Why is imagining Star Trek Stories Easier than Imagining the Ascension?

[[ Hi Sister Laurel, in your post on the Ascension you said that it was difficult for us to believe that Jesus was raised bodily into "heaven". You suggested it might be easier to imagine the Star Trek story as true instead. I wondered why you said that. Thank you.]]

I appreciate your question. Thanks. We humans tend to draw distinct lines between the spiritual and the material and often we rule out any idea that has the two interpenetrating the other or being related in paradoxical ways. We simplify things in other ways as well. For instance, do you remember when the Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin first orbited earth and made a pronouncement that he had now been to space, had looked and looked for God and did not find him? The notion that God's relation to the cosmos was other than as a visible (and material) being among other material beings present in "the heavens" was completely beyond this man's ideology or imagination. The idea of God as Being itself, a being that grounded and was the source of all existence while transcending it all was simply too big an idea for this Cosmonaut. Imagine what he would have done with the notion that everything that exists now exists or is on its way to existing within the very life of God! (Gagarin is now said never to have affirmed this; instead Soviet authorities did and used his flight to do so.)

Another example might be better. When I was young, I went to a Christian Scientist Church and Sunday School. There, every Sunday we recited what was called, "The Scientific Statement of Being". It was a bit of neo-Platonic "dogma" written by Mary Baker Eddy. It was the heart of the faith: [[There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-All. Spirit is immortal truth; matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God, and man is his image and likeness. Therefore, man is not material; he is spiritual.]] By the time I was seven or eight I was questioning what it meant to say matter is unreal (or, more often, how could I be asked to deny the truth of matter's reality). Imagine what it was like to fall off your bike and tell yourself the blood and pain was "unreal" --- only Spirit is real. 

The answers never satisfied, but I think you get the point. The human mind has always had difficulty not drawing a distinction between the material and the Spiritual even to asserting the two things are antithetical --- even to the extent of denying either matter or spirit actually exists at all.  (Christian Science said matter was unreal, not just in the Platonic sense of being less real than the ideal, but in the sense of asserting that materiality is delusional; on the other hand, contemporary science often says anything except matter is unreal.) An incarnate God, or a God who would make room within his very life for embodied existence like ours (in whatever form that embodiment occurs) would be anathema and literally inconceivable to either of these! So yes, we often suspend disbelief in reading science fiction or fantasy literature in order to enter deeply into the story. But what is also true is that we need to learn to suspend disbelief in intelligent ways in order to appreciate the Mystery of God and the cosmos; we need to do this in order to enter deeply into this great drama. Star Trek's stories may seem easier to believe than stories of the Ascension because the Mystery we call God is greater than anything we can create or even imagine ourselves.

One last point. When I was studying theology (either BA or MA) my professor answered the question, "What do I do if I cannot believe in God?" His answer was, "I would encourage you to act as though it (God's existence) is true and see what happens." My own objection at the time was that that would be encouraging people to engage in pretense, not real faith, and John responded further, " Perhaps it seems like that superficially, but what would really be happening is that one would be opening oneself [or remaining open] to allow those things that God alone can do." Another way of saying this is to affirm, one would thus be refusing to close oneself to the Holy Spirit. Once one allowed this openness, one would then compare the differences in one's life before such an openness and afterward. I didn't find John Dwyer's initial answer much more convincing then than I found the Christian Science answer re: matter's unreality when I was 7 or 8 yo, but I also mistakenly thought my faith was strong and sufficient. 

I now know that learning to trust (and to be open to Mystery) in the way John described is both more difficult and more intelligent than any cynical skepticism scientific materialism offers us today. And one grows in faith (thanks be to God)! I have experienced things in my life which God alone could do, and I recognize the wisdom (and the humility!!) of John Dwyer's advice to students believing they were atheists or that faith was naive, namely, that they suspend their disbelief, open themselves to new ways of seeing, and see what happens. Of course, this specific form of suspension of disbelief would result in a vocation to commitment to a world itself called to be something ever greater than even the limitations of science can imagine. What is often difficult for us is to understand is that this specific suspension of disbelief is more profoundly wise than science itself can know, or our often-earth-bound imaginations can create.

