Fall is finally here and it cools everything down and seems to add a touch of space between myself and the burning-hot things that crackle in my mind. This morning, I can step back and look at faith with a bit of crisp, cool perspective.
My faith journey in the past few years has been anything but a straight path. I started as a devout Catholic, then a faithful yet strongly doubting one, then a sort of generic not-quite-Protestant Christian. Lately, I can hardly bring myself to attend church at all, and my attendance is spotty at best.
My brother-in-law recently shared this article, which points out some of the problems that might arise from the application of the arrogant certainty of a certain extremist brand of atheism to the subtleties of religious tradition. He referred to it as New Atheism, which is something I admittedly know very little about, but the ideas in the article got me thinking – what is there in common between my hedging away from organized religion and my sort of “flip side” hesitancy to take part in something as bold and brash as the ideas that Harris’s version of atheism touts?
When I left strict Catholic practice I experienced something like what many people experience when they first go away to college. I felt my mind, or more specifically, my spiritual self, crack open, and all the walls fell down like shards of eggshell. Did it let all my light go rushing out and away in to the dark vacuum of godless space? No, it was the opposite, and this surprised me. After laying down a strict belief in the sacraments as limited, rule-bound touchstones with God – tiny, circumscribed portals of grace – every moment became sacred. I began to see it as maybe even terribly wrong that organized religion often likes to inject a barrier between the sacred and the secular, between Sunday and the rest of the week. I started to see so many things as holy that I had just barely tolerated before: long lines become spiritual practice. Pausing to understand and show kindness to my children meant more than a hundred mornings singing hymns in stained-glass light. Atheist and agnostic friends bring the truth to light just as quickly – if not more so – than their Christian counterparts. But what was that thing – that exact thing – that I was moving toward? I knew I was moving away from orthodoxy for its own sake, but where did the path lead? I could only see a footstep or so ahead of myself in the pale sand.
This fall, with the leaves falling down and smacking my arm on their way to the ground as I sit in the yard, finally able to enjoy the outdoors without sweating down to nothing, it finally becomes clear. The thing that I keen towards is the willingness to admit uncertainty. Anything which requires its adherents to be Absolutely Sure, whether it’s the faithiest faith of all faiths or the hardest, coldest, most logical form of secular humanism possible, repels me, most importantly just for the fact that I have so often been wrong in my own life that building a worldview upon my own rightness seems even riskier than the gospel metaphor of building a house on sand.
The greatest part of this discovery is what it opens up, and what it frees me from. I can sit with the idea that maybe – even probably – we are all going to end up somewhere good after this ride is over, whether it’s a sort of soft, enclosing forgetfulness, in which we will let go of our decades of grinding, pinching daily cares, or a specific paradise built on clouds of cotton candy. I haven’t got a clue what waits for me after this, and it seems to me that if we are honest, none of us really does, but life is so good anyway that somehow I am able to let go of that need for certainty, bit by bit, hour by hour.
The other side of this coin is realizing what I am freed from, and looking at the tight grip that my formerly-beloved faith holds on people who just want to do what’s best, live in accordance with God’s law, and not close themselves off from blessing.
When my daughter was an infant, I was part of an online message board that provided support for Natural Family Planning (NFP) which is an actually quite scientific, quite effective form of “child spacing” that Catholics are actually allowed to use. It isn’t superstition, and it isn’t the “rhythm method.” It has many good points, and I’m not sorry I learned the science behind the theory. The dogma underpinning it, though, is chilling to say the least. I started a discussion with some fellow members about when we might consider it justified to use NFP – because within Catholicism, you have to have a good reason even to avoid pregnancy – every month, you have to be Really Sure that you don’t want to purposefully have another child.
I brought up postpartum depression, because after two babies and two bouts with it, I took it as fairly certain that were I to have another child, I would most likely dip down into the pit again. Would such a tendency justify never seeking another pregnancy? The answer, spiking with irony like a thousand knife-points, was that I ought to start taking antidepressants so that I could cheerfully endure more pregnancies. In other words, because it is wrong to take a pill (like a hormonal birth control pill) to alter the function of my body, I ought to take a pill to alter the function of my body. No thought or consideration is given to the children I already have, or to my relationship with my husband and what it might have to endure from repeated year-long depressive episodes bordering on psychosis. Within Catholicism, I simply wasn’t allowed to make that call for myself. My own personhood – my right to sanity and health and balance, my right to love the little beings I already had in my family, my right to not saddle my husband with the task of keeping me on this side of the ground for one year out of every two – made literally no difference at all. The woman’s mind and emotions count for shit. It’s the womb that matters. That part of me worked fine, so the rest would have to follow suit.
So, what does this have to do with certainty? Back when birth control first became a possibility, and when the Catholic Church was formulating its response, a false certainty was injected into their dealings. It is a seldom-discussed fact in Catholic circles that when the question of birth control came up in papal council in the 1960s (see a quick rundown here) the majority report found that there was no significant moral distinction between using natural methods (like modern-day NFP) and using “artificial” methods like barriers and hormonal applications, because both sought to separate the procreative and unitive aspects of human sexuality.
The minority report, which Pope Paul VI ruled in favor of, did not refute the findings of the majority report, and in fact did not even address them in any detail. Instead, it offered a counterargument that looks, to me, like children sticking their fingers in their ears and saying “Lalalala I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you.” The main thesis of the minority report is not that there is a logical or ethical flaw in the majority report’s findings, but rather that the Church could not accept the majority report’s findings, because doing so would require them to admit that previous church decisions had been inaccurate and incorrect, and – horror of all horrors – “we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches” when their earlier decisions allowing contraceptive use were handed down. So, simply put, all the implications of offering church members the freedom to plan their families while not also remaining celibate for at least two weeks out of every four are put aside, because the Vatican simply cannot admit that it might have been wrong, or too hasty, or not-quite-fully-informed in the past. Certainty wins, and ordinary married couples bear the burden of proving that certainty right, on pain of grave sin.
And that’s kind of my point. When an organization claims certainty, there seems to go with it a willingness to sacrifice other things – important things – to the preservation of that certainty. Certainty becomes the god, and we must bring our tributes to its altar. Within Catholicism, it is often the bodies and minds and hearts of women that are laid on the altar, and with them the minds and hearts of the men who love them but can’t speak up in their defense. In other cases very close to my own experience I have seen parents sacrifice relationship with their children in the name of evangelical, end-times certainty, and it is sure that civility, at least, has been put to the side many times in favor of this certain, certain, certainty.
And so as I move forward on whatever path this is, as I learn to love and accept myself and listen to my own instincts without having to label them immediately as subversive and sinful, I discover what riches there are in saying simply, “I’m not sure.” There is an assurance, a vitality, a challenge, and a sense of a sacred quest in this unsureness. It is the nest that holds us all, the thing we all share in common, whether we want to admit it or not. It should make us gentle toward each other as we all move toward whatever comes next.
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