ASKBROTHERGIOVANNI

The faith journey - the complete acceptance of what is not provable

"A Faith Journey" Courtesy of the Pizzaonian Art Institute, Abe Straction, curator

 

Brother Giovanni – Could you briefly discuss your attitude about faith in God.  What is your personal opinion on how one works at understanding faith as a life process?  Thank you

The faith journey - my perspective

Faith in God requires introspection.  Ironically, nothing makes you doubt your faith more than introspection. 

First, you must believe what is not provable.  Then, if you get over that hurdle, you must from a Christian perspective accept without reservation that you are loved personally by a God who knows you intimately. This is the “Good News of the Gospel.”

None of this is offered as a challenge to what you believe.  The intent is to take a closer, albeit brief, look at what faith is really about. Let’s start with why worry about introspection at all?

For one, it seems that you could be unknowingly accepting a candy store concept of faith if you are not willing to go deep within yourself to understand why you believe in God in the first place.

When it comes to God, why do you believe? How unselfish is your belief?  What do you get from your belief? What do you give back to yourself and others because of your belief?  These are all valid questions all of us should take seriously if we are going to be honest about our relationship with God.

It is easy to dispose of these questions as unnecessary if you accept your faith as a gift from God. I am sure that it is a gift; however, does this mean that you check your intellect at the door?  Is this what your God wants from you?  From my perspective, this cannot make any sense if we are embracing the concept of believing in the God of love and mercy.    

Let’s take love as an example.  Love is sacrifice.  Love’s primary purpose is to give not to get. How many of us can remain in love with anything that does not give something back? Is this  point where you start questioning my faith? Nonetheless, this does not make the question any less valid.

I always hear how people feel the presence of their God and how important that feeling is in giving meaning to their lives.  This is wonderful when it happens, but is this what your faith is about? What happens when your God withdraws that feeling of intimacy and hides from you in the shadows?  What happens to your faith then?

The journals of history that recorded the thoughts of the saints are filled with their lament of a God that withdrew from them.  Whether driven by our own consciousness or planted by God, the need to test the sincerity of our belief always arrives and becomes the critical point in our spiritual journey. This test is often the withdrawal of any emotional relationship with God.  We are left only with our intellectual understanding of our belief in God and little else.

How do fare when this happens to you?  What do we find out about ourselves when we find ourselves alone in the darkness?  There are endless books that explain this part of the spiritual journey, but how about going it alone for a while and finding out what you really believe.

Isn’t this what the faith experience is really about?  This is where prayer and the emerging quality of your relationship with your God takes place.

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Brother Giovanni "Ask Brother Giovanni" is a feature of the Pizzaonian Newsertainment Network, Diverti Mento, editor

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Sister Veronica responds to Brother Franco’s comments - "On a more reasonable Christianity"

"Pizzaonia Emerging" Courtesy of the Pizzaonian Art Institute, Abe Straction, curator      (C)2009

 

Continuing our dialogue on the state of Christian fatih, Sister Veronica responds to Brother Franco’s comments

On a more reasonable but still as demanding Christianity

For most people Brother Franco’s concept of Christianity will seem pretty harsh.  Certainly Jesus’s concept of love and service is a radical message.  It centers completely on love, service and sacrifice.  Everybody likes the idea but few seem capable of accepting the complete message.

Where Brother Franco and I separate is on what did Jesus mean and did Jesus understand how impossible it would be for most of us to be able to embrace the message on the level that Brother Franco states?

I am sure Jesus did.  For one, he did not tell everyone “to sell everything and follow me.” Here is where it is very easy to get into trouble.  No doubt Jesus is demanding the best we have. The question is – what is that best?

What is ignored by Brother Franco’s analysis is that we are not all capable of giving equal levels of love and sacrifice at the same time.  Union with God is an individual process.  This is true for all religions, and it seems to me to be particularly true of Christianity.

After all, why do we have the concept of mercy?  If we were all saints, the totality of the Christian message would be embraced and completely lived to the fullest.  Indeed, there are some who have achieved this.  However, most of us have not. And that does not make us any less Christian.

As for the man in the Gospel who was told, “to sell everything and follow me,” Jesus was asking for what he wanted from him.  Every day, if we are aware of our faith, Jesus is letting us know what he wants from us. And what he wants from each of us can be very different.

What gets confused in His message is that, for some reason, if we are not asked to sell everything, it assumed by many that what we are asked to do in order to be his disciple is less than complete sacrifice. I obviously disagree with this all-or-nothing perspective.

Each of us has a gift to be realized.  For many of us bringing that gift into the fullness of life regardless of how small it may be is worthy in His eyes.  It may be more or less than others depending on what we are capable of at any giving moment, but I suspect if it is the best we have, it is all equal in God’s eyes.

Sister Veronica

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Christianity reasonable?  Are you kidding?

If there ever was a more radical message than the message that Jesus of Nazareth preached and taught while he walked this earth, we certainly don’t know about it. His message was not accepted in his time, and to this day still hasn’t been completely accepted in our time.

Unfortunately, what we have seen evolving over the last 2000 plus years is a watered-down version of the original message.    

Let’s take the subject of war*.  Is it even reasonable to believe that war could exist if Christians followed the original Christian message? 

Today war* is justified and defined as a reasonable means of self-defense.  Now we take self-defense for granted, but if you take the original message literally self-defense was not an option. We were to turn the other cheek and face our enemies in a loving nonviolent way.

