There was a recent controversy in Tacoma, Washington because the Tacoma Art Museum considered showing the work of an artist named David Wojnarowicz. Specifically, they wanted to show a video montage he put together that was pulled by the Smithsonian because it was too offensive. The Tacoma museum’s curator responded to critics by saying, “For someone to come and have to confront this image, it’s not going to be easy but art’s not easy.”

Curious about what this non-easy art might involve, I did some searches and found a clip of the video on Youtube (it’s called Fire in My Belly by David Wojnarowicz if you’re interested, though I don’t recommend viewing it). It features images of ants crawling on a crucifix juxtaposed with flickering shots of a young man doing something pornographic.

Oddly, it was this kind of thing that helped lead me to God.

Shortly after I got married, my husband suggested that we check out an international modern art festival that had come to town. At one exhibit we walked into a large room where stylishly-dressed people wandered around rows of metal boxes, nodding and making approving comments. Were we in the wrong place? Had the organizers not had a chance to set the art out on the boxes yet? As it turned out, the metal boxes were the art.

As we walked through the other exhibits, I was amazed at what was considered art: a light bulb, a paper with some holes in it, even an entire building with some spray painting on the side. A favorite approach seemed to be to take something that traditionally symbolized purity and hope (e.g. a sacred religious object) and juxtapose it with something considered dirty and bad (e.g. excrement).

“It’s beautiful,” someone commented at one such exhibit. I recoiled at the statement. If someone wanted to say that this art was thought-provoking or interesting, I could have barely seen where they were coming from. But beautiful? No.

My husband teased me by joking, “Hey, one man’s Sistine Chapel is another man’s metal box!”

“Umm, no,” I mumbled.

At the time I was an atheist, and my husband responded with an interesting question. As we walked back through the rows of metal boxes, he said: “Are you sure that you can defend that statement from a purely atheistic perspective?”

Without thinking about it, I blurted out, “If not, then I denounce atheism. Because I know more than I know anything else that those boxes aren’t as beautiful as the Sistine Chapel.”

I meant it as a half-joke. I’d been an atheist art critic for all of thirty minutes, so I hadn’t exactly fleshed out my thesis, though I assumed that there must be a way to defend my point of view without appealing to anything supernatural. But as I thought about it in the days and weeks that followed, I found that it wasn’t as easy as I’d imagined it would be.

To make the case—from a pure atheist-materialist perspective—that that box was not as beautiful as, say, a Monet, I could say that the creation of great classical art requires more skill than other types of art, and that we get the concept of objective beauty by recognizing the work of the most skilled members of our tribes. But that argument was flimsy. After all, maybe I had no idea what was involved with putting together an aluminum box.

I went over similar lines of reasoning, considering the human animal’s evolved desires and the way we react to stimuli, but each time I came up short. Even if I had been able to demonstrate conclusively that humans do have an evolved tendency to register the chemical reactions that indicate “beauty” with some types of art more than others, I couldn’t get around the fact that there was no objective rule that would apply to each individual. Someone could walk into the Sistine Chapel and announce that he thought it was ugly. Everything within me screamed that that person would be wrong, and not just because I thought so, but because he was not recognizing an objective beauty that existed regardless of any person’s opinion. But I couldn’t get there while adhering to atheistic principles. All I could do was point to trends about what people tend to do, which proves nothing objectively.

What I sensed in my soul is that there is indeed a scale of objective beauty. Some works of art are more beautiful than others; therefore, there must be some ultimate source of beauty that the more beautiful works are more like than the less beautiful ones. (To borrow an analogy from G.K. Chesterton, if someone says one city is more like New York than another, that analogy only works if a specific place called New York actually exists.) Yet in order to supersede human opinion, this objective source of beauty couldn’t originate in the human brain, could it?

This line of thinking disturbed me. My flippant comment that I would denounce atheism before I said that a metal box is as beautiful as the Sistine Chapel turned out to have more weight than I’d expected. Because in order to defend my position that an objective scale of beauty did exist, I had to appeal to something for which there was no strict scientific evidence, something beyond the material world.

And that’s why I always see a silver lining when controversies like the one in Tacoma come up. Because it makes people wonder: “What is true art? What is true beauty?” And, as I know, when you start asking those questions, you’ve taken the first step down a path that leads to the living Source of all that is beautiful.
 
 
Originally posted at National Catholic Register. Used with permission.
(Image credit: All Art News)

I regularly get emails from people who say that they've been seeking God, but haven't found him. They often express disappointment and frustration at the fact that once-promising spiritual journeys have now led to a dead end, and they want to know: "Is there anything else I can do?"

