Post Christian: Sides to Religion

My grandmother, Georgia (Joiner) Bredewater, was born on this day in 1921 in Texas.

Just a quick one today in the run-up to the big event at Notre Dame. I had the chance to be on the Pat Flynn Show (upcoming) and we talked about a variety of things. Pat has a very intellectual take on faith. As I was thinking through my life so far in preparation for that conversation, I was considering how it has taught me that there are multiple sides to religion and faith, and I realize that I am lagging behind where I could be on all of them.

You could divide these up any number of ways, but for today I will draw out four of them:

• Intellectual faith. This is about thinking through the philosophical, scientific, theological, and historical issues surrounding a religion and its teachings and deciding whether it seems credible or not. This is how I approach a lot of life (at least on the conscious level!) and was definitely my way in to the Catholic faith in the first place. Catholic Christianity has a huge, well-lit, clearly signed set of intellectual entrances and a huge, expansive, richly decorated set of chambers where we can stand or sit or kneel and enjoy pondering the intellectual beauty of it all.
• Emotional faith. Interestingly, despite all many emotional issues, I had a practice of emotional faith from the very beginning. I have always been attracted to music, and during the years of high school after my initial conversion at 14 I would cultivate this side of myself by singing and teaching myself to play the tunes of different hymns on my clarinet. In a way, as it says in Revelation, I have fallen away from my "first love" as embodied in and built up by these practices, and that hasn't helped me.
• Community of faith. On the other hand, as a teenager I was really an island, like that Ethiopian in the Acts of the Apostles where Deacon Phillip is whisked into his presence just long enough to present some Biblical apologetics, baptize him, and then get whisked away again. I often wonder how that Ethiopian got on when he got home. Fortunately for me, I wound up at the Wash U CSC for four or five pretty happy years... then I went to grad school, and the emotional beating that that applied to me, followed by over a decade of moving every two years (or less), has left me pretty rootless again.
• Meditation and contemplation. And yet, that time at grad school was not wasted in terms of faith either. It was at Notre Dame, for heaven's sake, and you will not find me among those people grousing about Notre Dame selling out its Catholic identity. There are plenty of rich veins of Catholicism there if you take a moment to find them. Somehow I was led to an education for ministry class for adults, and there I got my first real lessons in mental prayer. (We used Opening to God by Fr. Thomas Green, a book whose memory I still cherish.)