everywhere), omnipotent (all powerful) and omniscient (all knowing). We were taught that the Holy Trinity of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit were three persons in one and that the human mind was too feeble to comprehend such a thing and that we should just take it on faith that this was true.

            Armed with the knowledge of good and evil, sin and redemption, mercy, grace and sacrifice, we would be able to take on the world. It was bliss. And then we ran smack into the world view of God.

            First, God had been divided. He was not only Catholic, but Protestant and Orthodox. Communion was not a daily thing, but a special occasion in some churches. There was no ceremony in some places, only preaching and there were some churches where the ceremonial aspect of the service was over the top. And there was more. Jesus had been Jewish, but the Jewish religion did not recognize him as the Son of God. He was not divine, nor was he the Messiah. In fact, they are still waiting for the Messiah.

            I remember hearing comedian George Carlin describe God as an invisible man in the sky who saw everything I did and would send me to hell to burn for eternity if I did anything wrong….but he loved me. Still later, a Native American reporter took a camera into a Catholic mass, filming the consecration of the host where the priest repeats the words of Jesus, “Take and eat for this is my body which will be given up for you.” The reporter then commented how savage and barbaric that must have sounded to the Native Americans who were being pulled away from their natural beliefs and often forced to covert to Catholicism. This was getting confusing.

            Like most Catholics, I began to drift away from the church in my teens. I took it upon myself to read the bible and make my own interpretations of sin and forgiveness. I investigated other religions, mostly those that my heroes were into like Buddhism and Hinduism. I lived on The Farm, a commune in Summertown, Tennessee 70 miles south of Nashville for a minute, where the founder, Steve Gadkin preached a message of community, spiritual awareness and non-violence. It worked pretty well for a while, and all his sermons began with 30 minutes of transcendental meditation.

            By the time I was in my twenties, my God was me. All I cared about was where I would get my next drink, my next hit and my next bed to flop into. All the while, my friends were dying around me. Some overdosed, others died in car accidents, but most died by suicide. We were an unhappy bunch. During this time, I had a friend, Nathan, who was a staunch atheist. His God was Madlyn Murray O’Hare and she believed that God was a crutch, that we are in control of our own destiny and anyone who believed in God was an idiot. Worse, most of these bible thumpers were leading people down a primrose path and when they got to the end of that path, they would ultimately be disappointed. There was nothing after death.

            Nathan and I would go out most nights drinking and carousing, looking for women to bed or some other trouble to get into. Usually, we would end up at my apartment where we would pass out until morning. One late night, we turned on the TV and there was St. Madalyn preaching the rejection of dogma and the new humanity. Nathan was her cheering section and when the interview was over, he asked me why I believed in God.

            “Because He’s real,” I heard myself say. “He’s an historical figure. He was here and He’s still here.”

            “Ahhhh, you’re an idiot,” he said. “If there was a god, this would be a better world.”

            After that, we would debate God’s existence after late nights out or on our morning runs. Every discussion, Nathan would come armed with new “facts” about the non-existence of God. All I had to fall back on was my Baltimore Catechism and my Catholic upbringing, the few scriptures I had memorized and some of the prophesies from the Old Testament that pointed to Jesus as the Messiah.

            One evening a few months later, Nathan came to pick me up for yet another night out, but first, he said he had something to tell me.

            “I’ve become a born-again Christian.”

            I laughed out loud.

            “No seriously,” he said, “I’ve given my heart to God. I’ve gone back to the church.”

            I sat there waiting for the punchline. It was a long wait.

            “What brought this on?” I finally asked.

            “Whenever we talked about God, you never backed down. You never wavered. I mean, you really believe in God. It’s like you know Him, like you’ve met Him.”

            We spent the rest of the evening talking theology with Nathan asking questions and me trying to supply the answers. Honestly, though, I was upset by the whole thing. How was it that this atheist, this sinner, this man who had wholly rejected God become so faithful. He stopped drinking immediately. He cleaned up his act, and he began studying the bible. Why had I not been blessed by this?

            My moment of truth would come some months later when, drunk, I ran my truck off the road. I went back to tow it home the next day and I could see a half mile up the road where I had narrowly escaped killing myself by running into a tree, a fence or a ditch. I knew that there was something that had saved me and that something had to be God. I finally stopped drinking and drugging in my mid-twenties after the suicide of my best friend, Nick. I was angry at him, angry at God and angry at the world. There had to be more.

            I began to drag myself back to church on Sunday. I still had other vices. I was horribly lazy. Didn’t care what kind of job I had and didn’t put much effort into my life. I was jealous of everyone who worked harder than me because they had more than me. Any money I had, I spent on clothing or other comforts. I was searching for God in the world, the one place He was not, so He must have been in church. He had been there in the tabernacle throughout my childhood. If I could just get Him to listen to me.

            Every Sunday sermon seemed to have a message for me, but I always seemed to interpret it as a scolding, a dressing down from on high. I thought that if maybe I joined the choir, that God might be in the choir loft. After all, I was a pretty fair musician. But God had other plans. When I showed up to choir practice to offer my services, the practice had been rescheduled and I was invited in out of the cold into a meeting of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, a mission of the parish that helped people in financial need. It was awkward listening to these older men of the parish talking about the people they had helped during the past week, paying their utility bills, bringing them groceries, covering their rent and collecting donations of food and money to put together Thanksgiving dinners for those in need later that month. I took it on faith that God wanted me here and I joined at the end of the meeting.

            I began to find God in service to the poor. Here were people who had far less than me, who had given up their pride to beg for help from the church. Many were not Catholic. Some were elderly. There were a few people there working the system as well, but we assisted everyone. We never turned anyone away and I watched those men offer their own money when what the church had to give was not enough. It broke my heart.

            Things still went wrong in my life. I got married and divorced. I lost jobs, had money problems and discovered new vices. I was often broke. God was not keeping me from doing stupid things.

            I continued to work on my sobriety, to listen more intently at church, to talk to my mother who prayed fervently for all her children. After my father passed away, I spent more time with my mom, and we went to church together. She loved the high mass with all its pomp, and we chose a church near her with a beautiful choir and very good community. I began to feel a part of that community, and I began to find my place there. I began to feel God’s presence through the faith of my mother. After she passed away a few years ago, I continued to attend the mass and people who had seen me there with my mother expressed their condolences and closed in around me to care for me. God was there in my community, but He is also here in my life every day. I have found my way home.

            Do I believe in God? I think that it is more important that He believes in me and that He has always believed in me.

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.-Jeremiah 1:5"

            God has reached out to me countless times. The closer I am to God, the more I understand his mercy and grace and the more the world is able to experience God’s mercy and grace. Yes, Jesus’ life was foretold by the prophets’ centuries before he lived and He did live historically, but that is not why I believe. I believe because God patiently waited for me to get to know him. It was not enough that I knew the facts about Jesus as we read them in my catechism and the gospels, but that I see how His life, His sacrifice changed not only the world, but my small world as well.