Do You Even Believe In God?

• 7 years ago

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK

I don’t know anything about Robert M. Pennoyer II, an Episcopal priest living in New York City; he may be a good man and a dedicated priest. But I have to say that his initial comments in his article, entitled “Hallowing the Gaps: Not Letting Certainty Smother Faith,” in the June 14 issue of Commonweal rubbed me the wrong way.

Pennoyer opened the article with a recollection of a wedding he attended back when he was a seminarian. He describes the “usual wedding-reception introductions” at the table where he was seated. He told the people at the table that he was studying to be an Episcopal priest, even though he had some doubts about his career choice because a “high tolerance for bull**** seemed to be a prerequisite for a life in the church,” and he was not the kind of guy who put up with such things.

One of the other guests at the table, a biochemist, surprised by his comment, responded, “If you think so much of your religion is bull****, why are you studying to be a priest? I mean, do you even believe in God?”

It seems an appropriate question. Would someone studying law, medicine, accounting, or culinary arts introduce himself this way at a wedding, as if he was ashamed of his life’s calling? It brought to mind a day when I was working a summer job with a tree company back in the 1960s. A fill-in member of our crew one day was also an Episcopal seminarian, who informed us while we were eating lunch that he was sleeping with his girlfriend.

I remember saying to myself — I was about 19 at the time — that what attracted this young man to the Episcopal priesthood seemed to be a fondness for the tweedy lifestyle in the old-money Episcopal parishes in the suburbs of New York City, rather than anything to do with taking up a cross and following Jesus.

But I quickly scolded myself for making this judgment. I told myself that perhaps the young man was merely seeking to establish that he was a “regular guy” with the blue-collar men on the truck.

I suspect that comparable social pressures led Pennoyer to make his protestations about all the “bull**** in religion” to the other guests at the wedding reception, whom he describes as young professional couples. It could be that he was eager to convince them that he was sophisticated and worldly wise and not some fundamentalist yahoo. (My hunch is that it didn’t work: Self-abnegation seldom impresses anyone.)

What was Pennoyer’s answer to the question about whether he “even believed in God”? He said, “It depends on what one means by God.”

Pennoyer still struggles with that question now that he is older and an Episcopal priest. He writes in his Commonweal article of his appreciation of the writing of the medieval theologian Meister Eckhart. Pennoyer concedes that Eckhart’s statements can seem “puzzling and blasphemous,” “headscratchers” that “knock us off our balance.” But Pennoyer sees “headscratching” about the nature of God as a good thing. It indicates that we are earnestly searching to understand a God whose “ineffability demands a creative use of language.”

Pennoyer tells us that where he finds God in his own life is in those moments when our prayers for our loved ones are answered, “the moments when life overbrims, moments that make clear the giveness of existence, and offer us a hint of its giver.” He uses as an example a time when he was praying for his prematurely born daughter, “born with a broken esophagus,” who “gulped down her first meal, a chalk-white barium solution.” When he was told his daughter would survive, he writes of how “Gratitude made the world shimmer, and hallelujahs seem inadequate praise.”

He sees this moment of exultation a confirmation of “Rabbi Heschel’s line about how faith isn’t some constant state of belief, but rather a sort of faithfulness, a loyalty to the moments when we’ve had faith.”

Pennoyer’s answered prayers for his daughter made the God whose existence he was reluctant to affirm at the wedding reception seem alive and real to him. He was no longer confronting the distant and impersonal “uncaused Cause,” the “Prime Mover,” the “ground of our being” that the theologians write about.

Let us concede that the thought of God as pure spirit, with no beginning and no end, omniscient and omnipotent, who has numbered every hair on our heads, who sees every sparrow that falls to the Earth, but who answers our prayers in ways that are incomprehensible to us and may leave us living lives of great sorrow — can be difficult to understand.

Several theologians have described this difficulty in understanding the nature of the Creator as the “mysterium tremendum.” It is a mystery that leaves Pennoyer believing that the most intelligent option is to cling to a faith that leaves him in agreement with Meister Eckhart’s assertion: “The one thing I know about God is that I do not know him.”

This is why Pennoyer holds that “certainty will asphyxiate whatever it is that still breathes in our religious traditions, whatever it is that can surprise us with its whisper. Where custom has trampled a deep rut, it can be hard to hear the voice of God. Faith can aerate this lifeless ground, but only when it is capacious enough for doubts and for loves, and gives them room enough to dig.”

What is the applicable metaphor? The “elephant in the room” seems appropriate to me.

To be sure, understanding the nature of God is perplexing. But ought not a member of the Christian clergy find room for Jesus and His words in making an analysis of this matter? Perhaps a scholar teaching a course in natural theology should not rely on Jesus’ revelation about the Father.

But one would think an Episcopalian priest would find some opportunity to bring it up when speaking to a wider audience, such as Commonweal’s. Jesus came to Earth to teach us about the nature of the Father and how we are to understand our relationship to Him, the proper way to pray and to worship.

Because of Jesus, we know that God is more than the Prime Mover. Because of Jesus, we know God is the Father who in Heaven, who gives us our daily bread and forgives our sins, who made us to know Him, to love Him and to serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next. We don’t have to search for God on “lifeless ground.” We have Jesus’ words to guide us.

Look: It can make for an interesting intellectual exercise to see if we can discover the nature of God through unaided human reason, exploring the implications of Meister Eckhart’s “puzzling and blasphemous headscratchers.”

But Christians need not leave it there. Jesus’ teachings are part of this equation. There was a time when we could assume that Episcopalian priests did not think it unsophisticated to bring them up in polite company.