As with anything deeply personal, it is difficult to explain my theological journey in a short post. Nevertheless, I will attempt to summarize my path as best I can. After all, I think general overviews are helpful at the beginning of any complex presentation, and this will serve as a kind of preamble to the rest of my blog posts, since I will likely go into more detail about the most important points in future articles.
I do not recall a time when I was not deeply religious. In fact, my older sister once recounted a story about me that predates my own memories, in which I expressed some form of religious sensibility. I attribute this to two main sources, each traceable back to the source of all things, God Himself: 1) the grace of baptism and 2) the fertile spiritual soil provided by the example and prayer of my beloved mother and father.
Skeptics reading this would likely pause here with triumphant sneers on their faces thinking, "Ah ha! Of course! Another Cradle Catholic merely mimicking the beliefs indoctrinated into him by his parents." To such a remark, I would first retort: "and do you think the indoctrination of any of your actual or potential children in the ways of your skepticism is any more noble, acceptable, or excusable?" After all, we tend to scoff at others' process of instilling their beliefs in their children as pathological indoctrination, whereas we pardon our own process by claiming that it is free from such foolish bias and social conditioning, because somehow we are better than everyone else.
That is not the case here. Did I continue in the path of my parents? Yes. To oversimplify, I consider myself an amalgam of my father's head and my mother's heart (though, in truth, both have influenced my mind and my heart). For my father's part, he instilled in me the one primary virtue of any honest thinking person: seek the truth above all else. In short, I was challenged with the task of perpetually asking myself--and I challenge you to ask yourself--the following question: "if I am wrong, do I want to know?" The only intellectually honest answer would be yes. The most guttural emotional response (if we are first intellectually honest) is usually no. That challenge stuck with me.
That challenge was also rooted in my father's own theological journey. As a MENSA member with an IQ in the top 0.5% of the human population, he prided himself in his youth on his surpassing intellect. With this highly capable brain, he once took it upon himself to disprove the Catholic faith. But, being intellectually honest and thus allergic to straw man fallacies, he also committed himself to subjecting himself to any answers the Catholic Church might have against his objections. One after one, his objections were met with convincing counter-arguments. After a long period of ridiculing the Church and attempting--as his main objective--the justification of casting her teachings aside, he had to admit defeat. But this defeat was truly a win. It was a win, because even in trying to prove the Catholic Church wrong, he did so with a commitment to seeking the truth and desiring to know if he, himself, was the one who was wrong, and he found the answer: he was wrong. This admission is what enabled him to be right. He won by losing (see MT 16:25, LK 17:33).
It is for this reason that I can say to the skeptic: yes, I followed my father's path, but his path started the same as yours: skepticism. Yet, he was an honest skeptic open to rebuttal, a much more noble form than the typical, arrogant laziness exemplified by most skeptics.
For this reason, I can say without shame that I did indeed learn from and treasure those many long conversations about deep philosophical and theological topics that I had the privilege of having with my father. Added to this were long nights of deep prayer on Holy Thursday until Good Friday that were a kind of tradition for us in my youth, often just he and I together for six or nine hours of prayer, scripture study, and religious movies. Those were some of the best nights of my life.
Prayer is not a theme to be overlooked here. As a family, we used to pray a decade of the rosary every night along with the Sacred Heart Prayer, the Prayer to St. Michael, along with some others. On First Saturdays, we went to Confession and Mass. In honor of the three hours of our Lord on the Cross, on Good Fridays, Noon to 3 pm were set aside as sacred for quiet prayer, scripture reading, and reflection. My mother was also often found to be at prayer, and she especially loved the rosary. From these examples, I began my own prayer life while in 2nd grade, praying one decade of the rosary each day. This continued for many years. Even at my birthday slumber party while in 5th grade, I snuck away from my friends who were camped out in the living room, went to my room, knelt before a picture of Jesus (I can still vision it clearly), and prayed before going back downstairs to sleep. I would bring a rosary with me to school, praying it on the return ride home. In 6th grade, having discovered EWTN, I switched to watching/praying along with the International Rosary on television shortly after the bus dropped me off at home. I still remember receiving a couple of gifts in 7th or 8th grade that I treasured so much: a statue of St. Francis (I loved him, because he and I shared a love for animals) and a couple of books by the renowned Philosopher Peter Kreeft (whom I would later meet when I was a graduate student at Boston College, where he taught, and later at a conference on atheism at which he was a speaker).
The first book was Yes or No?: Straight Answers to Tough Questions about Christianity. It is a very readable book written in dialogue format. It is a conversation between Chris the Christian and Sal the Seeker. It may sound hokey, but the contents are profound. I highly recommend it.
The second was Prayer: the Great Conversation. Thus, yet again, those two themes come together: thinking and prayer. At bottom, those are the two main, cooperative, complementary, and indispensable aspects of any sound theological inquiry.
I had originally planned to go into the major thinkers from my academic studies that helped shape my own theology. But, alas, I will need to save that for another time. In fact, I had to add "Part I" to this blog post because I wrote more than anticipated to get this far. It might not seem that "theological"--in an academic sense--so far, but I have found that without these fundamentals--rigorous thought and deep prayer--theology is not only vacuous but dangerous. More on that next time.
If you'd like to support my blog and work, please do so via this link: