On Faith asks: What passage or verse in scripture or literature best defines your own faith or beliefs? Why?
“Though as adults we want answers, we will sometimes settle for poetry.” –Kathleen Norris
As a student of religion and an aspiring writer, Norris’ words are a welcome expression of my own faith.
Her short statement, found within her bestselling book The Cloister Walk, is both pragmatic and pacifying. It acknowledges the soul’s longing for certainty, but finds comfort in metaphor. Has insecurity ever been so satisfying?
Today, I found poetry in liturgy. I attended mass this morning at my father’s childhood parish and sat in same pews where I wept at my great grandmother’s wake. The church was filled with babies and teenagers, adult couples and a large group from a nursing home. My grandmother and I, a proud and occasionally pious pair, added to the spectrum.
When, at the prayers of the faithful, we prayed for the members of our military serving far from home, my grandmother looked up at me and squeezed my hand. There is a rhythm to life here, in this church, I thought. There is beauty. There is poetry.
At mass we sang “Here I am, Lord.” I cannot make it through that song without having my throat close up, my nose start to burn, and tears glaze my eyeballs. I wanted to sing! I was too moved to sing. Are there more vulnerable words than “Here I am”?
I believe that religion moves us closer to the divine. But I believe in “a God above God” –that beyond the God that our religions idolize, there exists a God that is. In that way, I see my religion as poetry, as an acceptable way. There is more than simple religion, yes, but this beautiful expression is holy, too.
Isn’t poetry what we are doing at On Faith? Those readers and writers among us use words to express the ineffable, hash out ancient and modern ideas, and share intimate experiences and deep, dogged desires. I find it to be a thrilling, crucial human adventure.
So to all these poets, I offer Rumi:
We search this world for the great untying
of what was wed to us at birth
and gets undone at dying.We sleep beside a stream, thirsty.
Cursed and unlucky his whole life,
an old man finishes up in a niche
of a ruin, inches from the treasure.
We sleep beside a stream, thirsty.
Comments (1)
Campus Catholic,
A beautiful piece. Religion is an inspiring adventure. The Catholic religion, however, makes a definitive, central, and unavoidable claim to be more than a human adventure: it claims also to be THE God-given path to encounter the same God. That is the central claim of the Catholic religion, more central than even its claims about Jesus, which become forceful only because of the witness of their source.
None of this is to say that other religions are entirely ineffectual. Not at all. In fact, many of them have glimpsed a great many truths.
Rather, the Catholic claim is precisely that the "God" striven after by all the other religions, but captured definitively by none, has revealed himself in his true nature (if not entirely) through the prophets and in the person of Jesus Christ, and that revelation has been preserved and transmitted across the generations intact by the Catholic Church.
People who disagree on this point, this central and fundamental point, might indeed enjoy Catholic liturgy, pore over the Scriptures she has preserved, agree with many or all of her moral stands; but they miss the point. Despite all her admitted similarities to other religions, the Catholic Church claims that her faith is not just like all the others, but is given directly by God, and that where other religions disagree, they are wrong.
It might be a false claim; it is certainly a very chauvinistic one (if it is false). But it is the claim that must be contended with. To pretend that it is not there, and that the Catholic faith arises from yearnings of the human heart and speculations of the human mind as the faiths of other religions do - it just misses the point.
Posted August 20, 2007 12:59 PM
Posted on August 20, 2007 12:59