I'm not a spiritual director or a theologian, but I do have plenty of experience with spiritual dry spells and difficulties in the process of conversion, and I've spent a lot of time talking with wise people about common struggles in this department. While it's important to understand that any kind of powerful experiences of God are a gift, that there’s not some magic formula we can follow that will guarantee that we’ll receive a flood of consolation, there are certain things we can do to make more room in our hearts for God’s presence.

1. Seek humility first

If you feel stuck in your spiritual search, set aside the search for God per se and seek humility instead. The importance of this step cannot be overstated. Pride is one of the most effective ways to block God out of our lives. Throw all your efforts into becoming a more humble person. For inspiration, read up on people throughout history who were known for their humility. If you’re not exactly sure what true humility involves, here's a great article that explains that humility is not the same thing as low self esteem or thinking that you’re bad.

2. Go on a cynicism fast

Commit to a period of time during which you’ll fast from all sources of cynicism: Give up watching TV shows and reading websites that make jokes at other people’s expense (even if it’s about celebrities or politicians); try to change the subject or say something positive if such conversations come up in person; avoid making cynical jokes or comments yourself. You might be surprised at how much this fast will transform your heart.

3. Read the great Christian authors

While a transformation of heart, a turning of the soul toward God, is the most critical step in opening ourselves to God, it’s also important to realize that seeking God does not mean setting aside logic and reason; quite the contrary is true. Asking tough questions and hearing what the great Christian thinkers have said on the matter will only bring you closer to God. Some authors I recommend are C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo.

4. Do the experiment

I believe that God’s existence can be “proven” in a certain sense, as long as you understand that God is Love, and what you’re trying to prove is Love itself. This is not something you can know about from analyzing data or reading books alone. To get the “proof” that you seek, you must enter the laboratory of your heart, and actually conduct the experiment: live, for a while, as if God did exist. Pray. Follow the Ten Commandments. Show love and kindness to everyone, even your enemies. Read the Bible. Give God the thanks and honor and respect you would show him if he did exist. As Pascal suggested, just try it for a while, and see what happens.

5. Pray frequently

This is by far the most important step. I know, you feel like you’re talking to yourself. You don’t see the point of it. I was there for a long, long time. But there is no substitution for humbly, regularly turning toward God with an open mind and an open heart. If you’re stuck for words, consider reciting something like the Prayer of St. Francis, or just pray, “God, I want to find you. Show me how. I’m listening.”

6. Be willing to lose it all

When I originally posted a version of this list at my personal blog a few years ago, it stopped at number five. Then I got an email from a wise reader, who suggested that I missed a sixth step. He wrote:

"There was one thing that was essential to my reversion that you do not mention. One must be willing to give up everything for God…I believe that the biggest problem people have with finding God is that they are not willing to give up earthly desires to find Him. People want the best of both worlds. They want a relationship with God and be able to hang on to worldly desires. I think this is all to often overlooked."

One of the things that’s different about seeking the truth about God as opposed to, say, seeking the truth about a mathematical equation, is that the truth about God is personal and transformative. If you’re seeking the truth about mass-energy equivalence and you discover that e=mc², it doesn’t mean anything for you personally. You don’t need to live your life any differently just because you now know that the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content. But not so with God. Because God is the source of all that is good, to know what God is is to know what Good is. And if you're not open to a new understanding of what is Good, then you're not really open to God.

The bottom line is this: seek, and you shall find. If you understand what it really means to seek (using both your mind and your heart); and if you understand that the finding part doesn’t necessarily happen immediately, that you’re beginning the long process of building a relationship that will continue to grow and change for the rest of your life, you will find God.
 
 
Originally posted at National Catholic Register.
(Image credit: Sustainable Nano)

A while back my kids were watching the Nick Jr. cartoon Ni Hao, Kai-Lan, and I happened to see something that has troubled me ever since.

Kai-Lan is a little girl with a friend named Rintoo, and in this particular episode Rintoo isn’t feeling special. Kai-Lan and her other friends seem to have an instinctive feeling that Rintoo must be special somehow, and spend most of the episode trying to figure out why that is. After some searching, they finally figure it out. At the climax of the show, Kai-Lan announces with a little song that she has found the source of Rintoo’s specialness! I suppose it was too much to hope that she’d quote directly from the Catechism, since it’s kind of hard to rhyme “man is the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake, and he alone is called to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life” with “it was for this end that he was created, and this is the fundamental reason for his dignity.” But I was surprised and distressed at what she came up with: he’s fast. That’s what makes him special. And she went on to tell her young viewers that the next time they’re not feeling special, they should remember what they’re really good at, and know that that’s what makes them special.