 Authentic faith, (which, again, is not the same as naive credulity), is something different, and in some ways, both more challenging and compelling than the more superficial suspension of disbelief we adopt when we read science fiction or fantasy literature. The essential difference, I think, is that the first type of suspension of disbelief is a form of chosen naivete adopted temporarily for the sake of recreation and enjoyment; it allows us a vacation from reality, while exercising imagination in the service of creativity. This certainly enlivens us. The second type of suspension of disbelief, that of faith, while also exercising imagination in the same service, requires more than our imagination. It is neither naive nor credulous and requires the whole of ourselves in a more direct commitment to enlivening others; as a result, faith opens us to a more intense and extensive commitment to reality itself and is simply more difficult.

Followup questions on story, fundamentalism vs atheism, etc

[[Dear Sister, thank you for your posts on story. I have heard Genesis called mythical before, but I was unclear why scholars thought that was a good thing and not a harmful one. I especially never heard before that taking such stories literally could actually be the most harmful thing we can do. It was interesting to hear you put creationists and atheists in the same box here. So here are my questions. Do all stories in the Bible work in the same way? Are you saying that creationists and atheists misread the Bible in the same way? Are these two really more related than not? What is it they are both missing with regard to the stories in the Bible?]]

Some stories in the Bible are more historical (and that is true in the later chapters of Genesis as well), but yes, they challenge us in SOME of the same ways I outlined in the earlier posts. Especially they challenge us to identify in one way and another with the characters and problems involved and make decisions on where we will stand as a result in our own world; they can stand temporarily as a space where we can explore ourselves, etc, but generally they do not ask for the same kind of suspension of disbelief I described before. However, two kinds of Scriptural stories especially work in the way I outlined: myths, and parables (especially Jesus' parables which are completely unique to him in the history of literature).

Both are especially good at providing a space where we can enter in and leave our own world behind (so to speak) for the time being, but only so we can return with our own hearts and minds changed in some way and engage that world differently as a result. One of the ways you will see that Jesus' parables differ from myth per se is that they draw us in, disorient us, and then, demand that we make a choice which reorients us, either to the world as we ordinarily understand it, or toward the Kingdom of God. They are more active or directed in this dynamic than myth per se; further, because they are less fantastic than myth they demand not so much a suspension of disbelief as a renunciation of belief. I will not repeat more of what I have written in the past about parables, but I would suggest if you have not read them, you check out the pieces on Thematic Aperception Tests and Parables, or, the Parable of the Good Samaritan for a more detailed explanation of the way Jesus' parables in particular work. They are tagged, so you can find them in the list of labels at the right hand side of the blog.

Yes, I am saying that creationists and some atheists (there are different kinds) do tend to read the myths of Genesis' primordial history in the same way. Both take these stories literally, and make them ridiculous in the process. The creationists read the stories as explanations not only of a sovereign creator God, but as descriptions of the way he creates. They rule out evolution (micro and macro), ongoing creation, a world which is moving towards perfection or fulfillment rather than (merely) falling away from it, etc. As a result they make faith look like an anti-intellectual act of people afraid of truth instead of a deeply intelligent act worthy of humanity and the profound mysteriousness of the cosmos. They do something similar with God, who is invariably treated as A BEING rather than as the ground and source of all being and meaning. Atheists do the same, but they do so in order to justify a lack or even refusal of faith, the transcendent, and the like. They do so in order to denigrate believers and belief, but also to castigate the parodies of God naive believers so often put forward --- itself a much more legitimate enterprise than is sometimes recognized. So yes, despite apparent differences, these two groups of people often have more in common than they have differences.

What both of these groups of people miss is the fact that stories are sophisticated even sacramental vehicles for encountering truth, and this is especially true of myth or the mythical elements in stories. Both groups treat literal truth as contrary to profound truth which needs to be conveyed with myth and the bending and shaping of the literal. Both forget how story functions in our lives. They treat these things as childish, something to be outgrown, rather than understanding how entering into stories allows for growth in transcendence. (Watch a child being read to and imagine the explosions of transcendence going on in her mind and heart as she places herself in the story and internalizes what she hears!)

