I have a question. To be and believe as a Catholic one must be able to say the following statement and believe it with the grace of light and faith.
I believe in One God, the Father the Almighty…
I’m not positive what your question is, but I think you’re asking if I can honestly recite the creeds. I think I can. But, I’m going to sort that out during RCIA.
Antheism says that there is no God. Angnosticism says there may be a God but we don’t know who He is.
Atheism means “I don’t believe in god.” It may or may not mean, “There is no god.” Agnosticism says “we* can not *know.” But there’s a lot of flexibility in those terms, and they are used even more flexibly. I’m of the sort that “I don’t believe in god,” but that applies to a God which is not the God spoken of in the Catechism! Thus, My atheism, perhaps, stops where the Catholic God begins. My atheism is built around the evangelical christian god, as well as the gods of Olympus and the Roman Pantheon and the like.
Catholicism is very certain who that God is and knows who that God is by that God revealing Himself through Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.
Certain that there is a God, yes. I’ve never known of the Catholic God. Evangelicals have a god that I deny. Catholics that I’ve know have never presented their God to me–I had to stumble upon that God almost by accident in my mid-30s? It will take me some time to develop any level of certainty, and that certainty will inevitably, I think, always be tainted by some level of doubt.
But, how well does Catholicism know that God? Take the Catechism:
Paragraph 40: “Since our knowledge of God is limited, our language about him is equally so. We can name God only by taking creatures as our starting point, and in accordance with our limited human ways of knowing and thinking.”
Paragraph 42: “We must…continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, imagebound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God–‘the inexpressible, in comprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable’–with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God.”
Paragraph 43: “…we must recall that ‘between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude’; and that 'concerning God, we cannot grasp what he is, but only what he is not, and how other beings stand in relation to him.”
Thomas Merton, in
New Seeds of Doubt, speaking about contemplation:
p. 14-15: "Contemplation is no pain-killer. What a holocaust takes place in this steady burning to ashes of old worn-out words, cliches, slogans, rationalizations! The worst of it is that even apparently *holy *conceptions are consumed along with all the rest. It is a terrible breaking and burning of idols, a purification of the sanctuary, so that no graven thing may occupy the place that God has commanded to be left empty: the center, the existential alter which simply ‘is.’
“In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he
no longer knows what God is. He may or may not mercifully realize that…this is a great gain, because ‘God is not a
what,’ not a ‘thing.’…It sees that there is no ‘what’ that can be called God. There is ‘no such thing’ as God because God is neither a ‘what’ nor a ‘thing’ but a pure ‘
Who.’”
I think the Church recognizes well that it does not know that God well. This is essential for me in my quest. God is not an old man in the sky. He does not shape the world with human hands, though we may think of it in that way because we “take creatures as our starting point.” Michelangelo’s image of God in the Sistine Chapel is not God, nor a true image of God, but a way of thinking about God, restricted by the fact that we are mere humans. I think Catholicism understands that. That’s my point in my previous post.
I like how you are saying that you believe in Love and Truth. For God is Love and God is Truth. You are off to a good start.
I will be keeping you in my prayers as you go through RCIA class.
I appreciate it. I’ll need it!
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