Anyone else find that disturbing?

As I watched the little characters dance around and celebrate the various skills that supposedly made each one of them special, I was guessing that this wasn’t going to be the episode where Kai-Lan’s slow, mentally ill, physically disabled friend was introduced, because then things would get really awkward.

Though I don’t attribute any malevolent intent to the show’s writers, I think the sentiments expressed in this episode belie one of the disturbing logical results of a completely secular worldview. It’s an interesting look at what happens when we take part of the natural law that’s written on our hearts—in this case, the fact that every human is special—and try to explain it without God. Kai-Lan and her friends know on some level that Rintoo is definitely special; and yet they are products of a secular culture which teaches that every truth must be provable by the scientific method in order to be accepted.

There are two main definitions for special: one is “regarded with particular esteem or affection” and the other is “superior in comparison to others of the same kind.” The first is a better definition for describing the inherent specialness of each person, since each of us is regarded with particular esteem and affection by our Creator. But you can’t get there by looking at the material world alone. In order to confine specialness to the realm of the observable and the provable, you must go with the later, twisted understanding, which leaves you with a malleable definition of what it is to be special. In Rintoo’s case, what if the setting of the episode were moved to the U.S. Track and Field Team’s practice arena, where he wouldn’t seem fast at all? Or what if he became disabled and could no longer get around quickly? For that matter, what if all of humanity got together and agreed that being fast was not a good trait? Would Rintoo still be special?

Chances are, he has other things he’s good at. But what if he didn’t? What if he were the dumbest, ugliest, most rejected, immobile person in the world with not a single thing to offer his fellow man? Then would he be special?

Without God, the closest we can get to explaining the truth of each individual’s specialness is to say that he or she possesses certain exceptional skills or qualities that are currently valued by other human beings, or to perhaps note the fact that each person is different by virtue of his or her unique DNA. But neither of those statements articulate the full truth—and somewhere, deep down inside, we all know it. The problem is this: the reason every single one of us is inherently special—even the most flawed, the most unproductive, and the most decrepit among us—is because we are special to Someone. It’s because we are loved and valued by God himself.

When people agree on this, even if it is based on vaguely theistic concepts of God rather than passionate Christian devotion, it acts as a societal safety valve. We at least agree that it is not up to us to determine what makes another person special, or whether or not he’s special at all. Each person’s value comes from Something outside of and higher than people’s opinions, a Force untouchable by human caprice. When we lose this concept and start thinking that we can value other people based on demonstrable evidence, the safety valve is gone.

That’s what scares me about this line of thinking. Right now, the dark implications of this worldview are easy to ignore; here in the Western world, we live in a time of unprecedented stability, peace, and abundance that makes it relatively easy for us all to get along. There are only a few types of people whose specialness we have motive to disregard (the severely disabled and the unborn, mainly). But that probably won’t last forever. If any elements of society were to be destabilized, we faced widespread resource shortage, or any other situation came up that caused an epidemic of fear and tension, there would be a lot more pressure to disregard the value of other people’s lives. If we continue to see our fellow human beings as special based on arbitrary, flexible definitions that are ultimately rooted in human judgment of evidence, the devaluation of human life will spread to even more segments of society. And one day it could be you or someone you love who is no longer considered special.
 
 
Originally posted at National Catholic Register. Used with permission.
(Image credit: DvidsHub)

Andrew Sullivan linked to my conversion story recently, and there’s been some interesting discussion in response. It was this particular part of my essay that generated the most controversy, and I can’t say I’m surprised:

"If everything that we call heroism and glory, and all the significance of all great human achievements, can be reduced to some neurons firing in the human brain, then it’s all destined to be extinguished at death. And considering that the entire span of homo sapiens’ existence on earth wouldn’t even amount to a blip on the radar screen of a 5-billion-year-old universe, it seemed silly to pretend like the 60-odd-year life of some random organism on one of trillions of planets was something special. (I was a blast at parties.) By simply living my life, I felt like I was living a lie. I acknowledged the truth that life was meaningless, and yet I kept acting as if my own life had meaning, as if all the hope and love and joy I’d experienced was something real, something more than a mirage produced by the chemicals in my brain."

