Faith Hope and Love

Which reminds me of a Meatloaf classic: "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad"

Maybe one and a half on a bad day. Can you guess which one I'm missing?

I stumbled across my wife's blog about Catholicism today. My first reaction was "Oh wow, she's really into this stuff" followed by "Where's she getting all this extra time to run TWO blogs?" Then I noticed she hadn't posted anything on the Catholic blog between March and a few days ago.

I have a standard remark about my wife's conversion to Catholicism. "I spend all my adolescent years trying to get away from Catholic women, and what happens? My wife converts."

But seriously folks...

Something she wrote here made me think about responding on her blog, but since it would clash with the curtains over there I thought I'd just write it on my own blog.

She writes:
I am, however, offended deeply at the notion that God gave me depression to teach me these lessons. I can’t bear to hear people say that God gave a child cancer for the purpose of building character or correcting a fault. The verse is “God turns all things to good,” not “God does all things for good.” This may seem like a minor adjustment to the notion of how God works in the world, but it is a crucial one.

For me, the best thing about abandoning my faith in the supernatural is being set free from questions like these. Because I no longer worry about why God lets one baby die from malaria and another live, or how that might be turned to good, or that maybe S/He could have chosen a kinder lesson for the moral improvement of the parents or whatever. Things happen and I don't have to try to make sense of a supreme being who lets bad things happen to good people, or good things happen to bad people, or lets anything happen, really.

I'm not trying to dispute anything my wife describes in her post. In fact, I could really relate to her description of giving things over to God via accepting them into her heart, or however she eloquently phrased it. I feel the same kind of peace when I accept reality for what it is instead of trying either to push it away from me or to consider myself as separate from it in the first place. I think we work through a lot of things in similar ways, but I don't see any "God" in any of it, and she does.

No, the thing that struck me was just a profound sense of relief. These theodicean sort of questions really used to bug me. I can't really claim to be totally free, but thank God I'm free from this!

The worst thing about deciding I'm done with faith is the gulf it creates between me and the missus, and the difficulty it poses in raising our kids. But hey, if James Carville and Darth Matalin can get over their differences, what's a little religious disagreement between friends?