I just finished reading a book that made me madder and madder the further I read. The name of the book is Why I Am Not an Atheist: the Confessions of a Skeptical Believer by Christopher Beha. The reason the book made me so mad was that there was almost no autobiographical information at all throughout, despite the implications of the title.
As a teenager, Beha left the Catholic church in which he had been raised and then eventually embarked on a ten-plus year long study of philosophy. The book turned out to be equivalent to a Master's study of the history of philosophy. Now, I actually like philosophy in small doses, those I can actually digest, but if I had wanted a book on the history of philosophy, that's what I would have ordered. Surprisingly, Beha makes very few-and-far-between comments on the effects of his study on him personally.
He tells us in great depth what the individual philosophers taught, and even the impact of their teachings on the cultures and times in which they lived. But the in-depth explanations of rationalism, phenomenology, and all the other "isms" left me cold. "But what does it mean?" I wondered for hundreds of pages, eventually skipping dozens of those pages looking for something either I could relate to or something that Beha himself related to.
The more I read, the more determined I got to give this book an absolute horrible review on Amazon.com. People deserved to know what they were getting in this book, I thought!
Fortunately, and finally, I perservered to the end of the book, and Amazon automatically closed the manuscript the way they do with Kindle books. But not before I spotted a final chapter of the book, entitled "Postlude," (the opposite of Prelude, obviously). In that final chapter, obviously not important enough for Amazon to consider, Beha finally writes the message I had been ready to read! In that final word, Beha goes on to tell what happened after he sent his finished manuscript off to the editor. He began a new novel about a young lapsed Catholic writer and his fascination with an old girlfriend who has converted to Catholicism. In that book, he put all his quarrels with God, but he also tried to address the fact that he couldn't quite get over him. After he had sent that book off to a publisher, he experienced the most severe bout of depression he had ever faced. He was almost paralyzed with dread and though repeatedly about killing himself. He imagined he would stay in this situation for the rest of his life. He drank too much and cut himself off from people around him. He said he wanted companionship but he also wanted to dedicate himself entirely to the creation of his own meaning. That a life shared with others might play some part in that creation hardly occurred to him.
Eventually he met a young woman who treated his writing as comic novels. He tried to explain that he was writing about "the indictment of the superficiality of contemporary culture." She nodded: "It sounds like comedy," she said. Finally, instead of trying to impress her, he tried to make her laugh and discovered that he was capable of making someone else happy --- and that made him happy at last:
My life was filled t love, but there was something in this love that demanded I make sense of it. The light and the warmth of this sun were baffling. Where were they coming from? What did they mean?
Beha reviewed his 15-year-long study of philosophy and then told himself: Suppose you start with love. That was the one and certain thing in my life. If I took this for true, what else would have to be true with it?
He and his then wife decided to return to church, just for something to do to have a sense of community, time for reflection, and the experience of ritual. And then one Sunday morning, he listened to a reading from John's first letter: Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God,and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God...If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
For the first time, Beha realized that when we love, God becomes a part of us; the warmth and the light he was now experiencing was God!
He also understood for the first time that God exists outside of time and space, beyond the range of human understanding through reason: "God can well be loved, but he cannot be thought" (from the 14th century The Cloud of Unknowing.) He finally understood that life is not a problem to be solved by the intellect, a thing that must be mastered by being understood. And that is why mystics are not trying to convinced anyone of anything! They are simply saying how it is for them. Beha discovered that we have a capacity for knowledge that does not come by sense experience, but that comes through love and the grace of God.
Beha eventually stumbled across the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which begins with these words: Faith is man's response to God,who reveals himsef and gives himself to man, at the same time giving man a superabundant light as he searches for the ultimate meaning of life. Beha commented upon reading those words that they were a "pretty good way to describe what I found when I started going to Mass again."
What I can say is that the path I'd been on all this time had brought me to the place where I was both intellectually and emotionally prepared to listen to the voice within, a voice that I know had been there all along, a voice I had been taking great pains to keep quiet.
And finally, Beha quotes one of his favorite philosophers: "The Christian religion is only for the man who needs infinite help." "Over many years," writes Beha, "I have come to discover that I am that man."
Amen, Mr. Beha, I am actually glad I read your book!
