When I was fifteen years old in 1960, I read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, and Albert Camus' L'Etranger. Then when I started at Brandeis University in 1963 a few weeks before I turned 18, I continued my exploration of the ideas of Jean Paul Sartre and other existential philosophers in my college courses and personal reading. The existentialists promoted the idea that belief in God and in Christ is a crutch that weaklings use to prop themselves up because they are not brave enough to face the existential dilemma: that life has no meaning. This idea continues to have wide currency 60 years after I discovered it. It is one of the cookie-cutter list of beliefs that almost every college student graduates with, that and the belief that you must have sex before marriage to find out if you are compatible, and many more. But I digress . . .. (This digression on sexual morality will be returned to later.)
Back to the existentialists’ ideas. For the unreligious person, human life on this earth makes no sense except the meaning that one can tentatively cobble together for one's self in face of the indifference of the cosmos. Existentialists admit it is tough living with the conviction that one's existence and that of one's species is just an accident of evolution. But, they say, one must resolutely turn away from the childish notion that humankind was created for a purpose and push on with one's chin up to do what one can bravely do to apply meaning to a meaningless life.
Tellingly, Jean Paul Sartre was a compulsive womanizer, and I believe he convinced his life long partner Simone de Beauvoir to accept that marriage was also an outmoded notion, as was fidelity. Obviously for him, without religion, there was no external or internal reason to value these old-fashioned notions, when they would only restrict his freedom to please himself with the philosopher groupies at the Sorbonne.
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| Sartre and de Beauvoir |
Since I wanted to be considered as a peer of the great intellectuals of my time, I followed these ideas and turned away from my Catholic faith. The lure of being an intellectual and becoming privy to a new knowledge that the common people don't have was the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that was proffered to me as an arrogant young student, and I bit it.
Remember this was 1963. Since then, I tried many of the alternative philosophies that the times had to offer. After I dropped out of Brandeis, I continued to search for truth by seeking out intellectuals and artists, thinking the avant garde had the answers. I was under the illusion that without the moral principles taught by Revelation, learning alone would make people good.
This reminds me of a story I heard during that time about the famous avant garde lesbian couple Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The way I heard the story, when Gertrude was dying. Alice B. Toklas asked her, "Gertrude, Gertrude, what is the answer?" Gertrude answered her, "What is the question?" and then died.
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| Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas |
The Christian Church: A Theological and Historical Sketch by a professor at the diocesan Institute for Leadership in Ministry put forward Paul Tillich's construct that the Church must answer the questions of each age as the method for doing theology. There is a lot that can be said against that concept, but, as is hinted at in the above story, even the avant garde intellectuals don't seem to have either the right answer or even the right question.
If people relying on their own understanding do have questions, they may be the wrong ones. I think about Howland the owl in Pogo comic strip, who said, "I didn't know there was any other question besides 'Who?'"
Here is one of the common objections to Paul Tillich's method of correlation mentioned in the above-mentioned book:
[T]he method distorts the significance of the Christian message by reducing the Christian answer to whatever human experience requires or finds expedient. This weakens divine Transcendence and the divine cutting edge in human life, transforming God into a projection of human needs and desires."
Keeping that fallacious notion that “Christ’s will is as simple to divine as one’s own desires,” in mind, we now return again to my search for the meaning of life. While some around me took drugs because it was the in thing to do, for about a year I sought enlightenment through psychedelics, because people like Aldous Huxley, Carlos Casteneda, and Timothy Leary (who I saw one night at a public lecture in a Harvard classroom, after he had been fired from Harvard, when he was still wearing a suit) told us we could reach previously-unheard of heights of knowledge and lead others to these new heights. I subscribed to the Psychedelic Review. Pursuing better living through chemistry only meant for me that I went on some risky adventures that I'm lucky I survived. I certainly didn't find the answers to the meaning of life that way, although a boyfriend of mine told me that during an acid trip he had met God, and God was Bob Dylan. Obviously, the path to true enlightenment lay elsewhere.
By the time I was 30, I was divorced with two children two and four years old and attending Moorhead State College in Minnesota on the opposite bank of the Red River from Fargo North Dakota, and using government help for child care while I worked on finishing my college degree. One of the things that got me interested in Christianity again was the simple observation that living according to Christian values made economic sense, if you think of your energies and emotions as resources to be spent in building your life.
Intercourse without commitment is a risky business. You open yourself up to a person to whom you are attracted, and by the rules of the game as it was played then and is played now, you must at the same time work hard to avoid giving any impression of being possessive.
What used to be called the marital act was now defined to be without any intrinsic meaning. The real bonding that often takes place even between two people who do not love each other, do not want to love each other, is totally ignored. After taking that risk, and allowing that intimacy without commitment, if you are rejected or even if you break off the "relationship" yourself, you have to take the pain that follows without whimpering. I've heard it admitted that it takes about 6 months or more to recover from a "failed relationship." After you recover (with scars) from the grief (for which society offers no support) you pick yourself up and start again, burned but determined, usually thinking that there is something wrong with you, instead of the obvious fallacy of the basic premise, that asking for commitment is ignoble. This notion hearkens back to one of the basic premises of de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, which has infiltrated society, that marriage is a form of prostitution in which women barter their bodies for a lifelong commitment from men.
In contrast with those who practice the serial promiscuity that was the norm at that time, and who live through cycles of ecstasy followed by death and grieving, people who follow the moral teachings of Christianity, who marry and keep their vows, skip that painful cycle of loving and losing and are able to do other things with their time and emotions, such as build a home and a family and make a contribution to society as a whole. The passion that brings them together and bonds them at the start of their relationship is understood to be a part of the lifelong process of loving, not the goal in itself.
