Over the past weeks, I have been sharing with you chapters from Fr. Desmond Forristal's book The Mystery of God. The following is actually chapter one of the book which is called Asking Questions.

According to an old saying, philosophy begins in wonder. We wonder about things. We ask questions about things. We want to know the explanations and the answers. We want the explanation which will cover the whole of our experience.

Even as children we are not content to accept things as we see them. We keep asking for reasons and explanations. The conversation of the small child is a stream of questions.

Who is that man?

Where did he come from?

Where is he going?

Why does a man have legs?

Why does a bird have wings?

Why does a dog not talk?

Who am I?

Where did I come from?

Where am I going?

Some of these questions are trivial and easily answered. Others are so profound that they have occupied the minds of the greatest thinkers all down the ages and still occupy them today. Because we are beings who think and reason, we will go on asking these questions until we are satisfied that we have found the truth.

The Meaning of Life

In the year 627 the monk Paulinus came to the court of the pagan King Edwin in the north of England in order to preach the Christian faith. The king summoned his council and asked their advice. One of them answered in these words:

Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter's day with your thanes and counselors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside, the storms of winter rain or snow are raging.

This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came.

Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows it we know nothing. Therefore, if this new teaching has brought any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it.

A similar image is found in a famous modern play, Waiting for Godot, by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. The play tells of two tramps who are waiting for a mysterious person called Godot to come and save them. While they are waiting, they meet a blind man who is guided by a dumb man. When they ask the blind man when his companion became dumb, he bursts into an angry speech about the absurd and meaningless nature of human life.

When! When! One day, is that not enough for you one day like any other day, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams for an instant, then it's night once more.

The two stories end differently. In the real-life story, King Edwin and his advisers listened to Paulinus and were won over. They destroyed the idols they used to worship and came to believe in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour. But for the tramps in the play, there is no saviour. There is only a boy who arrives each evening with the same message: "Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won't come this evening but surely tomorrow."

These two stories show the two ways of responding to the challenge of human life. There is the way of belief and the way of unbelief.

If we choose the way of belief, we are saying that human life has meaning and purpose. It is not just a gleam of light between two darkness's. It is not snuffled out in an instant by death. It is something that is part of a larger plan and pattern: and that plan exists in the mind of a planner, whom we call God.

If we choose the way of unbelief, we say that there is no meaning or purpose to human life. There is no plan and therefore there is no planner. My life is no more than a moment of light before the everlasting night of death. The only meaning it has is the meaning I succeed in giving to it myself.

There are difficulties both in belief and in unbelief they are well illustrated in the writings of the French existentialist, Albert Camus (1913-1960), who came to the conclusion that the world is absurd and meaningless; but he found that in his heart he still wanted it all to have a meaning.

I said that the world is absurd but I was too hasty. This world itself is not reasonable that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of the irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.

Alienation

Many people today are torn between belief and unbelief in the same way as Camus. They find it difficult to accept the explanation of the world that is given to them by religion, yet they find it just as difficult to accept that the world has no explanation. This difficulty is often sharply felt by young people. They tend to rebel against the values that are taught to them by believers in religion, but they find no comfort in the values that are taught by unbelievers.

This is a theme which is found in many modern books, films and plays. One of the best-known of these is John Osborne's play, Look Back In Anger, about a young man who has rejected the old ideals and found nothing to put in their place. He says:

There aren't any good brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won't be in aid of the old-fashioned, grand design. It'll just be the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you.

A word that is often used to describe this condition is alienation. An alien is a foreigner, and alienation is the feeling of being a foreigner, a stranger, an outsider, of not really belonging, of not fitting in to the world in which one lives. The alienated person cannot find a meaning for life, has no worthwhile aims or ambitions, has a heart filled with restless desires but does not know how these desires can be satisfied or this restlessness set at peace.

This condition of alienation is not anything new. It is described in a book written fifteen centuries ago, St. Augustine's Confessions. In this book, Augustine tells how he rejected the Christianity taught him by his mother and tried to live a life without God. He had a brilliant career as a teacher but knew no peace of mind until he returned to God. "You have made us for yourself," he wrote, "and our hearts can never rest until they rest in you."

