Dear Friends,
There was a wonderful essay in last week’s Wall Street Journal by Sarah Hurwitz who wrote about her experience of finally embracing her Jewish faith as an adult. It took her until she was 36 years old and functioning successfully in the world before she took the time to fill up a gaping hole in her spiritual life. What she discovered as she began to explore her faith was that it was anything but childish. She discovered that her faith was quite complex and required an adult mind to truly understand it. When she was young, she was taught the stories as they are taught to children, but the problem is that she did not keep learning. She reflected on how her Christian and Muslim friends were having the same experience as they transitioned to adult religion. They were forced by life to wrestle with their old uncertainties and they had come out on the other side humbler and more nuanced in their faith.
Let me share with you some of her final thoughts:
“I’m talking about people like me, who ditched our childhood faiths in disgust, considering ourselves “too smart” for religion. I would argue that we are not part of the solution here – we’re part of the problem, since we are abandoning our traditions to those who would distort them for their own small purposes and absolving ourselves of responsibility for the results.
We would never do such a thing in a secular context. If someone told us that they found their sixth-grade science or history classes to be dull and over simplistic, and thus entirely stopped learning about those subjects, we would be appalled. But that is precisely what many of us do with religion, including plenty who continue to show up at our places of worship and go through the motions. We’ve rejected the kiddie stuff but never bothered to replace it with an adult version.
And that’s a real loss, because mature forms of religion don’t traffic in simplistic or implausible answers, but push us to ask the right questions. Not just, “what does it mean to be happy or successful?” but “what does it mean to lead a truly ethical life? To be part of a community? To serve something greater than one’s self?”
To find this kind of religion, we need to seek out – and if necessary, create – communities that embrace wise, loving versions of our faiths. We need to find clergy whose spiritual depth is matched by intellectual depth; who understand that faith is at best a form of protest against the self-absorption, materialism, triviality and cruelty of modern life; and who are comfortable uttering the phrase “I don’t know.”
In short, when it comes to religion, many of us still need to grow up, and that means doing the seeking and grappling required to make these traditions are own.”
I hope you are finding in your experience of the community we are creating here at Frances Cabrini something of what Sarah talked about in the essay. I hope you have felt challenged to learn more about your faith tradition and to enter into a deeper relationship with God. If there are areas of faith development where you are experiencing a need and have not found a resource to answer the need, please let us know. Perhaps, you can help your co-workers and friends to look at their faith with new eyes and help them to plumb its depth. Share with them your own experience of finding new insights and greater wisdom in the ancient stories. Like Sarah, they can grow up and make the religious tradition their own.
Peace,
Fr. Damian