MetaCatholic

Duane Smith has a provocative post on belief and lack of belief, which is, I think, in danger of comparing apples to elephants. It’s worth reading, and, unlike his posts on Ugaritic vets, who always seem to be taking the piss out of their horses, very comprehensible. He lumps together what I see as three separate groupings, linking them by the mismatch between external speech about faith and actual interior experience of it.

• The first group is instanced by the story of a retired minister he knows, who ceased to believe what he was paid to preach, but felt compelled to continue acting as though he believed inn order to support his family. It’s not clear to me from what Duane says whether this entailed an complete or partial loss of belief, or indeed whether the conceptual framework within which this minister thought was able to make room for doubt and absence. I am sure (as I think Duane is) that this minister is far from unique. A clergy chapter of Agnostics Anonymous might help create the kind of safe space for people in situations like this to find support in dealing more constructively with such hard situations.
• The second group is instanced by Mother Teresa. The story of her spiritual life as evidenced by her letters to her confessors led to quite a stir. Unlike Duane’s clergy acquaintance, she had both a context and a tradition which, rightly or wrongly, could allow her to conceive of her experience spiritually, and more importantly, in frank discussion of it with her confessors. Effectively she conceives of her faith as one held in the teeth of God’s absence, not his non-existence. Duane of course would see this as a delusion, similar to the third category of person. (I’ll come back to that at the end.)
• The third category is an extraordinary story of an Indian “tantrik” who seems seriously deluded about his own power, never mind his conception of the universe. Evidence simply has no effect on the delusion, although it seems remarkably obvious to everyone else. (I’m assuming the story is fairly reported, but I’m unsure how representative of the Hindu tradition — that did after all give the world Gandhi — this man is.)

Now, it is entirely possible that people of faith are all as deluded as this Indian tantrik. But I would (obviously — being deluded myself) suggest not. The delusions portrayed here are about controlling the world, and trying to make it be, or appear to be, another kind of thing than it is. Faith and theology, however, are about trying to make sense of the world as it is, and discerning how to live in it wisely. That is the difference between Mother Teresa’s dealing with her depressive sense of a lack of God in the world, and the other cases. In her case there is a searing honesty that discards illusions about how God is meant to behave, and what the world is meant to be like. Her language about God’s absence becomes tied up in the motivations that drive her to care for the most abandoned people in the world, not as a superior, but as a servant who also knows abandonment, and faces squarely some of the worst the world has on offer. As some bloke said “by their fruits you shall know them”.