Will Wilkinson disagreed with my methodology for deducing meaningfulness, saying that “the best reason to think ‘life is meaningful’ is because one’s life seems meaningful. If you can’t stop ‘acting as if my own life had meaning,’ it’s probably because it does have meaning.” Over at the New York Times, Ross Douthat responded to Wilkinson by saying that we need to look at that idea a little more closely. Douthat offered a thought experiment in which he described soldiers in the trenches who feel like the overall war is meaningless, yet find purpose in their bonds with one another. Ultimately, he concluded:

"This is a very natural way to approach warfare…and it’s a very natural way to approach everyday life as well. But the part of the point of religion and philosophy is address questions that lurk beneath these natural rhythms, instead of just taking our feelings of meaningfulness as the alpha and omega of human existence. In the context of the war, of course the battle feels meaningful. In the context of daily life as we experience it, of course our joys and sorrows feel intensely meaningful. But just as it surely makes a (if you will) meaningful difference why the war itself is being waged, it surely makes a rather large difference whether our joys and sorrows take place in, say, C.S. Lewis’s Christian universe or Richard Dawkins’s godless cosmos. Saying that “we know life is meaningful because it feels meaningful” is true for the first level of context, but non-responsive for the second."

Exactly. That’s smart-person speak for the point I was fumbling around to make: All of the atheistic arguments I’ve heard in favor of the meaningfulness of human life assume that our experiences are valuable. “I volunteered at a soup kitchen this weekend, and that brought others happiness and gave me a sense of fulfillment,” the thinking goes. “That gives my life meaning right here, right now, whether or not there’s a soul or an afterlife.” It sounds lovely. But I don’t think it works.

Let’s say we have the following equation, and I have the freedom to make X whatever I want it to be:

X * 0 = _____

I could do something cool like make X = (21 + 2 + 10 + 28 + 22 + 14 + 7), adding up the days of the month for family and friends’ birthdays so that their total is a number that represents the month and day my husband and I were married. Or I could carefully craft some other combination of numbers that was deeply significant to me. But the equation would still look like this:

(21 + 2 + 10 + 28 + 22 + 14 + 7) * 0 = _____

No matter how many or how few numbers I use, it would still yield the same result: Zero.

If consciousness is just a mirage produced by chemical reactions in our brains, and if the mirage permanently flickers out on the day those reactions cease, then do any of our conscious thoughts really matter? Sure, you can have an impact on others who will live on after you die, but one day they will disappear into thin air too. To my mind, all this talk of valuable life experiences adding up to something meaningful is like talking about how to make X add up to something meaningful in the above equation. In the end, it’s all for naught.

This, of course, does not necessarily mean that the atheist materialist worldview is false. Whether or not life has any meaning if atheism is true is a separate question from whether or not it is true in the first place. My intent here is simply to point out that you can’t have it both ways: Modern atheism denies that human consciousness is rooted in anything other than the chemicals in our brains, thus rejecting the idea that any of our experiences will last outside of time; yet it also tries to say that our consciousness and experiences are meaningful. I don’t see how both of those assertions can be true.

Interestingly, this is a debate I’ve had with atheists when I was an atheist, and with Christians now that I’m a Christian. It’s not only nonbelievers who argue that you can find meaning within the atheist worldview: I’ve talked to quite a few Christians who say that if there were no eternal life for the soul, they would still find life to be meaningful. Maybe there’s some gene that allows you to sense meaning even if you believe that you’re faced with complete annihilation? If so, I don’t have it, because that mindset is not one I’ve ever understood.
 
 
Originally posted at National Catholic Register. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Psychologies)

There’s a huge movement that’s sweeping Austin right now called Explore God. If you live in central Texas, you know what I’m talking about. You pull out of your driveway and you see a sign in the yard across the street. You get on the highway and there’s a billboard. You drive past a church to see a big Explore God banner out front, then, on your way home, more signs dot the houses as you drive through your neighborhood.

I was blown away by the saturation level that the people behind this movement managed to achieve, and curious about the campaign’s content. Since it seems to be targeting seekers and non-believers, I pulled up the section of the website that discusses atheism to see whom they got to address this topic. To my shock, I found...

Me.

I vaguely remembered the time a camera crew visited my house when I was 9,000 months pregnant. Evidently that was for this Explore God thing. I had no idea! Well, I had some idea. I mean, they said something about the internet and God and billboards, but I didn’t catch most of it since I was busy trying to find a way to ask if they needed any footage of me taking a three-hour nap.

Anyway, I would have eventually figured out that something was up, since my email and social media accounts have been hit with a new round of feedback from the online atheist world. It’s been a while since I’ve had large numbers of people calling my conversion, my sanity, and my mental coherence into question, and it’s provided me with a good opportunity to take a step back and ask myself, Why did I become a Christian?

I’ve been pondering the question for the past few days as I fold laundry and make lunches, and I thought I’d share my thoughts.

On Having Proof

 
The issue that arises over and over again when you talk about atheist-to-Christian conversions is one of proof. We atheists had seen plenty of people concoct nonsensical and internally inconsistent belief systems because they confused “what feels good” with “what is true.” It struck me as a very dangerous path to start assenting to beliefs that cannot be disentangled from the messy world of subjective experience.

