Tag: doubt

Vaccines and other victims of their own success (like Jesus)

The one-two punch of the Covid-19 pandemic and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s return to the national stage have revived the perennial topic of vaccine denialism. There are many reasons this skepticism remains so popular, some more understandable than others. A friend was recently freaking out about vaccines. She had just vaccinated her daughter, and now the kid was having some unpleasant symptoms. My friend was sure of two things: The symptoms were a reaction to the vaccine, and they were horribly dangerous, possibly lethal.

No, three things: that this was evidence she had made a mistake. Her kid was suffering, and therefore she should not have vaccinated her.

I know where she was coming from. My kids and I are all fully vaccinated with every recommended vaccine, and I have done enough research that I understand more or less how they work, what is in them and why they are so important. At the same time, I am old enough to see that just because something is backed by science does not mean it is infallible. What I am not old enough to remember is what life was like before vaccines. I have a single chickenpox scar on my chin, but I never saw mumps, never saw rubella, never saw polio. My childhood friends all survived childhood.

And it may seem, because of this basically healthy world we live in, that the choice we face is between deciding to take the risk of bad side effects or refusing to take that risk. But really, the choice is between taking the risk of massive suffering from horrifying diseases or taking the much smaller risk of much lesser suffering from vaccinating. That is the real choice.

But vaccines are the victim of their own success. Because they have been so effective, people forget what they are protecting us against, forget why they are necessary.

Salvation is the same.

If we have grown up Catholic, or even if our conversion or reversion was a few years ago, it is very easy to start taking salvation for granted. Even people who are not Christian themselves have been marinating in Christianity for so long, they don’t recognize it for what it is, which is the very air we breathe. Honest historians do know this and will point out just how much Christianity has permeated and permanently transformed the world we live in.

But because Christianity is so familiar, we simply see it as the norm rather than as something novel, amazing and transformative. This is partly because we don’t clearly understand what life was like before it—or without it.

Jesus Christ, too, is a victim of his own success.

Because we can’t remember or conceive of life without Christ, we may start to think a Christless life wasn’t so bad, that the real threat of entering into the waters of baptism are the side effects that may come along with it: things like the dullness of having to do all those churchy obligations or the embarrassment of living in ways our friends or family don’t understand or the real pains of self-denial. Or that you might have to make big changes in your life.

So is it worth the risk? Is it true that the immense benefits of being Christian outweigh its likely risks?

Before I answer that question, let’s return to the original analogy. I used to think that vaccine skeptics were just people who hadn’t done their homework or who did not understand very much history or science. Now I see…Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine. 

Photo by Steven Kamps on Unsplash

Stepping out in doubt

Has anyone ever told you there are jokes in the Bible? The one I found the other day made me laugh until I cried.

A little background, first. My old therapist had one of those wretched inspirational posters on his wall. It was a stock photo of a misty lake, and the caption said something about needing the courage to step off the shore so you can begin your journey.

It never made sense to me. What kind of journey is that? We don’t have to wonder what will happen when someone steps off the shore: They sink. Step off the shore, under you go. Bloop! End of journey.

Well, that poster may have been an illogical cliché, but it also turned out to be decent advice—as long as you don’t take it literally. But it was terrifying. Feeling nothing under my feet is the worst thing I have ever felt. There is always the temptation to scramble around and flail your way back to familiar ground because even if you recognize that your old life is a disaster, at least it is familiar.

But I did it: I stepped off into the void many times over the course of several years while I was in therapy. I was learning what in my psyche was craziness, what was garbage and what were traps I laid for myself, but also what was good, sane, powerful and admirable. What truly belonged and could be developed further and how to do it. It was an untangling process, and what was salvageable about myself was much more solid and worthwhile than I had feared. It is such a cliché to say “I found myself,” but that is more or less what happened when I took a big step away from security. I discovered, to my relief, that there was a real me there, in the heart of all the dysfunction.

Then, armed with a new sense of self, I started working on untangling some relationships. This was, if anything, even more terrifying. I knew that if I cut away everything that was unhealthy, there might be no relationship left.

People are who they want to be, and if you are going to become healthier and more whole yourself, you have to let other people be who they choose to be. Sometimes this means the relationship will end. You will lose someone you did not want to lose. This is a thing that happens sometimes, when you step out, away from secure footing. Many of my relationships changed. Some became stronger. Some were lost.

