Easy enough:
1.His existence.
2.Our immortality.
3.Why someone who loves us stays silent or only communicates in the most oblique and ambiguous ways.
4.Why someone who loves us would tell us to come to him with our problems and concerns and suggest that we need to make our own free choices instead of leaning on him to help.
5.2-4 depend on 1, of course, and at least some understanding of his nature.
Without 1, and some awareness of his nature, trusting answers will come is moot.
Yes, I am seeking with everything I’ve got (which is apparently not enough). Being on this forum. In my work. In my studies. In prayer. In dialogue with priests and theologians. If I could afford to go back to school in theology, I would be seeking there too!
I’m open, too. A dancing sun. A stroke of lightning (I’d gladly take one to know he was listening). Aquinas’ mystic sleep with visitation by angels. A sudden offer of a job with the church that I didn’t apply for. I’m pretty flexible. Silence, however? That’s not evidence of anything.
I can see you’re struggling with this in an earnest and genuine way – not simply as an intellectual question, but as one that has deep emotional and personal implications.
You’re also in good company – Mother Theresa, for example, often doubted the existence of God (I believe she said that she couldn’t always feel God, that she often felt “nothing”).
There was a moment during which Jesus couldn’t feel God on the cross, it would seem. At his darkest hour, he cried out, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
It’s obvious you come from a Catholic background, so I would – as an informed non-Catholic – point out that what we experience as the “silence of God” is sometimes posited to be a result of the sin of Adam. In other words, we are alienated from God – like that little girl in Poltergeist (to give a homely example) who is separated from her parents, lost in another dimension. The Gnostic metaphor of being in darkness - or in a state of being asleep – also seems appropriate. We are lost and are trying to find our way back into the light, and it would seem that only our own efforts will get us there (we do not know why this is so, but free will appears to be important, and it
is true that lessons are only truly ours, if we learn them for ourselves, even if we have teachers). We are being called into the light, but cannot well hear where the voice is coming from, nor in what direction it’s coming from. The voice is distorted by the time it reaches us, and it comes to sound garbled, or just like white noise. We think we hear it, but we’re not sure.
Non-Catholic theists have put forth similar ideas of life on this earth being a kind of “dusting”, or a kind of waking sleep. For example, some “alternative spiritualities” refer to what they call the “blindness of the physical plane.” The Hindus talk about Maya, the goddess of illusion. In Christian terms, this seems closer to Gnosticism, but I think there is a semblance of this metaphor in traditional Christianity, as well (“I once was lost, but now I’m found; was blind, but now I see”).
Some of these alternative spiritualities posit that this “sleep” of life may be more positive –
that there may be some value in “dreaming the dream” of life, and not waking up prematurely or even being aware that one is dreaming. They use the metaphor of a nightly dream – if you are
too aware that you are dreaming (and that the illusion isn’t real) then you can deprive yourself of the lessons of that “illusion.” It is similar with works of art – if you remind yourself constantly that, “this is not Gandhi, this is an actor named Ben Kingsley; and this is a Hollywood movie; and all those people are just pretending” then you can rob yourself of insights that immersing yourself in the movie – not only suspending belief, but forgetting that you are watching a movie – can give you. You turn the lights
off, the better to immerse yourself in the experience.
I think part of your own struggle seems to be the idea that God doesn’t communicate with us directly
yet demands so much of us. I personally – as a non-Christian in orientation – am not so sure that’s the case. I think that there is much more leeway afforded, than is generally believed; and that the difference between a “believer” and a “non-believer” may be all but moot, in the grand scheme of things. I personally suspect that the differences between a theist and an atheist doesn’t necessary make a whole lot of difference, in terms of the way in which a life will be “judged.” What seems important is not one’s relation to – or conception of – transcendence, but rather one’s experience of immanence. The Buddha certain thought so (he taught an ethic, but very little metaphysics).
This is analogous to the question posed in another thread, “what if doctrinal differences do not matter?” As a non-Christian, obviously, I take a particularly liberal view of that question
There are even times when I consider that the point may not be to awaken from the dream at all, but to
experience the dream to the fullest. That the
dream itself has all of the lessons we need to learn (as when Voltaire’s Candide says, “we must cultivate our garden”). Learning
how to live, and how to live with each other. How to play together in the sandbox