Deep down in my heart of hearts, I might feel that the sun revolves around the earth...but before I start announcing this as a truth about the way the universe works, I should go ahead and examine the evidence to see if it is actually true. It is this kind of never-wavering requirement for proof that allows us to have a clear-eyed look at the universe. No area of life should be exempt from this sort of analysis, certainly not religion.

Doesn’t that mean, then, that it’s impossible for any person who holds to this way of thinking to be a believer? At most, you could be an agnostic. But since religion cannot be proven in any kind of verifiable way, a person cannot both subscribe to an evidence-based way of evaluating the world and be a believer. One or the other has to go. Right?

For most of my life, I would have said yes. Absolutely, yes. But then, about 10 years ago, I began to reconsider.

Filming for #ExploreGod

I began to consider that many of the pioneers of science believed in God—Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, Boyle, and Mendel, to name just a few. Almost all the great Greek and Roman thinkers of antiquity believed that supernatural forces were at work in the world. In fact, among people considered to be the greatest minds of history, only a small percentage were atheists.

Realizing that so many bright people believed in God didn’t make me think they were right—after all, there are bright people in every belief system—but it did pique my interest about the issue of proof.

Was I really ready to say that I was a more analytical thinker than my engineer grandfather? Was I seriously going to claim that the monk Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, did not require evidence before believing a theory to be true? Did I honestly think that it never occurred to Galileo to question assumptions?

These questions lingered in the back of my mind as a series of events played out that led me to consider that there might be more to life than the material world alone. I set out on a search for truth about the spiritual realm, which pretty quickly led me to the only lasting world religion whose founder claimed to be God. I came to see that there was a strong case that a person named Jesus of Nazareth did exist. I thought it was interesting that Christianity spread like wildfire through the ancient world, despite the fact that becoming a Christian often meant persecution or even death.

I began reading works by the great Christian thinkers, and was surprised that their arguments in favor of belief were more intriguing than the ones I’d always heard (mainly “Shut up,” and “You’re going to hell”). In fact, this was some of the most reasonable, lucid writing I’d ever encountered.

Yet I still had not seen proof. I was caught in a no-man’s land between finding the case for Christianity extremely compelling, and not being able to take the leap to belief because I could not prove it to be true.

I didn’t know where to turn, so I decided to do an experiment: something rang true about Augustine’s famous statement that you must believe so that you might understand, and so I began to live my life as if God did exist. I prayed, even though I felt like I was talking to myself; I followed the Christian moral code; I read the Bible and honestly tried to understand what it might be trying to teach me. I conformed my life to a God-centered life, even thought I wasn’t sure I believed that God existed.

There was no big thunder-and-lightning encounter with Jesus, and, frankly, I only rarely “felt” God’s presence. But once I began this experiment, it was as if some hidden, tremendously powerful magnet had been activated within me that began pulling me in one direction. One odd “coincidence” after another formed a breadcrumb trail to lead me to God, and it sure did seem like some external force was acting in my life in a real way.

But the most interesting part was this:

The more I went through the motions of believing in God, the more the world made sense to me; the more human history made sense to me; the more I started to make sense to me. The picture of human life that I’d formed based on science alone now seemed incomplete. I still believed everything I’d learned through the lens of science, but I now saw a whole other dimension to the world around me. It was like the difference between looking at a picture of a double-fudge chocolate cake and having one in front of me to smell, touch, and taste: everything I knew before was still there, but I was now experiencing it in a much more intense and vivid way.

I’d considered my life before this God experiment to be good, and it was in many ways, but it now seemed disordered, confused, and flat compared to the life I had now. Little lingering issues faded away; parts of life that had seemed overwhelming were diffused and put in their proper place; I saw that certain actions that had seem innocuous in my atheist worldview had caused great harm to me and to others. I was finally able to put a name to the deep stirrings within my soul I’d experience when listening to a profound piece of music or hearing about an act of evil; I understood why Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, what drove the efforts to build the great cathedrals. For the first time I felt the depth of my potential as a human, a woman, and a mother.

When I considered this experience in light of the evidence for Jesus of Nazareth, the improbable spread of early Christianity, and the seamless and perfectly, internally-consistent traditional Christian moral code that has stood strong for two thousand years, something clicked. To borrow from an analogy I once heard someone else use, it was like finding the box top that made all the puzzle pieces come together. Atheism allowed me to complete a few sections, but its box top had me constantly jamming pieces together in a way that didn’t work. With Christianity, everything snapped into place.

