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| April
1999 Volume I, Number 5 |
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Faith
and Doubt at 40 Below Easter Morning Excerpt
from After the Absolute
How Not to Meditate Shots
of Changing Faith From
the Editor To
the Editor |
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 Shots of Changing Faith(top) James Todd James Todd is a member of the Duke SKS At age sixteen when I concluded that Karl Marx was right, "religion is the opiate of the people," I never thought that my search for truth would turn out to be an exercise in faith. As a sophomore at Concord Academy, I did my ethics class final project on, "the dangers of faith." In my paper I made such sweeping points as: God does not exist, church is a waste of time, and religion obscures the truth. When I was done with my presentation, I had successfully alienated myself from most of the rest of the class, most of whom held religious beliefs. Even Asher Millan, the one other avowed atheist in the class told me, "After your presentation, I don't think I want to be an atheist anymore." My teacher, Mike Pardee, returned my "Dangers of Faith" paper with the usual smear of red penned comments and corrections, one of which has remained with me ever since: "It seems that your faith lies in doubt." In hind sight, I can see that Mike Pardee was right: my faith was in my ability to doubt, or more precisely in my ability to explain anything intellectually. I had complete faith in my burgeoning power to reason, attested to by the A's I received in Calculus and AP Chemistry. I stood firmly by my intellectual, atheistic convictions until I came across something that my intellect could not conquer: Nancy Haas. Laying on the couch in Nancy's basement under a fuzzy, wool blanket and watching David Letterman on Saturday night was simply more real than any paper I had written or any argument I had made and much more tangible than the convincing but airy essays I had read in the American Atheist Magazine. In the face of an ocean of new, terrifying, and exhilarating, emotions brought on by this relationship, my intellect was a sinking ship which I desperately tried to repair in vain as it was swallowed up by waves of feeling. Even though it may not be chronicled in any religious study, I experienced a conversion: the capacity of my intellect became finite, and this strange new force called love took its place in my life. Although I didn't see it at the time, this was my first lesson in faith. Previously I believed that faith was a strained emotion that people cooked up to please their parents or avoid their problems. I later discovered that faith is what we rest our lives on. By definition we have faith in those things we base our lives on regardless of whether these things are stated explicitly or implied. Whether I acknowledged it or not, at age seventeen my faith was in financial security, a stable family, citizenship in the most powerful country in the world, a network of friends, social prestige, a healthy body, and the power of my new found compassion. Two years later at 9:46 am, I was getting off the #49 Washington St. bus at the City Hospital stop for the one-hundred-thirteenth time and stepping out onto the snowy streets of Boston to face the cold, crisp air of New England winter. My eclectic teammates filed off the bus behind me in their bright red City Year jackets and standard issue Timberland khakis. I was six months into City Year, the nine-month long community service program I signed on for after leaving high school. The sense of compassion I had gained from my relationship with Nancy had merged with the liberal sentiment of Concord Academy to produce in me a healthy, young idealism that lead me to commit the prep school sin of deferring college in order to work in inner-city Boston to help the "less-privileged" and meet people from diverse backgrounds. Now that I was working side-by-side with Jaime Gonzalez, who was more afraid of raccoons than pistols, doing the type of community service work that was revered at Concord Academy, I was sick of Jaime and the dreary City Hospital. I was sick of reviewing vaccination records in a tiny room with no windows in the basement of Boston City Hospital alongside my all-too familiar teammates. The possibility that some child in a poor neighborhood might be unvaccinated seemed remote and unimportant in the face of my growing fatigue and personal discontent. At age nineteen my faith was simultaneously being made conscious and being taken away. While I poured over hospital records, painted a homeless shelter, and poured concrete in a church basement, no one around me was impressed that I could integrate complex functions, nor did they care that, as one of the captains of the Concord Academy varsity soccer team, I used to make announcements at school assemblies about upcoming games. Once again my ship was sinking and my faith was changing; this time my faith in the goodness of humans to alleviate our collective suffering was falling into the ocean of an apparently impersonal, cruel, and overwhelmingly apathetic world. And once again the tip of an island emerged, this time in the form of religious and philosophical inquiry. My latent interest in philosophy had resurfaced with a new openness to push beyond the bounds of logic and reason. If I had to give my high school ethics program presentation again I would still call it the "Dangers of Faith," except this time I would say, "The biggest danger of faith is that your faith will inevitably be jarringly taken away from you, leaving you simultaneously terrified and amazed. This is not a danger that can be avoided because you have to have faith in something—even if your faith is in doubt." |
