The newspapers over the weekend very rightly featured photographs of the Buffalo Bills players, and the Bengals players, too, assembling in a circle, many with their hands on each other’s shoulders, all in prayer for their teammate Damar Hamlin, who had been carried off the field close to death. Fortunately, he is recovering.
This outpouring of faith across the nation in the face of this event is not unusual. Some writers have attributed it especially to football’s close alliance with Christianity, particularly in part due to its popularity in the Bible belt. I don’t know about that. I think this tendency to reach out with prayer to God, as inchoate as our understanding of who or what God is, is a human instinct. We search for faith, we search for hope, we search for support at a time when we need it.
I vividly recall praying on the occasions where I faced my greatest worry and challenge. The birth of each of our children, my cancer, now my wife, Francie’s cancer. The birth of each of our children’s children.
I pray in church each Sunday for peace in the world, for leaders who will be able to bridge animosity with understanding and love.
My belief that there is a God personally intervening in our individual lives has waxed and waned over the years. Today, I have to say I doubt whether God would intervene in each individual’s life in the manner in which I pray that He will. But I don’t discount the possibility. And whether he does or not, I know this. Praying helps me cope with the fears and challenges I am facing.
I identify with Konstantin Levin, the protagonist in Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina".
I was moved by Levin’s groping for a clear articulation of his faith in God and by his doubts about many portions of revelation. Yet I join him in his ultimately embracing Christ’s teachings and life as a code to live by. Levin’s groping mirrors my groping, with all its doubts, questions and uncertainties. Yet, ultimately I reach the same place Levin does with my belief in a moral code which is reinforced by my belief in God. I know that whatever success I have had in adhering to that code has been strengthened by my belief in the preaching of Jesus Christ.
“The question for him (Levin) consisted in the following: ‘If I do not accept the answers that Christianity gives to the questions of my life, then which answers do I accept?’ And nowhere in the whole arsenal of his convictions was he able to find, not only any answers, but anything resembling an answer.”
Like me, Levin recognized that while his wife was giving birth, an extraordinary thing had happened to him. He, the unbeliever, had begun to pray, and in the moment of praying, he had believed.
Like Levin, I discovered, probably when I was in my late ‘20s or ‘30s, that my belief in some Catholic theologies had outlived their stay and no longer existed. I had come to doubt (and I still doubt) many of the precepts with which I grew up: the Virgin birth, even the bodily resurrection of Jesus.
However, I come back to the most fundamental beliefs, that there is a superior power that calls on us to follow our best instincts to do what is right and to respect the dignity of every other human being.
I recall the counsel of one of the priests at my prep school, Portsmouth Priory. He warned me not be distracted from my basic faith in God by quibbling with individual church beliefs which I found contradicted reason. It took me a long time to understand what he was saying and follow that counsel. I’ve come to see, as Levin expresses in Anna Karenina, that there is “not a single belief of the Church that annihilated the main thing—faith in God, in good, as the sole purpose of man. In place of each of the Church’s tenets, there could be put the belief in serving the good instead of one’s needs. Each of them…was indispensable for the accomplishment of that chief miracle, constantly manifested on Earth, which consists in its being possible for each person, along with millions of the most diverse people, to understand one and the same thing with certainty and to compose that life of the soul which alone makes life worth living, and alone is what we value.”
No comments:
Post a Comment