Finally, I had found my proof—though it wasn’t the type of proof that I’d originally been looking for.

What I came to see is that there are different kinds of proof in the world. The process for proving that the Horsehead Nebula is 1,500 light years from earth is different than the process for proving that the bad guy committed the crime, and the process for proving that God exists is more different still.

And so, to the folks who want to know what kind of proof I have to offer for my Christian beliefs, I would say this:

I can show you lots of evidence, and, if you’re willing to consider it with an open mind, I think I can make the case that this belief system is at least worth a second look. But I cannot prove its truth to you in the way I can prove that the earth revolves around the sun. The human soul is a necessary component of the God experiment, and the laboratory in which it takes place is the individual human heart. Yes, there is compelling, verifiable evidence for the truths of this belief system, but an analysis of evidence will not—cannot—get you all the way there.

If you are standing back and waiting for the data alone to convince you that God exists, that’s like holding a piece of litmus paper above a solution but never dipping it in. You can have a complete understanding of how the hydrogen atoms in the liquid would potentially interact with the dye on the paper, but until the paper has contact with the solution, the experiment is not complete.

And guess what: in the God experiment, your entire life is the litmus paper.

So no, you absolutely do not have to check your analytical, evidence-based way of evaluating the world at the door when you step into the waters of spirituality. Just understand that when you begin to explore God, you’re looking for an entirely different kind of proof.
 
 
Originally posted at Conversion Diary. Used with author's permission.

The galactic census data is in! According to an Associated Press article released recently: “Scientists have estimated the first cosmic census of planets in our galaxy and the numbers are astronomical: at least 50 billion planets in the Milky Way.”

When I would hear that kind of thing when I was an atheist, I’d muster up my most condescending facial expression and turn to the nearest believer to say: “You still believe all that Bible stuff now?” To my way of thinking back then, the vastness of the universe debunked the Christian worldview. Obviously we’re nothing special in the grand scheme of things. Obviously there’s not some Creator out there who values us over everything else—otherwise, why would he have bothered messing around with making all this other stuff? Why create the Triangulum Galaxy and the Horsehead Nebula and the 50 billion other planets here in the Milky Way if you’re mainly concerned about the goings on at tiny little planet Earth?

It’s too bad I hadn’t read Chesterton. He addresses that kind of argument with his typical wit when he writes in Orthodoxy:
 

"Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image; what one might call an impressionist portrait. It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree."

 
Exactly. What I was missing back then was an openness to contemplating just what kind of God we might be talking about. I pictured that Christians believed in a man with a flowing white beard who lived off in the clouds somewhere. Sort of like my uncle Ralph, but with magic powers. With this limited, facile view, it’s no wonder I couldn’t get past the vastness of the universe. Uncle Ralph wouldn’t waste his time creating a bunch of planets no one was ever going to use, so, presumably, neither would this supposed God.

What I see now is a universe that gives us an ever-present reminder of who and what God really is. The vastness of the universe is unfathomable; to try to contemplate every detail of every object in existence is an exercise in futility. The human mind has nowhere near that kind of capability, and that understanding should inspire us to humility about our own intellectual powers. And so it is when we contemplate God.

It’s a perfect plan, really: the smarter we get, the more we can know about the universe around us. Yet the more we study and measure and chart the heavens, the more we realize how incredibly tiny we are, how very much there is that we will never, ever know. We get a glimpse of the reality that the sum total of human learning cannot ever scratch the surface of what there is to know. We see that we are surrounded by an unfathomably wonderful creation; which points to an unfathomably wonderful Creator.
 

“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9).

 
 
Originally published at National Catholic Register. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Wall Desktops)

In my part of the country, it's common to raise your kids to be "open-minded about religion." I know quite a few parents who are taking this route, and it seems to be a more and more popular choice every year. I've always respected the sentiment that drives this decision. The parents I know who want their children to be open-minded in this area typically seem to do so out of a desire to respect different viewpoints, and a hope that their children will think for themselves rather than blindly believing what their parents tell them to believe. The sentiment is admirable, but recently I've started to wonder:

Is such a thing even possible?

If being in a state of open-mindedness means that you're asking questions, seeking knowledge, and attempting to evaluate data without bias, it seems that that should be a transitory state: At some point, you either find answers, or determine that the answers are not findable. In either case you now have a defined belief system, even if it's agnosticism. At this point, while you may be open to hearing new perspectives, you are no longer "open-minded" in the sense of not having any opinions about matters of spirituality -- you've found your belief system.

