Faith-Based, III

I spend a fair amount of time around religious people, and often I feel like a fraud. They seem so strong in their faith, unlike me, the spiritual equivalent of a 98-pound weakling. Many of them are nurtured by strong communities of faith - communities which I envy, but typically from a distance. They pray. I say certain words. They seem to live the thing. I imitate someone who is living the thing. Or so it often seems to me.

Part of their strength is that they appear to be cognitively certain of what is true about God. I ultimately demur on this point, even writing plaintive letters to you putting the best possible face on the argument that cognitive certainty is impossible, and that we are left finally, and only, with hope. My friend Richard Neuhaus reminds me about St. Paul's dictum that we walk by faith and not by sight, and gently offers, in wonderful Neuhausian fashion, the proposition that "hope is simply faith disposed toward the future." But these wise words notwithstanding, my lack of sight on this matter is constantly unsettling.

Some things, of course, are easily visible. My capacity to make sense of natural data clearly shows me that the human person is spiritually thirsty. Ducks are made to swim. Humans are hard-wired to seek transcendence. Seeking the answer to what it means to live and die, and longing for a home beyond this home, is what we humans ultimately do. It's our most characteristic trait as a species. While this aspect of our personhood is regularly ignored and even denied today, doing so strikes me as self-evidently erroneous - little different as an empirical matter from supposing that humans are born without arms and legs.

So far, so good. But then, at the crucial moment, vision fails. (Or at least my vision fails.) What is the specific answer to the great question? Where is the home that is longed for? For whom am I looking? I have been taught, and I seek to embrace, the Christian answer to these questions. But as a weak-sighted person, living often in the dark, I hope for, but cannot see, that answer.

And so my friend Kevin Hasson said to me, read the Bible story of the Prodigal Son. You remember. After a hard period of living on his own, and badly, in a "far land," the chastened son wants to return to his father's house, and is even willing to accept his father's judgment, which the son seems to believe will be harsh. He sets out on the long journey, walking toward home. But "when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him."

Quite a moment. It turns out that the son did not need such wonderful vision, after all. He was still a great way off, but his father saw him. The son did not have to locate the father accurately, get the destination clearly in sight, discern the correct answer. The son only had to walk toward home. The rest was a gift - not anything that the son figured out, but something that was figured out for him, and that was better than he had imagined. The son was short-sighted, but he was loved anyway. He was not able to run to the answer, so the answer ran to him, and kissed him.

All the doubting remains, of course. But for me, this story is comforting. As regards life's largest puzzle, here's the proposition: I am more sought after than seeking. I am seen before I can see.

A postscript. Elizabeth Marquardt, an affiliate scholar at this institute, is currently discussing the Prodigal Son story with scores of young people across the country, as part of her research on the moral and spiritual lives of the children of divorce. Marquardt is exploring how young adults who were largely abandoned in childhood by their own fathers can, and cannot, relate to a religious parable in which a father's love is strong enough to purport to teach us about divine love. Pretty important stuff. Stay tuned.

Sources: II Corinthians 5: 7. Luke 15: 11-32.

First published Spring/Summer 2001.