They do this in different ways: the creationist, for instance, absolutizes elements in the narrative as literal or historical in the modern sense and loses contact with the depth dimension of the story. Thus when faced with scientific data regarding evolution, the age of the world, etc, they must deny these things; when told by other believers the stories of creation function as myth, their faith is threatened unnecessarily and they cannot see the deeper truths embodied as only story can do. The atheists on the other hand opt for the data of science as far superior to what can be conveyed in story and if told the account is mythical, dismiss it as nonsense or fiction on ALL levels. Both underestimate truth (its scope and mystery) and the God who grounds and is the source of all truth, but they do this especially by forgetting how story functions, and how human beings are by nature story-telling beings not because they are unsophisticated or primitive, but precisely because they are sophisticated and capable of transcendence and communion.

Normal adolescent questioning: Is this really unfaith? Atheism?

Recently a mother approached an AOL bulletin board with questions regarding her adolescent daughter and the serious questioning she was going through with regard to her faith in God. The term atheism was thrown around, but left undefined; while most of the respondents pointed out the importance of this phase in the girl's faith development and encouraged the mother to continue dealing with the situation as she had been doing, one person posted she was concerned that this child had "cut herself off from God" at such a crucial time of her life. It seemed important to me to respond to this, not least because I am always amazed to find Catholics who believe that simply (or rather, ostensibly) questioning the existence of God (or of inadequate notions of God!) is genuine atheism or, more importantly, represents genuine unfaith and the relative (much less the absolute!) absence of God from the person's life. Here then (with some redaction of the opening) is that response:

Sorry, but how can we say this young girl has "cut herself off" from God??? He dwells within her; he is part of her very being (remember Ratzinger's work on the dialogical character of the soul?). Has she closed herself off to the life that is deep within her summoning her to grow and be? Has she closed herself to love, to being present for and with others? No, as her Mother's description of things makes very clear, she has not. She is questioning, yes, and doubting, yes, but how else is one to move from childish imitative faith to a more independent and mature faith of her own? To question, and even to doubt seriously is not the same as sin where we do reject God's presence (even this cannot make him absent from within us or our own subjective world). It is a way to actually engage with God and his creation --- a God who is always bigger than the notions of him we are taught as children --- and certainly it can be a way our faith matures and deepens rather than leading us away from faith itself.

On the subjective side of the equation (the side of the subject who is doubting or seeking), better serious questioning and doubt than a "faith" which never matures beyond the immature credulity and images of God that are best outgrown or transcended. The Apostle Thomas seriously doubted, and his doubt prepared him for God's revelation; it did not close him to it. And on the objective side of the equation (the side of objective reality: what is really there apart from the subject who is doubting), we must remember our OT: "if I go down into the depths of sheol, you are there . . .". God reveals himself as the One who will be with us in season and out; his name means he will be the One who he will be and implies this faithful being with us no matter what.

Again, the Apostle Thomas doubted as seriously as anyone could, and God did not reject him, did not absent himself from him. Indeed, he revealed himself in a fresh and heretofore unheard of and impossible way. Thomas' doubt CAN (and some commentators rightly suggest, should) be read as a recognition that the resurrected Christ had also to be the crucified Christ or he would not be believable, and isn't this the absolute truth? Isn't this the heart of our Gospel faith? We believe in a scandalous God, one who stretches former categories and ordinary ways of knowing him, coming to us in weakness, and kenosis. While we reject NOTIONS of God, we do not necessarily reject God himself, and in serious doubting and questioning we do not cut ourselves off from God, but open to finding him (indeed, we are often desperate to find him) in new and more profound ways.

Again, what is sometimes called atheism is rarely truly that, for the person continues to believe in objective value, continues to search for, be open to, and affirm meaning (of which God is ALWAYS the source and ground), continues to love others in a way which is (and can only be) empowered by God and open to knowing God --- eventhough the word God is rejected, and certain notions of him (many of which OUGHT to be rejected as parodies of the real God) are no longer helpful. It is nearly impossible to be consistently atheistic (this requires the rejection of meaning as such), and when we are speaking of an adolescent making the transition to more mature faith, the things called "atheism" are far from the embittered, cynical, nihilistic positions characteristic of genuine atheism.