Three Epiphanies Concerning Religion – One
I’ve had this essay in mind for a while. It’s too long for a blog post, and I thought I would try to place it with some magazine, and perhaps I will do so later, but it occurred to me the other day that I could go ahead and get it written by treating it as three separate Sunday journals. So here we go.
Thinking back over the progress of my commitment to the Catholic Church, I note three moments of particularly strong insight, three moments which either caused me to take a step or to understand the meaning of the step I was about to take or had taken. I don’t know whether it’s significant or not that none of them came from a Catholic source.
The first happened sometime in the latter half of the ‘70s, probably 1977 or so. I had been a fairly typical religious seeker of my generation, dabbling in different traditions, exploring none of them very deeply or seriously. Had I thought of the term I might have described myself as “spiritual but not religious,” in the manner of so many today. Unlike many of those, however, I did not exclude Christianity. I thought it a profound tradition but supposed, in the thoughtless way of that fool, “modern man,” that such a thoroughly supernatural set of beliefs had somehow been rendered unbelievable by the modern world, if not actually disproved.
As I’ve written elsewhere, I had come up against the fact that a mixture of beliefs, chosen from among many on the basis of whether or not I liked them, could not provide me with a sure sense of meaning for my life, or with a useful set of ethical principles. They could only guide me where I had already decided to go, because I was free to abandon them if they didn’t suit me. And yet I didn’t see how, “in this day and age,” one could accept the principles of any one religion.
Partly out of some sort of sense that I needed something more specific, I had begun to attend an Episcopal church. It gave me a way of connecting to a tradition without requiring a commitment to much in the way of definite belief. And it was while I was in this in-between condition that I read Paul Tillich’s Christianity and the Encounter of World Religions. I’ve just discovered that I seem to have gotten rid of the book—I thought I still had it—so I can’t quote the passage that made such an impression on me, but here’s my best recollection of it:
After discussing the similarities and differences between Christianity and other religions, Tillich says something like “Does this mean that one should attempt to select and combine the best elements of all traditions into something new? No, on the contrary, one should enter ever more deeply into one’s own tradition.” I think he also included something to the effect that dabbling could never be a substitute for attempting to live one faith.
Now, Tillich is, of course, a pretty questionable theologian from the Catholic point of view, or for that matter from the point of view of many Protestants. But there is profound wisdom in this statement of his.
You can’t experience marriage by thinking about all the women (or men, as the case may be) you know and imagining one who combines the best features of all of them, or by spending time with each of them now and then. You can only experience marriage, and receive the blessings and trials of it, by picking one of them and marrying her (or him). To follow any serious spiritual path, not just the Christian, you have to follow it. Even if the popular idea is true, which I don’t believe, that all paths lead to the same place in the end, you must pick one path and follow it; otherwise you’re merely wandering. Of course you may get where you want to go by wandering, but that’s not the most sensible approach, if you actually do want to get somewhere. And at any rate I was tired of wandering.
It was plain to me that Christianity was the only path really open to me, the only one that I was prepared by my culture and my temperament to embrace. It was the religion that my ancestors for a thousand years or more had held, and the one that had shaped the civilization that had shaped me. Tillich’s counsel gave me the impetus to go ahead and join the Episcopal Church, which required making an affirmation of faith.
There is something a bit hazy and confused at this point in my memories, and probably it was in fact hazy in my mind at the time. I’m not entirely sure what I believed. I think my action had something of the character of a test drive; I would enter the Christian faith as if I believed, even if I wasn’t entirely sure that I did, or that I believed the orthodox tradition, or even exactly what the tradition held. I would give it an honest try; I would see what happened if I believed and behaved (as best I could) as a Christian.
I can’t say at what point the trial became a real commitment, but it wasn’t very long, probably a matter of months, before I realized that I was no longer holding anything back and did in fact believe the essentials of the faith, not as symbols but as facts. In the space of two or three years I went from being a sort of tourist looking in on Christianity to a pilgrim trying to reach the heart of it, a journey that soon carried me out of the Episcopal and into the Catholic Church.
It would probably be an overstatement to say that I would not have taken that first serious step without Tillich’s admonition. Nevertheless, it did give me a needed push and was important in helping me to see that an uncommitted syncretism—the somewhat smug belief that all religions have some truth in about equal measure but none is worthy of genuine allegiance—is no way to make spiritual progress.
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