"Aha!" I thought. For these and many other reasons, I realized that the rules that some people rebel against are actually protections laid down by God to keep His beloved children from harm's way. Should I hate the mayor whose employees put up the stop signs for cramping my freedom of expression, when observing the rules of stopping at those signs make traffic flow easier and prevent accidents? Should I hate my loving God whose Church teaches me that sex belongs in marriage and has as an intrinsic purpose the creation of new life? Or should I defy this loving God because modern intellectuals think that the Church is a big meanie trying to steal people's joy? Modern intellectuals in my 75 years on this Earth have believed and taught a lot of hooey. Why should I trust them? Their "truths" are always changing.
I practiced Transcendental Meditation. Explorations into paranormal phenomenen had one salubrious effect. I had to realize that if I admitted that spiritual forces of any kind exist, there was no grounds for denying the reality of the spirit of God.
A long series of similar explorations: a dabble in Zen Buddhism here, six months of Sunday meetings with Unitarians with an empty altar there, a couple of more months at Presbyterian churches, a stint with the Episcopalians at the University of Minnesota. Finally, a Bible study with a daughter of a former mayor of Minneapolis who was active in Campus Crusade for Christ led me to make a commitment to Christ. I received the gift of faith. Or maybe I retrieved it from where I'd thrown it aside when I bit that apple. There was no turning back after that.
After a couple of years soaking up the Bible at an Evangelical Free Church and a charismatic church called "Jesus People Church, " I found my way back to the Catholic Church. I became a relapsed Catholic. And boy was I ever shocked. What had happened to the Church I was returning to? Vatican II and the 60s had happened, that's what.
Fast forward to 2003 when I wrote the first version of this essay. I was enrolled in the bishop of San Jose's Institute for Leadership in Ministry, and I was not expecting this, but the professors were telling me that after Vatican II and the new theological revival, we Catholics now are free to and indeed must make up our own faith. One priest told us, "The Resurrection is the only thing we need to believe by faith." Another teacher suggested that we have to sort out and cling to the beliefs that make sense to us in the context of our current society.
No longer are we enlightened post-Vatican II Catholics in the 21st century expected to live by the morality and doctrines of the past. Now we know better than the great Church fathers like St. Augustine that the teachings of the past two thousand years about the truth of the most of the New Testament have been discovered to be false.
These so-called discoveries were uncovered by a series of brilliant Protestant Bible critics. As soon as the Church allowed its theologians and scholars to embrace the new critical methods, Catholic theologians found out things that the Church has never known before about what Jesus really meant and did.
To people who think this way, the old certainties are dead. We are expected to believe like Alice in Wonderland, several contradictory things at the same time. We are encouraged to agree with the debunkers that, even though our Church's founding documents are culture-bound fictions, but we are also expected to think they are inspired and can guide us in our Christian lives--as long as we don't take any one of their statements or stories as literal fact.
And now we don't have to be passive recipients of doctrines from the magisterium of the Church "hurled at us like rocks," to quote one of the professors dismissal of the notion of a Church that teaches the truth. Solely with a personal relationship with Jesus as our guide, and our self-referential consciences, we are supposed to bravely cobble together a new morality and set of doctrines that “answer the questions of our age.”
Sounds like the spirit of Jean Paul Sartre or maybe Timothy Leary in the clothing of a priest from San Francisco or a professor from Santa Clara University. Been there. Done that. Not going down that primrose path again. The lure of becoming privy to a new knowledge that the common people don't have and disabusing them of their old primitive childlike faith is another fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil being proffered to us all, and we still have a choice not to bite it.
I almost forgot to answer the question posed in the title about what is the question?
What is Truth? is the question. The authentic teachings of the Catholic Church are the answer. Not some cobbled together self-assembled assortment of dogmas we happen to chose to believe in.
Following is my original introductory paragraph to this essay, which I wrote for a class at Bishop now-Emeritus Patrick McGrath's Institute for Leadership in Ministry in the Diocese of San José: "The Catholic Church is the answer to all existential questions. I'll try to illustrate my reasoning behind this statement by telling the story of how I came to believe that the Church had the answers, while addressing some of the points made in the class Basic Topics in Ecclesiology and in The Christian Church: A Theological and Historical Sketch, by Professor Frederick J. Parrella." Roseanne T. Sullivan 03/19/03
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| Frederick Parrella (without the French beret he wore in ILM classes) |
P.S.: When Frederick Parrella taught the "Basic Topics in Ecclesiology," he was moonlighting at the ILM. His day job is a Professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University, so he is not some outlier. He is allowed to form (or reform) the Catholic faith of many SCU students. In 2019, he was interviewed about his course, "The Theology of Marriage." A few snippets from the interview interspersed with my comments follow.
"The longtime Professor of Religious Studies is renowned for teaching 'The Theology of Marriage' since 1983; it fulfills one of three Religious Studies classes every SCU student is required to take before graduation."
He didn't seem to bring in any Catholic readings about the theology of marriage into the course. He gives a book by Jewish Martin Buber and a lot of folksy "wisdom" to these students. If they come to his class seeking Catholic doctrine, it seems they are out of luck.
"Have any of your students met each other in your class and gone on to get married?
"Oh yes, a couple of times, and I’ve been invited to their weddings. Years ago, a former student asked me to marry her, and perform the ceremony. I said, 'I can’t do that.' She said, “Check your email—you’ve just been ordained a Universal Life minister.' I’m marrying a former student next month."
So a theology teacher at a Catholic university was willing to officiate at the marriage of one of his students, while acting as a Universal Life minister with a mail-order ordination, without pointing out that for Catholics, marriage outside the Church is invalid, and seemingly without entertaining the thought that it is inappropriate for him to "marry" anyone.
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