Why does our generation struggle with faith?
Ron Rolheiser, OMI
FAITH AND A TIME OF AGNOSTICISM
Fewer people today have faith in the old way, the way our ancestors did. Fear, among other things, made them believe in God. They feared many things: plagues that could come at a whim and wipe out whole populations, illnesses for which there was no cure, natural disasters against which there was no defense, hunger as an ever-present threat, and even the normal process of childbirth as potentially ending a woman’s life. Many things were to be feared. This kind of vulnerability helps induce faith.
More positively, though, this vulnerability brought with it the capacity to be astonished. Before a universe that holds so many mysteries – thunder, lightning, the stars, the changing seasons, the process of conception, and the simple inexplicable fact that the sun rises and sets every day – there is cause for healthy astonishment, for holy fear, and there is the constant reminder of our littleness and the fact that life cannot be taken for granted.
Today, of course, we have few of these fears. We have faith in medicine, rationality, science, and in what we, humanity, can do for ourselves.
Fear is not a good motive for religion, but rather the antithesis of true religion (whose task it is to cast out fear). Mature faith must take its roots in love and gratitude, not fear. Thus, freedom from false fear holds a rich potential for a more mature faith and religion.
We need God as much as did our ancestors. We just don’t know it as clearly. Nothing has changed. We still stand in radical insecurity before energies and powers beyond us, storms of the heart, no less frightening than the storms of nature. We’re no less helpless, vulnerable, mortal, or fearful than the people of old and need God as much as they did, only for different reasons.