There are times when I wish I had faith in something other
than the persistence of life itself. I was raised in the Catholic faith and, as
a small child, listened intently to all I was told by my mother and the nuns
who taught our summer school. Some of it didn’t make sense. Some of the beliefs
I was adjured to accept (God is good; God cares about humans more than other
life forms, giving us dominion over them; God will save, rescue, support humans
from evil, especially US citizens; that my soul was in serious jeopardy if I
attended a service in a non-Catholic church) flew in the face of my experience.
I clearly remember being excited when I was told that, as I prepared for my
first communion, I had reached the age of
reason. I took that to mean some of my more pressing questions – those
surrounding the efficacy of prayer, the virgin birth, limbo and purgatory, who
determined what was good or evil, who was eligible for heaven and hell – would
be answered. I was sorely disappointed. The more I questioned, the more evasive
the answers became until I decided for myself that most of what I was told was
simply made up. Despite, or maybe because of, college classes in religious
history, world history, world literature, and psychology, as well as exhaustive
reading over the last six decades, that hypothesis still stands.
It is my belief, in this dichotomous world, that man falls
prey to being divided in makeup, embodying some of both male and female,
intelligence and blindness, good and evil. Morals? Up to us. Belief systems? Up
to us. Determination of good and evil? Up to us. I no longer imagine a being
that gives two fig leaves about what humans do. We are simply part of a system
that continues both with us and in spite of us, an ever-changing system that
places no more importance on human activity than it does on any other natural
process. It is both a freeing and a frightening train of thought, but it places
responsibility exactly where it belongs – on us.
That said, in the current world political situation, part of
me longs to believe in a Jesus figure, a man so imbued with zeal that he still
has an effect on mankind some 2000 years after his death. I want to cherry-pick
Bible selections, make a super-hero of the man who in Matthew 21:12 overturned
the tables of the moneychangers and drove them off with admirable wrath and a
whip. I would send him to the Mexican border and put him in charge. I’d pray
him off to Syria, to Yemen, to Russia, to the White House with his cleansing ardor. And in the best
of all possible worlds every mother who ever loved her child would follow with
me behind him, afraid but strong, gathering the children, reuniting them with their families,
holding the orphans, feeding the starving, comforting the bereaved. It’s man’s
inhumanity to man that most influences my belief that it is us, we humans, who
simultaneously hold the happiness and sorrow of the world in our hands, our
minds, our hearts.
