Faith in what?

[doubting_thomas]

I became a practicing Catholic in college after years of being part of a nominal Catholic family. Years later, I am now having doubts about any and all organized religion. I am having a very difficult time reconcilling why God would place in the hands of people the monumental task of transmitting the truth. Why Abraham, Moses, the propets? Were they immune to imaginative reality? Religion grasps at possibilities and holds onto them as truth. I “believe” that it is obvious there is created order which points to divinity. I don’t see where or why God would use humans to diseminate and transmit truths generation after generation instead of making his truth apparent to all generations prior and future in the same consistant and complete way. I have been listening to Fulton Sheen and Hahn and reading for years, but have recently posed this question to myself and am unable to answer it. Please help, I don’t want to leave the church, and I don’t want to tell my family. I have been evangelizing and teaching in the church for years now and would be very sad if I asked a question the Church could truly not answer. I won’t accept, the response… because we (humans, Christians, Jews, Mormons, whatever) are special, that won’t cut it anymore.

 

[Fr.Vincent_Serpa]

Dear Doubting,

I was just about to answer your question on the EWTN website when I noticed your question here. You consider us believers as special to be unacceptable, yet you aren’t you singling out yourself as special in your attempt to step out of the human situation and question God’s motives.

You ask why God would use humans to disseminate and transmit truths to each generation instead of making His truth apparent in a more consistent and complete way. Well while we’re at it, why would God create humans in the first place? Why not nothing?

All we have of ourselves are human tools to understand what is infinite and they are woefully inadequate. Certainly, if we were in charge, we would do a lot of things differently than God does. Who of us if we were God would deal with sin in the world by becoming one of our own creatures and allowing ourselves to be tortured and put to death? Who of us would even think of demonstrating such love? No one of us would—because our love and everything else about us is finite. Our notion of divinity is completely colored by the limited human framework that we inevitably project on divinity whenever we try to get a handle on it. We have never had an experience of anything that is not limited----with one exception: His love for us as expressed in His passion and death. That has to be our starting point—and it leaves us where it left the original doubting Thomas: on our knees.

Fr. Vincent Serpa, O.P.