Many of us could give a number of reasons for our faith.  These range from the deeply personal, like a conversion experience a la Tolstoy in William James, to the logical approach Sheldon Vanauken describes in A Severe Mercy where he assents rationally to Christian doctrine without any actual feeling of faith, without making the "leap of faith" that Kierkegaard describes.  I remember once defending Catholicism to a skeptical atheist on the grounds of its survival in the face of nearly impossible odds.  "Think of it," I'd urged as I paraphrased Pentecost, "11 uneducated blue-collar laborers running around claiming they'd found God!  Who would have listened?" without - I argued - the impetus of grace.

These reasons are all very well and good.  Today it is not-quite Christmas, and so I think it is appropriate to share some of the recent feelings I've had towards Christ.

In Brideshead Revisited, the following dialogue caught my attention:
“Is it [Catholicism] nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.”
"But, my dear Sebastian, you can't seriously believe it all."
"Can't I?"
"I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass."
"Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea."
"But you can't believe things because they're a lovely idea."
"But I do. That's how I believe."

It is a lovely idea, indeed, to arrange a manger scene and show kings and mighty spirits bowing to the innocence of a baby.  A lovely idea, too, that we selfish small-souled people could turn our right cheek to someone who had struck our left.  That we could bless - or even be - the meek, the humble peace-makers.  That we would place others before ourselves; love our enemies; give our cloak to the one who had asked for our shirt; and cease to be Scrooges, even briefly.

How often do we do these things?

Not very, perhaps, and with the feast of Christmas arriving tomorrow it's a timely moment to re-read the Sermon on the Mount, arguably the most beautiful and utopian ideal for humanity that has ever been envisioned.  As Chesterton said, "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried."  This leads me, then, to a short passage from The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis that has somewhat defined my faith of late.  It is Puddleglum addressing the evil queen as she tries to convince the protagonists that no "over-world" exists, but only her own dark, underground kingdom.  Aslan is the Christ-figure in the books:

"One word, Ma’am . . .One word.  All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder.  I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst of things and then put the best face I can on it.  So I won’t deny any of what you said.  But there’s one thing more to be said, even so.  Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things–trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself.  Suppose we have.  Then all I can say is, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.  Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world.  Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it.  We’re just four babies making up a game, if you’re right.  But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.  That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world.  I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it.  I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can, even if there isn’t any Narnia.  So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland.  Not that our lives will be very long, I should think, but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say."

And so goes our faith to an extent.  It is a lovely, beautiful, often-untried idea.  It seems so improbable, so impractical, so old in the midst of modernity.  But that Sermon on the Mount, and the personality and vision of Christ expressed in the Gospels, remain among the most objectively beautiful passages ever written.  Remain among the most compelling worldviews ever made.  And - with a nod to Pascal and his wager - I am going to live as much like a Christian as I can, even if there isn't any Christ or Heaven or Hell (although I believe that there is).  It's not a question, sometimes, of the truth of my faith or of my feeling secure in it.  It is a question of exquisite beauty, and this our faith possesses abundantly.

Merry Christmas and God bless us, everyone!

-LC

I am currently reading a book called Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality by the religion correspondent for NPR, Barbara Bradley Hagerty. It's pretty interesting, almost like a modern update to William James now that a hundred years of science have passed. (And, in fact, the author explicitly acknowledges James as her forerunner.) She looks at all sorts of studies that have been done on the border of science and spirituality: for instance, what do brain scanners tell us about the meditation of Buddhist monks and Carmelite nuns, what do psychedelic drugs really do to your brain and how is it similar to mystical experience, can people be healed from sickness simply by praying, etc.

I am not yet finished with the book, but it seems that in the last analysis time and time again, just like with William James, science can give no real answer as to whether mystical experience or prayer or God are real or just a delusion. For instance, when someone takes LSD and says they had a mystical experience of God, who is to say whether or not it was a "real" mystical experience? Yes, it was caused by certain chemicals in the brain, but the same seems to be true about mystical experiences brought on by prayer, and indeed about all mental phenomena. As we know from Kant, we can't say definitively that a mystical experience was "real," because that implies that we somehow know the true nature of supernatural reality, the noumena of the divine, so that we can compare it to the LSD experience and say "That's not it."

Anyway, the problem with reading a book like this is it can make it very easy to view everything reductionistically. If you can point to chemicals in the brain that accompany certain spiritual experience, you can show that it all proceeds according to physical laws, and thus one might conclude that there is no such thing as spirit, only matter. This is the real question of this post: is it possible for spirituality to coexist with psychology and neuroscience, or do the latter rule out the reality of the former?

This idea came to me while I was praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament today at the National Basilica (yeah, I'm so holy): The Eucharist may provide the key to understanding how psychology can coexist with spirituality. We tend to think that something is either matter or spirit—but why not both? The Eucharist is said to be something that is both divine and material—the union of physical and spiritual. "And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us." Why might our minds/bodies not be the same way? I.e., both soul and body at the same time. (This can apply to all else in the world, too—all matter can be conceived as the stuff of God, in a way.) The only difference here is that with God, the Word is becoming flesh—it is an incarnation—a reaching down—whereas for us and our souls, it is a groping upward—a divinization—the flesh becoming Word, if you will. This makes me think of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, on "the teacher" and "the learner." In us, especially within our brains, the matter of the universe is striving to become spirit. As Carl Sagan once said, "We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." This also reminds me of the part in Paradise Lost when one of the angels is telling Adam how spiritual things grow out of the baser matter of the earth, like a plant rising from the dirt into a stalk and leaves and then flowering and bearing fruit, and how mankind might one day grow into a more clarified, etherized existence, like that of the angels.

-JMK