The problem comes in when people speak of open-mindedness about faith as a long-term state of being. I recently heard about a local family where the son converted to Christianity in college, and it caused problems with his parents since they had raised him to be "open to all belief systems." The parents' and the son's two different interpretations of this directive led to painful confrontations: The son was surprised that his mom and dad reacted negatively to his conversion, since he thought that he was simply following the tenets of his childhood worldview to their logical conclusion. He explored the world's belief systems with an open mind, then, when he saw that one made more sense than the others, he became a member of that religion. The parents, on the other hand, were shocked, since the image of their son tearfully giving his life to Jesus Christ and playing guitar for a praise and worship youth group was not at all what they had in mind when they raised him to be open-minded about religion.

I would encourage modern parents to think about this issue carefully. As this concept increases in popularity, it's easy to go with the flow and become an "open-minded about religion" family without first fleshing out all the implications of that credo. If you believe that objective truth cannot be known, then you are in fact not open to the religions that say that it can be known. It may be possible to say that you're agnostic but taking bits of wisdom from various world religions, but to be truly open-minded about religion is always a short-term state.

To take it a step further, I would encourage modern parents to shun the concept altogether, and embrace the search for objective truth instead.  You can guess where I think such a search would lead, but even if your conclusions are different from mine, I think that it would be more fruitful -- and would probably lead to a healthier family dynamic -- than aiming for near-impossible task of being in a permanent state of evaluating data without coming to any conclusions. I would love to see a change in the tone of the typical playground chit-chat about faith, when instead of saying, "We're raising our kids to be open-minded about religion," more parents would say, "We're raising our kids to seek the truth."
 
 
Originally published at National Catholic Register. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Copmi)

When people hear that my husband and I began exploring Catholicism in 2005, one of the first questions they often ask is, “What about the sexual abuse scandals? Didn’t that scare you away from the Church?”

They’re usually surprised when I report that the answer is no; in fact, the scandals and the negative media coverage actually increased my faith in the Church. Here’s why:

Getting the Facts Straight

 
One of the first things I did was to look into the numbers behind the sexual abuse cases. Was I heading into an institution that was filled with sexual predators, as the media would have me believe? I was shocked to find that, by even the most anti-Catholic organizations’ estimates, only about 2 percent of Catholic priests had even been accused of sexual misconduct. And certainly the cover-ups by members of the hierarchy were deplorable, but my research led me to see that that was common in all organizations, not just the Church. To list just one of the many examples, in Washington there were 159 coaches accused of sexual misconduct with minors over a 10-year period. Ninety-eight of them continued to coach or teach. And how did the school hierarchies respond? To quote this article:

"When faced with complaints against coaches, school officials often failed to investigate them and sometimes ignored a law requiring them to report suspected abuse to police. Many times, they disregarded a state law requiring them to report misconduct to the state education office.
 
Even after getting caught, many men were allowed to continue coaching because school administrators promised to keep their disciplinary records secret if the coaches simply left. Some districts paid tens of thousands of dollars to get coaches to leave. Other districts hired coaches they knew had records of sexual misconduct."

In another example, Carol Shakeshaft and Audrey Cohan looked at 225 cases of abuse by educators in New York City. Shakeshaft reported:

"All of the accused admitted sexual abuse of a student, but none of the abusers was reported to the authorities, and only 1 percent lost their license to teach. Only 35 percent suffered negative consequences of any kind, and 39 percent chose to leave their school district, most with positive recommendations. Some were even given an early retirement package."

I could go on, but you get the idea. After investigating the issue, I found that, sadly, there is nothing different going on in the Catholic Church than in any organization where men are in contact with children, and that it’s an unfortunate fact of human nature—and not something unique within the Church—that people in hierarchy tend to look the other way when it comes to bad conduct by the people who report to them.

However, unlike the coaches or the school teachers, the Catholic clergy were supposed to be men of God. What are we supposed to make of it when even they commit atrocities like sexual abuse? Pondering that question was one of the key things that led me decide to become Catholic.

Understanding Who Guides the Church

 
While I was researching Catholicism, I seemed to be surrounded by the message that the Catholic hierarchy was corrupt to the core. Not only were negative stories about the Church splashed all over the media, but I’d happened to pick up some historical biographies from times and places that were heavily Catholic, and many of those books gave the impression that every bishop who ever lived had a personal harem that he only left long enough to go steal from the poor and kick puppies. I knew that these were heavily biased accounts that not only exaggerated a lot of the bad deeds, but that also overlooked all the incredible priests, bishops and popes throughout the ages who radiated the love of Christ. However, being surrounded by all this negativity did remind me that not every Catholic is a saint, and that sometimes even people in the hierarchy do bad things.

