Abiding in the Fields Sunday, December 28, 2003

What a weekend! Two days with six kids, who ran us ragged. (Particularly my new buddy, my wee nephew-in-law, who shot me dead several times and breathed fire on Mrs. WTJ. Before leaping on me to crush me, he said, "You should cover your penis." Kids today!) Aside from the company, the best present was time: I got to spend a few hours at my favorite out-of-the-way bookstore, a converted barn in the wilds of the Catskills, and got to chatting with the owner. He promsed to teach me how to be unemployable.

Saw the Progenitors today. My mother is an astonishingly generous gift-giver, and presented us with boatloads of wonderful things, including three (!) homemade (!) boutique-quality (!) sweaters for Mrs. WTJ. Out to a hearty meal at the local Italian, which I know from personal experience is a haunt of the Mayor of Bayonne. We run in high circles here.

I haven't had many other good thoughts for my friend, with whom I started a religious conversation a while ago, so I pawned him off onto G.K. Chesterton (who I'd be cribbing from anyway). But I found a great paragraph in an article from the Catholic magazine First Things that bears on the discussion:

[Iris Murdoch] is God-obsessed, although she again and again [in a book of interviews] says that she does not believe in God. At least not in the God of the Christianity that, she insists, she cherishes. One interviewer suggests that she is devoted to Christianity without God but has found that it doesn't work. Murdoch doesn't disagree. She cannot believe in a personal God, she says, because God cannot be "a thing among other things." That is disappointing. One learns in Christian Theology 101 that God is not a thing among things, an existent among existents, but the Absolute Being of all that is, was, or ever can be. But apparently Iris Murdoch did not learn that in her Anglo-Irish Protestant childhood. It is truly disconcerting how often this happens. One encounters people who say they do not believe in God only to discover, upon examination, that the God they do not believe in I do not believe in either.

The final point is an excellent one. I had strong faith when I was a kid, strong but shallow--and it vanished as soon as it was disturbed by historical analysis and contrary viewpoints. It took me a long time to realize that I had lost faith in a straw man version of religion, not the genuine article; and that I was rebelling against the poor teaching of hateful nuns and cunning Jesuits, not the core of Catholicism.

In short, I don't believe in a cruel, oppressive, guilt-dealing God either. That's a convenient picture for bad teachers to paint, but it does no justice whatsoever to the truth.

@ 6:28:00 PM,

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