Then, at a certain point, my therapist asked me to look hard at my relationship with God and with the Catholic Church.

Read the rest of my latest for America magazine. 

Image: Ivan Aivazovsky 1888 Jesus walks on water (detail)  Public Domain

The cracks in the wall of the church

Have you been to one of those churches that is tidy and fine and in good repair, but the architectural style is . . . ongepotchket? A little of this and a little of that, and it all adds up to much too much.

Church buildings like this have clearly gone through countless renovations. Some parts are neoclassical, some are vaguely nautical. The light fixtures are from the 80s; the stations of the cross from the 50s, and the tabernacle is from who knows when. When was it okay to put those particular colors and textures together, and when was that shape ever anything but grotesque? And that’s where we keep Jesus.

It’s not just church buildings, but the Catholic Church itself that is this way. It has undergone more renovations that we can imagine. What we think of as Catholicism is not a coherent, uniform, elegant whole carefully curated by the Holy Spirit, but a sort of yard sale arrangement patched together out of whatever is made available to us in our era, in our region, in our budget, in our tradition.

That goes not only for architecture and decor, but also for styles of worship, for what we emphasize in how we incorporate our faith into our life, and for which virtues and which sins we emphasize, and for how we think about God.

The indispensable core of what unifies us as Catholics is smaller and more basic than we may realize, and so much of what feels normal and even central is actually just cultural, and may very well someday be renovated away.

Does this thought cause some discomfort? It should. The Church is not just about us or our times, and never was meant to be. Even the things that appeal to us and nourish us and give us comfort and support are not as central as we might imagine.

But wait, it gets worse! For some Catholics, living the faith is like coming into their old familiar ongepotchket, hodgepodge, yard sale church building, and one day they spot not only some aesthetic incoherence, but an actual crack in the wall.

And suddenly, they can’t shake the idea that the crack isn’t just a crack, but a portent. That everything they see around them, the things that appeal to them and the things that don’t, are an edifice built over a sinkhole. They feel they must tread carefully or the whole thing will cave in. That the cracks are structural; that there’s a yawning abyss under our feet.

Sometimes that emptiness seems like the only real thing, and every part of the church that has been built over it looks like it’s moments away from tumbling down into gehenna.

Those people who leave the Church over little things

People leave the Church for all kinds of reasons. Usually it’s more than one reason; but sometimes people will be able to point to the one thing that tipped them over the edge. Very often, it’s the sex abuse scandal. But also fairly often, it’s something that sounds less serious. It sounds like something that people should be able to get past:

“I was going through a rough time in my marriage and a priest gave a jerky sermon about divorce, so I walked out and never came back.”

“I was trying to organize my grandmother’s funeral, and the parish secretary was so rude, and even mocked the music I chose. That was the last time I set foot in a church.”

“I was in the back with my crying baby, and an usher angrily told me to control my kid. I decided if they didn’t want me, I didn’t want them either, and that was that.”

These things are upsetting and demoralizing, and can legitimately make us angry. But are they worth leaving the Church over?

When someone tells stories like these, other Catholics will often respond: Well, if you’d leave Jesus and the sacraments for something small like that, it shows that your faith was weak and shallow to begin with. If you leave the Church because of sinners, your faith was in man, not God.

I used to believe this. I no longer do. Or at least, I see a bigger picture of why humans — including me — do what they do.

Don’t get me wrong. When someone decides to leave the Faith, there couldn’t be more at stake. It’s one thing if someone decides they’re quitting their tech job and taking up weaving, or they’re tired of Twitter and they’re giving up social media. I may think they’re making a mistake, but they can live with the consequences.

But when you hear that someone has had enough of the Church, it’s so hard not to say, “Yes, but . . . don’t you want Jesus? I know that one Catholic you met was so cruel and awful, and I’m so sorry that happened, but are you really prepared to give up Jesus, just because of that? This is your immortal soul we’re talking about! Eyes on the prize! Get over it!”

But it occurs to me that everyone’s priorities are skewed — people who leave the Church because of the sins of other humans, but also people who stay in the Church because of the goodness of other humans.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image via Piqsels (Creative Commons)

Passing through the moor

This impulse, this drive to name, categorize, and find meaning in every experience, is the hallmark of a rational creature. We do not want to be like witless crickets, singing and leaping our way through the world, taking seasons as they come and then one day mindlessly coming to an end ourselves. We are made in the image of God, and that means we know there is meaning; and so we want to know why things happen. We want to know what our lives mean.