I found myself in a strange place: On the one hand, I was blown away by the wisdom I’d found in this Church. Reading the great works of Catholic theology left me feeling like I’d discovered the secret owner’s manual to the human life; the Catholic worldview was like the box top that made all the puzzle pieces of the human experience come together in a coherent whole. In the Catechism I saw a seamless, perfectly consistent moral code that was as compelling as it was counterintuitive—and when I tried following it, I found a peace and joy that I have never encountered before.

Yet on the other hand, I had all these reminders that Catholics are sinners too sometimes—that, in fact, even their leaders aren’t exempt from committing some of the most deplorable sins known to man.

It was when these two things collided that I realized: I don’t think people can do this on their own.

Ironically, the more the culture tried to paint the Catholic Church as full of sinful people, the more convinced I became of its truth. I didn’t believe that ordinary people could come up with a set of teachings that contained unparalleled wisdom; maintain them consistently across all times and places, even despite tremendous pressure to recant; and then keep it all going for two thousand years. And even if the media had been right that the priesthood and episcopate were full of corrupt and immoral people, that would have only made the situation more inexplicable in purely human terms—corrupt and immoral people are always the first to sell out and preach whatever message the culture wants to hear in order to get more power for themselves.

In short, I saw something divine at work here.

The Catholic Church has claimed all along that this is an institution “powered by” God, so to speak. It was founded by Jesus Christ, not humans, and a divine Force continues to guide it to this day. Just as he did with Sacred Scripture, God uses imperfect people to proclaim his perfect truth. It’s a crazy claim, particularly hard to believe in this age when atheistic materialism dominates the culture. But I think that the constant negative portrayals of Catholics in popular culture can be a boon to our faith in this department. Because every time the world reminds us that our natures are no less fallen than anyone else’s, it’s a reminder that our Church, its sacraments, and its teachings could not exist without Someone helping us out.
 
 
Originally published at the National Catholic Register. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Jeremy Sarber)

A while back I mentioned to an atheist acquaintance that I'd cried at Mass that morning. I explained that it was one of those times when I felt overwhelmed with the presence of God; I was so perfectly at peace, so surrounded by love, that I couldn't help but be moved to tears.

"Maybe it was the music," he responded. He went on to offer an erudite analysis of how music is known to produce certain positive sensations in the brain, noting that religious leaders from time immemorial have used the evolved human response to the stimulus of music to delude the faithful into believing that they've experience the divine.

I had to smile at his suggestion, because I actually agreed with part of his argument.

I never had a "religious experience" before my conversion from atheism to Christianity, and couldn't even imagine what that might be like. Would harp-playing angels appear in front of you? Would you hear a booming voice fill the room? I had no idea.

There had been a handful of moments in my life, however, when I experienced something that was unlike anything else I'd ever felt. On a few rare occasions I felt overcome with an odd sensation, an ecstatic elation on top of inner stillness that was so powerful that it made me feel as if I'd slipped into some other dimension. It was a moment of feeling compelled to relax, to let go, to just trust (trust in what or whom I didn't know, but that was definitely an overriding feeling when I had those experiences). Those moments were...well, if I hadn't been so certain that nothing existed beyond the material world, I might have said "spiritual." And they always occurred when I was listening to music.

It seemed illogical, really, that a mere arrangement of certain sounds in a certain order could transport me, for however brief a moment, into such a sublime state. I was aware of all the natural explanations for music's impact on the human brain; yet when I'd read about how the cochlea transmits information along the auditory nerve as neural discharges into the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe, I'd think, "Uhh, yeah, that's true…but I feel like there's something more going on as well."

One of the many things that rang true when I began studying Catholic theology was the emphasis on art—music, in particular—as a reflection of God. I came to see art as a sort of "secret handshake" of beings with souls: We share 96% of our DNA with chimps, but chimps don't write symphonies. Dogs don't rap. Dolphins can be trained to reproduce musical rhythms, but they don't sing songs. Only the creature made in the image and likeness of God can speak the secret language of music.

In other words, I realized that all those experiences I'd had while listening to music were so tremendous because they were experiences of my soul having a brush with its Creator. Or, in Pope Benedict's words:

"The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes, so that later, from this experience, we take the criteria for judgment and can correctly evaluate the arguments. For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said:
 
"Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true."
 
The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer's inspiration."

Christianity doesn't deny that beautiful music can move us to feel something; in fact, it acknowledges it, and then takes it a step farther by articulating exactly what it is we're feeling. And that's why I smiled when I heard my atheist friend's comment. It is actually because I am a Christian that I take that moment at Mass when I became filled with so much love and hope that I felt like I could explode with joy, and I say: Yes, maybe it was the music.
 
 
Originally posted at the National Catholic Register. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: VK.com)