A passage from my forthcoming book, “Two Episcopalians Walk Into a Bar:” The year was 1963, aboard a Yugoslavian freighter bound for Tangier:
I told him, “I suppose I want to believe in God. I want to be a Christian. I want to be an Episcopalian. I’ve grown to love the Church.”
Dr. Meany sat with that for a moment, as if turning it over rather than answering it.
“You know,” he said finally, “C. S. Lewis was always very reluctant to say who was or was not a ‘real Christian.’ He thought that kind of judgment was beyond our competence.”
He glanced at me, not challenging—just steady.
“We see only the surface—what a person says, where they go, how they sound. But the deeper movement of the soul… that’s hidden from us.”
He paused.
“A man who appears very close to faith may, in fact, be drifting away from it. And another who seems far off may be moving toward it—perhaps more honestly than we realize.”
I didn’t say anything.
“The impulse to classify people,” he went on, “to sort them into believers and non-believers—that can be a kind of distraction. It keeps us from the harder work.”
“What harder work?” I asked.
He gave a faint smile.
“Looking at our own lives.”
Another pause.
“Christianity, at its center, isn’t about labeling. It’s about transformation. And that”—he lifted his hand slightly, as if to qualify the point—“is not something we’re in any position to measure in other people.”
I let that sit for a moment, then said, almost quietly, “And what do I do?”
He didn’t hesitate.
“Pray.”
I looked at him.
“I don’t know how.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “It’s an old Anglican instinct—you pray that you may believe.”
Hi, Dan,
Very interesting, and very well-written and thought out–but, that’s not a surprise to me.
I guess my instincts are very far from being Anglican–I would never pray so that I might believe. This seems (and I expect I’ll get flack for saying so) deluded to me. This seems like drinking the Kool-Aid in the hopes of the wild after-effect from drinking it.
I’m only interested in believing in that which I have good evidence to think is real and True. There is, of course, a huge draw to believing in, worshipping and bending the proverbial knee to the Christian God–going to Heaven and avoiding Hell. Of course, that’s just scratching the surface. The biggest advantage, however, to believing in the Christian God is developing a loving relationship with your Creator who loves you and wants a relationship with you.
But, there is, equally (and perhaps more than just equally) an advantage to disbelieving in the Christian God–FREEDOM. With no God setting forth commandments as to how we are to live our lives, one can live life freely with as much sin as one wants and with the feeling that there will never be an repercussions for it (beyond what might happen on this earth–such as being put in jail.) But, for those who are the “great uncaught” they don’t worry about an ultimate Day of Judgment. There’s a huge draw to that sort of thinking for many people.
Jesus told people about Himself, and then He performed miracles for people so that they could see and then trust that He was telling them the Truth. Then, he expected those people to tell others about what the learned–the Great Commission. God gives us the Holy Shroud–that’s the gilding and the lily with regard to evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was and is a Truth-Teller. Christians don’t need to drink the proverbial Kool-Aid. We have real evidence that can permit our minds to rest very easy in the knowledge that the God of Christianity is real.
Best regards,
Teddi