But sometimes, we can’t. Sometimes we are passing through the moor, on our way to a strange and new life we would never have chosen for ourselves. We cannot name what we see in that great expanse of dark. And it is normal to, like Mary, simply decide we do not like it.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.

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Photo by Dan Cook via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Finding the Church-Within-the-Church

I don’t mean that we are allowed to pick and choose which beliefs suit us, and discard the rest. I do mean that we should focus on the doctrine that makes sense to us, nourishes us, draws us closer to the heart of God, and we should cling to them as hard as we can. When we find doctrines that disturb or disconcert or baffle us, we’re not free to ignore them; but we can at least acknowledge that they do belong in the Church, as much as the easier and more intelligible doctrines belong. When we focus on what makes sense to us, it makes the less pleasant parts easier to endure.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.

And why are you at Mass?

The elderly gentleman thinks Pope Francis is some kind of pinko hippie, and there hasn’t been a real Pope in Rome since Giuseppe Siri, and he will tell you alllllll about it if he can get you cornered in the foyer.

The nun next to him is headed to a pro-choice rally after Mass, and is chilling some champagne for the day when women priests will finally be approved.

So … why are they at Mass?

Because Jesus is here, and He’s giving Himself away.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly here.

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Image: Christ revealed in the breaking of the bread, photo by Ted via Flickr (Creative Commons)

“Well, excuse me if I care more about innocent babies than criminals!”

st peter square

Catholics who are in dissent from the Church  – those who reject Church teaching on contraception, or male priesthood, or whatever — often say that the Church is right about everything else, but regrettably wrong about this one issue.

And those of us who are not in dissent respond incredulously, “How could that be? How could the Church be right about the resurrection, and transubstantiation, and eternal life, but wrong about this one issue? How do you even swallow that idea?”

But it’s just as senseless to say, “I care so deeply about this one important moral issue that I refuse to even acknowledge that there are other important moral issues.” And yet this is exactly what we’re hearing in the wake of the four paper’s joint editorial condemning the death penalty in the U.S.  The comboxes are pretty much wall-to-wall reiterations of this argument: “Death penalty for criminals? Who cares? What I care about as a Catholic is ending the slaughter of the innocent unborn!”

This attitude displays a deep and disastrous misunderstanding of the consistency and interconnectedness of Church doctrine. The Church is consistent. Utterly consistent. All of her teachings spring from a unified understanding of what God is like and what human life is for.

So if we are going to pish-tush at some teaching of the Church — like the teaching that the death penalty is only to be used as a last resort when there is no other way of keeping society safe* — calling it “marginal” or “liberal,” or saying that we just can’t get ourselves to care about it? Then we are very close to being in dissent. At very least, we have what I might call a “dissenting mentality”: pretending to submit to the guidance of the Church, but actually only adhering to and defending the doctrines which appeal to us, while ignoring, scorning, or even openly defying the ones which we don’t like.

[the following paragraph added at 11 eastern for clarity:] I’m not talking about people who truly believe that the death penalty is, in some cases, the only way to keep society safe. I believe they are wrong, and that in this country, in this century, there is no compelling reason to execute any prisoner. But who I’m talking about is people who openly reject what the Catechism teaches:  who say, “The hell with that. Blood demands blood. Some people are just scum of the earth, and justice demands that we wipe them clean.”

If some doctrine makes us uneasy, and we admit that we don’t like it or understand it? No problem! That’s just being honest, and we all have some catching up to do. So pray, pray, pray, turn it constantly over to God, beg for understanding and the grace to submit, and have passionate arguments with people you respect. That’s fine. God never commands us to be instantly calm and happy about All the Catholic Things.

But for your own soul’s sake, if you have reservations or doubts, don’t be flippant or nasty about them, or, God forbid, proud of them.  Belligerently parading around with a “dissenting mentality” is like going to a friend’s house, greeting the host nicely, displaying perfect manners during dinner, — and then going to the bathroom and crapping all over the floor.  And then writing a gracious thank-you note for a lovely evening.

Guess what? It’s all one house. If you want to be a good guest, you have to behave yourself in every room.

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*2267 Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm – without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself – the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”68

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