I am a stumbling, doubting, failing, fearful Christian, so I fit right in with the rest of them. I was raised by atheists who, for complicated reasons, sent me to a Catholic school when I was 11, assuming that I was too smart to believe any of the abracadabra and would just focus on the classes.
But they had some other tricks up their sleeves, those Catholics. The first was prayer, which just about knocked me flat the first time I saw its practical application. One of the nuns came to talk with us about some dire issue from the real world; maybe it was Vietnam, maybe it was someone from the parish who was very ill—I don't remember. She summed up the situation, and I sat there wondering what the action plan was, because that was the world I inhabited. And then she said that what we were going to do was pray about it. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Something terrible was happening and it would somehow improve if a classroom full of sixth graders closed their eyes and mumbled?
I lived in Berkeley, a radical place, and my parents were hard-core lefties (grape boycotters, war protesters, supporters of student strikes, occasional tear-gas-ees), so I had pretty much heard it all in my house, including a scheme to bring down Richard Nixon that was so improbable it might have worked. But this was the most radical thing I'd ever encountered. This was levitating-the-Pentagon type stuff. Why not give it a try?
Read Full Article »