Just Imagine

The great blogger Toujoursdan recently posted on a question that comes up a lot for gay people who are religious, Why bother? Why do we trouble ourselves with religion at all, least of all with the Christian religion whose leaders go out of their way to proclaim their hatred and enmity for us and for our friends?

This is a perfect follow-up to Bishop Selby's splendid essay where he notes that contrary to all expectation and in the face of so much persecution and hatred, gays and lesbians remain faithful conscientious Christians and even devoted servants of the Church. It goes right to the heart of what we hope to be as a church, and what we believe the "good news" is supposed to be to the world.

In the wake of the events of 9/11, a lot of people found or renewed their religious faith. I was not one of them. The religious motivation for the massacre horrified me. I remember reading selections from the devotional counseling provided for the hijackers, found in their belongings after the event, with revulsion. Pascal's famous quote that men do their worst evil in the service of conviction sprang to mind. In the wake of the catastrophe, I did not read religious literature, but Camus' The Plague. I read it not to make sense of the disaster (it was senseless), but to make sense of how people respond to catastrophe. I remember seeing a lot of Camus' optimism about human response in times of crisis played out right in front of me in this most famously brutal and cynical of cities. Normally very self-protective and selfish people went out of their way to help their neighbors in the crisis: people opened their apartments for complete strangers stranded by the suspended public transportation to spend the night; people cooked and cleaned for bereaved firehouses for weeks and months as dead firefighters were recovered and buried; donations of everything from blood to boots poured in within minutes of appeals on radio and TV.

I was angry. But I was not angry at God. God didn't hijack planes and crash them into buildings. I've never believed in God the Great Puppeteer who makes everything happen that happens. I more agree with WH Auden who said that "The God of Love will never withdraw our right to grief and infamy." We're on our own to make things happen for good or evil.

I was angry at religion. I remember reading a piece of graffiti that appeared downtown within weeks of the attack, "Religion is the problem, not the answer." I still feel a large amount of sympathy for that sentiment. I saw religion as nothing more than an infernal incubator for the hatreds, bigotries, and superstitions that motivated so brutal and cynical a crime.

There is another part of me determined not to let the haters take the Gospel away from me. That part went into eclipse for awhile, but never really left me. I thought long and carefully and eventually put things into a certain measure of perspective. The whole business of religion is ultimately very human, as human as politics and culture. Creeds, scriptures, doctrines, dogmas, theologies, and institutions are all very limited and flawed instruments for approaching that immense mystery that we call God. They are as flawed and as mortal as we are. Bishops, priests, hierarchies, conventions, churches, megachurches, bishops' councils, religious broadcasting, church funds and properties, are all very worldly and very political things fated to pass away with the rest of the world. As a priest friend once remarked to me many years ago, "there are no collars in heaven."

When we say the Lord's Prayer, the Our Father, the Pater Noster, or whatever you want to call it, we pray for the world to end. We pray for that whole world that we know, that is the arena for all of our successes and failures, to end. We all know that what we say in that prayer is at odds with what we really want in our heart of hearts, "not universal love, but to be loved alone." And yet universal Love is what we pray for and what we hope to see in the end. Everyone will fall madly in love with everyone else. Fear, resentment, and hatred will be forgotten. And in that moment of blissful awakening, everything that we set up to divide us all one for another, every marker we use to find our way in the world will end: nations, religions, tribes, races, genders, etc. The life and death of God incarnate as one of us, among the least of us, in a young Jewish carpenter 2000 years ago, is a radical rejection of all of our measures of success and failure in this world. Power vs. powerlessness, success vs. failure, "who may" vs. "who must," all of our measures of success, political, financial, physical, sexual, moral, and spiritual were picked up and thrown out the window in the death and resurrection of Christ. That is liberating. We can take that whole burden of obligation and striving and just throw it off our backs. Our salvation is already accomplished on our behalf. Why should I abandon that supreme hope of liberation because of someone else's petty fears and prejudices?

I have had the good fortune to see this lived out. Father Charles Bewick was one example among many. He was an Anglican priest who found himself stranded and dying in St. Louis where I happened to live. He was part of the staff of an English bishop invited to start an institute in St. Louis. While there, Charles was diagnosed with AIDS. The bishop immediately dismissed him and left him stranded and destitute. A local parish hired him on as an assistant priest. This was the early days of the AIDS crisis in St, Louis, and the treatment of the afflicted was appalling and shameful. Charles immediately went to work to create a pioneering service to find housing for AIDS sufferers who were evicted from their homes. He faced torrents of verbal abuse from hostile religious and state agencies, and from landlords, but he never lost his cool and never responded in kind. He persisted, and managed to find housing for people who were in no shape to find it themselves. When he died, the bishop who dismissed him was very sorry for what he had done. He had the good grace to accept Charle's forgiveness. The bishop accepted Charles' dying wish that he celebrate at the funeral mass.

Could someone who was not religious have done work that was this noble and selfless? Probably so. I wonder though, if they could have done this work with the same courage and joy that Charles showed. I don't know. I know that there are a lot of non-Christians who live out Christian hospitality and charity much more fully than most Christians. Charles was not a typical Christian, but he was an exemplary one. Charles Bewick remains one of many witnesses to that liberating power of the Gospel that I have seen in my life.

The great theologian Paul Tillich once said that the burden that Christ promises to lift from our shoulders is not the burden of sin and death. We still have those, and always will. That's a consequence of free will, and of sharing a world with others whose will is free. God could bend us to His will if He so wished to do. Instead, He wants us all to come to Him freely and willingly. The burden that Christ lifts from our shoulders is the burden of religion; all of those rules of clean and unclean, all of those measures of holy and unholy. In the end, religion is another race, another test that this world requires of us. Christ took our tests and finished our races for us.

Just imagine, a world with no religion.

My inner Protestant believes that no one can be argued into religious faith. Faith is either something you have or you don't. I don't believe in "natural law" theology. I don't believe that there are any compelling arguments for the existence of God or for the truth of any part of the Christian religion. Any first year graduate student in philosophy or mathematics can make quick work of the old "first cause" arguments. It was testimony to Aquinas' greatness that he said that all of his elaborate arguments were not iron-clad proof of anything, but only concessions to human weakness. Arguments, in the end, are another means of compulsion. A relationship with God compelled by arguments is as hollow as a shotgun marriage. Religion is our imperfect instrument for approaching God, as imperfect and as mortal as we are. Just as there is no compelling reason to believe, I see no compelling reason to abandon my faith.