Killing us would be easy since we would offer no resistance. In place of the sword we would offer love to our enemy.  Many of us would die but in the long run our enemies would be overcome by our loving nonviolence, and we would restore peace to those who remained.

Many of us would have perished, but our reward would be heaven since we lived and died as Jesus asked us to. How many Christians practice this message today? How many of us have the commitment to the Christian faith to practice this message of love and nonviolence? The answer is obvious - look at the state of the world around us.

Let’s move off the extremes and simply talk about everyday life. Homelessness could not exist if we were truly Christians.  I know there are many programs that help the homeless – and many of those follow the Christian message closely.

However, for most of us, the homeless are a state of life, and we accept it as an everyday phenomenon. We don’t like it; we wish it would go away, but we do little about it. This is diametrically opposed to the Christian message. Homelessness could not exist if we were truly Christian.  

I know this sounds extreme but Jesus was extreme. His message was delivered softly and with love but there’s no mistaking its intent. Christianity was not meant to be reasonable. It was a radical solution meant to bring love into the world.

Add to this the notion that God the father was a loving God who knew each and every one of us personally, and loved us beyond anything we can imagine. 

Then  imagine this itinerant carpenter that we call the Messiah claiming to know this God, not only personally,  but to love him as his father -no more than that – to love his so personally he would call the God of heaven and earth ” Daddy.”

Can you imagine the shock people felt when they heard his message? No wonder they didn’t trust him. He was diametrically opposed to everything they had ever heard about their God. Here was a God of personal love, not a God of vengeance.

If this is still radical to us today imagine how radical this was to the people of his time.

We often hear that Jesus is not relevant today. As the late Andrew Greeley said, “He is not only not relevant in our time he was not relevant in his time. After all, they did crucify him as a common criminal.” This is hardly the fate of someone who was respected and loved.

So today most of us practice our Christianity in a very reasonable way. We are very nice people. We try to respect each other and partially live the Christian life. Unfortunately, this misses the mark. Most of us cannot admit this, but just look at the record. It speaks for itself.

So there is no misunderstanding, we include ourselves as part of the “reasonable Christians,” but to also be clear- let’s stop kidding ourselves.

Brother Franco

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Mark 10 -21 - Jesus looked at him and loved him. "One thing you lack," he said. Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.

*The Church's Just War Theory -   http://catholiceducation.org/articles/religion/re0182.html

In our next "Ask Brother Giovanni," Sister Veronica answers Brother Franco with her concept of what it means to be a reasonable  Christian.

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Jesus letters - "How do we know our belief in you is not self-serving and little else?"

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The continuing conversation between Jesus and Brother Giovanni

 

Dear Jesus,

It has been awhile since my last letter.  I am sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you.  I have had a lot on my mind lately, and I need to get some advice.  I know we have kept our conversations on everyday things since you are constantly being bombarded with requests.  And, I know trying to deal with what everyone wants from you leaves you little time to ever simply enjoy yourself like the rest of us.

However, having said that I am going to do what most everyone else does and lean on you.  Yes, this is about the whole notion of faith and the motivation that makes us want to believe in you.

I need to put my faith in some kind of context that makes sense to me. I am talking about the whole notion of believing in something that you cannot prove, but still deeply believe. Most non-believers will concede that you probably did exist, at least as a man.  However, the “Son of God” is where a lot of people are stopped cold and cannot fully grasp and proclaim.  Unfortunately, this is even true for so-called devout Christians who will not publicly proclaim who you are for fear of feeling foolish.

(Just as an aside – there may be a good reason for this since some of your more conservative believers do seem unbending and not very forgiving in their attitudes towards those folks who do not share their notion of who you are.)

However, since I am trying to move beyond this the other thing that I need to get off my chest is the whole subject of why we do believe in you in the first place.  Certainly, in the beginning it is more about are personal needs and our fears.  It is very easy for us to put them on your doorstep and hope they are going to be resolved.  Obviously, this is a pretty immature, and I suspect a lot of Christian haters believe that most of us who do accept who you are do believe that our needs and fears are why we, from their perspective, had to create you in the first place.

Again, you can see why they believe this since so many of us never leave the immature stage of needing you as the real reason for are so-called love for you.

If I am being too harsh forgive me.  It is very easy to point the finger at the other guy.  I hope I can keep this about me since to do otherwise is rather self-righteous.

All of this came about today when I spent some time with you in my thoughts.  It suddenly hit me how easy it is to fool ourselves into not realizing that our motivation for proclaiming our belief in you is never pure and always seems to have some self-serving purpose lurking in the background.

This is what separates us from the saints I suppose, but when do we know how sincere our belief and love for you really is?  Many people answer this by saying our actions should speak louder than words.  The true Christian acts out their faith in you every day with acts of kindness and love. But is that really true - Is it possible that even some heroic acts done in your name are also self-serving and not completely honest in their motivation?

You can see how far I can go with this – for some, I have already crossed the line and moved toward being ridiculous.

I am not sure there is an answer to any of this, but I would like to get your thoughts on the subject.  Perhaps what Thomas Merton said was right.  Maybe we can never be sure of our motivation.  But as he said so clearly, the fact that we still seek you may be enough.  It is our need to find you in the darkness of disbelief that might be as good as it gets. Maybe that is what real faith is all about.

Let me know what you think.

 

Your friend,

Brother Giovanni

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