I tried to remember the exact wording to the answers to all those questions in my Baltimore Catechism, I really did.   We were expected to have all our answers memorized in order to receive our First Holy Communion.  When it came right down to it, I chose to answer the questions in my own words when it was my time to be quizzed by our parish priest.  He frowned and his fountain pen hovered over my name; he was ready to cross me off his list.

“She’s not ready,” the priest told my mother and the Josephite nun who happened to be my catechism teacher.  My mother was deeply embarrassed for me and for herself.  She had been the one who sat with me after dinner every night, going over and over the required questions and their exact answers in preparation for this moment.  She could have told the priest that I really did know the answers, that we had studied faithfully each night, that I tended to answer with my own words, but she couldn’t find her voice.

“Begging your pardon, Father…” began the nun.  She proceeded to speak on my behalf–quite a bold thing for a nun to do in 1956.  Priests always had the last word back then and it was a nun’s duty to obey.  I received my First Holy Communion with all the other squirmy six-year-olds in my class that Spring.  So began my bumpy relationship with a god I wasn’t particularly fond of.

The catechism was eventually put aside, but the questions kept coming.  The answers were elusive and unsatisfying.

If God was All-loving and forgiving, how could he condemn any of His people to eternal separation from Him?  If He had given us free will–the ability to make choices for ourselves–why had religion become so rigid and fearful of change? Why was it so wrong of Eve to want the knowledge of good and evil?  What kind of twisted father allowed his son to be tortured and killed without putting up a fight to save him?  What was it about those core beliefs that allowed people throughout history to persecute, torture, and kill one another?  When people say “God is love,” what does that really mean?

Questions with absolute answers.  The absurdity of it.

Questions with absolute answers keep us compliant and spiritually lazy.  You cannot grab what is unknowable and put it neatly in a box.  If you do, you are cheating yourself out of what is possible.  Our human-ness demands that we wrestle with faith.  The best we can do is stay open and respond with awe to what draws us in.

What do I really believe is true?

The question cannot be easily answered and we may spend years avoiding it, but it’s ready to jump us from behind in sober, unsuspecting moments.  It sits with us in times of torment and suffering and in times of unbearable loveliness, it opens the door a crack, giving us a fleeting glimpse of what is contained within. It urges us to take a hard look at our unfinished-ness and prods us to find where we fit.  Each of us, like the world we live in, is drawn to evolve forward to a point of completion. We live out our days intending to do well, but we waver.  All the while, we are silently called to the sanctity of wholeness.

What do you really believe is true?

The question arises from deep within the human condition.  It percolates within our DNA and hovers over us, riding on the noosphere–the Earth’s mental sheathe—the last of the many stages of our geologic history, as real as the biosphere beneath our feet.  The question is everywhere and it gently insists on being answered.

What do you really believe is true?

Without this self-knowledge, you are an unfinished work of art propped up in the corner of the cosmos, collecting dust.  You don’t have to subscribe to an organized, finite, orthodox point of view.  You have been given a choice in the matter.

We have free will.  It is paramount to being human.  We have the choice to believe and to act upon the choices before us.  In doing so, we are causing change to occur in the world.  We are participating in its evolution, thereby determining what the world will become.

Looking through the fog of reality with eyes and minds blurred by smoke and tears and maybe even blood, we seek the answer.   It is what we are called to do.