Countless other people have come to the same conclusion as Augustine: that the only cure for alienation is belief. In a world of shifting values, belief is something that is fixed and firm. Walter Macken's novel, Seek the Fair Land, is set in Ireland in Cromwell's time, when the Catholic faith was being savagely persecuted. But the sight of Father Sebastian preparing to say Mass in ragged vestments comes as a sign of hope to the grief-stricken Dominick.

By the side of the shelter he had fitted a rough wooden altar. It held a crucifix fashioned from oak, with a figure carved on it. The figure was not well made because Father Sebastian couldn't carve, but it was recognizable. There was a pewter chalice; a sun-whitened handkerchief for a purificator; a stiffened cover of calf wrapped in a small square of silk for a pall; a chalice veil made of the same material, and a purse of the same holding another white handkerchief as a corporal. All these so painstakingly put together-crudely enough because Father Sebastian was not handy with his hands-made Dominick think: He really believe, oh, but he believes indeed! And it made him glad that there was one person in this chaos who held firmly to belief.

Patterns of Belief

The purpose of this book is to examine these questions about the existence of God and the meaning of human life. But before we do this, it will be helpful to examine our own personal attitudes in the matter of belief in God.

Most of us were brought up by our parents to believe in God. Our earliest ideas of God were naturally childish. We found it easy enough to imagine Jesus but not so easy to imagine God. We may have had a picture in our mind of an old man with a white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up in the sky.

Our feelings towards God may have been somewhat mixed. We were told that he loves us and cares for us and looks after us as a father looks after his children; and towards God described in this way we felt love and trust. But we were also told that he watches us and sees anything we do wrong; and towards God described in this way we may have felt fear and unease.

When we are no longer children, we find that we have out-grown our childish ideas. We cannot believe in an old man with a white beard sitting in the sky any more than we can believe in an old man with a white beard climbing down our chimney. We must exchange our childish picture for an adult picture. Out understanding of God must develop and deepen in the same way as our understanding of other things. If we fail to do this, our faith remains weak and may be lost altogether.

It is interesting to see how different people have managed the transition from childish beliefs. Some do it without any difficulty and find that their maturing faith has become a part of their maturing selves. Father Karl Rahner, the German theologian, has written:

I begin with the fact that I find myself a believer and have not come upon any good reason for not believing. I was baptized and brought up in the faith, and so the faith that is my inheritance has also become that faith of my deliberate choice, a real, personal faith. God knows that is how matters stand, his mystery sees into the depths of my being, depths that are impenetrable to me. And at all events I can say: "I have not come upon any good reason to stop believing in God-to stop being the person I am."

Hence, as a lapsed Catholic, I do not trouble myself about the possibility that God may exist after all. If he exists (which seems to me more than doubtful), I am in for a bad time in the next world, but I am not going to bargain to believe in God in order to save my soul. . . If the kind of God exists who would damn me for not working out a deal with him, than that is unfortunate. I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person.

They said, "What's the sun?" "Oh," I said, "It's a ball of fire." "Well, how did it get there?' I couldn't give them the second answer. I couldn't give them the second answer to anything. They'd say, "Why are we alive?" I'd say, "Oh, well, you're organic," but I couldn't go on. I couldn't jump more than eighteen inches up in the air off this earth, and I began to think how infinitely stupid it was for a chap who could only jump eighteen inches up into the air and then come down to earth again to say, "There's no God." This is blind stupidity, the greatness of which I can't even measure. But it is stupid and it was necessary for me to face this sort of thing in order to find God.

Like I said, I found my way back to God through the children. I thought, "I can't answer their questions. I can't and nobody can." So I thought, I've got to make some kind of decision for them and even if there's no God, I'd rather they believe there was a God because God necessarily represents good. I thought, that can't be a bad thing, so I'll say there's a God and we'll go to church, and I started to go with them; it's wrong to send them if you won't go yourself. So, I went to church with them. And then one day it came to me: "There is a God. There just is, chum." Don't ask me to give you any drawings or categories, I just know there is God.

This is the last excerpt I'll be sharing with you from Fr. Desmond Forristal.