Christianity: "Is this stuff real?"

"This stuff is for real." It was both statement and question. We were talking about God, about Christ and Christianity, about salvation, about religion - we never specified exactly what. "This stuff is for real, isn't it, Jim?" And with deep earnestness, in this profound moment when words failed us both, all I could say was, "Yeah. It is." "I feel it.... I really do," he hurried on. "I mean I'm not going to cry or anything..." He laughed uneasily. I smiled. He paused and then said, "...or maybe I will... It's real though, ain't it."

There is a temptation, in our walk of faith in Christ, to make things easy to believe. It is easier to believe that the Virgin Birth didn't really mean a literal virgin. It is easier to believe that the afterlife doesn't entail receiving new flesh and blood bodies - that we will just float about in spirit or will be absorbed as life energy back into the cosmos. It's easier to believe Heaven (or Hell) isn't a real place, just metaphors. It's easier to believe that Baptism or the Eucharist are just symbols, ceremony, and ritual, not the Real Presence of Christ in bread and wine or the Waters of Regeneration that birth us into a new eternal reality. It's easy to believe Jesus is never coming back. After all, it's preposterous to believe, otherwise, right?

The irony here is that in our troubled lives we want God to give us something real and true but something greater and more expansive than our problems or our reality or our circumstances. And when we receive it, we are immediately tempted to disbelieve it because it is exactly what we asked for - something beyond our reality! God, what you give us - miracles, mysticism, sacraments, theology, spiritual guidance - it's just too unrealistic! It doesn't fit inside my experience!
 
That's the problem with an easily accepted faith: it lacks reality beyond our own definitions. An easy faith has to obey our rules. We define those boundaries, what is and isn't possible. And so an easy faith has no power to release us from what we can't figure out ourselves. It may be a faith that is readily acceptable. It certainly makes more reasonable sense! It sounds more realistic and plausible. But when our reality needs a miracle because that's all that could possibly see us through the mess we're in, an easy "realistic" faith has nothing to offer but impossibilities. "Miracles don't happen," it tells us. "Prayer is about changing you; (God isn't really listening to or answering your prayers)." "Religion is all about teaching morals, ethics, and a healthy perspective - living a good life. (If you're in trouble, you deserve it because you broke the rules.)" Easy faith offers us ease, but it takes away all hope of any significant salvation.     

"This stuff is for real, isn't it, Jim?" Yeah. It's real. It's more real than we've ever experienced 'real' to be.


- Fr. James+