Crises of Faith: Letting Go to Hold On

A lot of Catholics ask me for advice on how to process what is unfolding these days. Events are really challenging people's paradigms of how they understand the Church, the papacy, and even the faith itself. They want desperately to understand how everything fits together—how can we process what we've witnessed within the framework of our beliefs? This causes people considerable anxiety, even agony; sometimes it consumes their spiritual lives entirely. They feel profound unease at not being able to account for every jot and tittle within their understanding.

One piece of advice I have been giving people is to remember that we don't have to understand everything. The need to sort everything out and fit the pieces together in a logical schema is a necessity we impose upon ourselves. It is not something the faith demands of us; it is a product of our society's left-brained, hyper-rationalist perspective that we honestly might not even be aware we are imbibing. It's a perfectly acceptable answer to shrug your shoulders and say, "I don't know what to think of all this." The Psalm tells us, "Be still and know that I am God." (Ps. 46:10)

It has been helpful for me personally to relinquish the idea that my intellect needs to make sense of it. There is always supposed to be a “not-knowingness” about faith, a “not-yet” ness, a “dark glass” element (cf. 1 Cor. 13:12). There are times when the reason we can’t make sense of something is simply because we can’t see all the pieces. I suspect that part of this trial is learning to be alright with that—learning to let go of our persistent desire to see the whole blueprint and understand how all the pieces fit together. It’s almost like having an algebra problem, but there’s no way to solve for one of the variables because you don't have enough information; you have to put your pencil down and say, "This problem has a solution, but not enough information is provided for me to solve it."

Of course, our faith should not demand that we accept blatant irrationalities. It's an extremely hard sell to insist on the Church's indefectibility, infallbility, and so forth, while trying to simultaenously process how the Church has simply chucked vast amounts of its heritage. I do understand why people lose faith over this. Sedevacantism, for example, emerges from the variance between what we "know" and what has happened. I believe this variance is only apparent, relying heavily on exaggeration and a hyper-legalist, non-contextual reading of important texts (among other things), but that doesn't mean I don't understand why people go Sede. They feel like it is the only recourse if they are to avoid accepting irrational propositions.

Of course, I would never ask any believer to accept the blatantly irrational just “because mystery.” But I do think we need to carefully distinguish between an irrationality and our inability to see the big picture. An irrationality would be like trying to solve a puzzle to which there was no objective solution. Inability to see is more like sitting down with a legitimate puzzle but your ability to solve it is limited because someone has turned the lights off in the room and it’s dark.

The trouble is, in both cases our subjective experience is the same—“I can’t figure out all to solve this.” But the difference is that an irrationality has no solution, while the other has a true solution that circumstance prevents us from seeing. Given that we are in the midst of a crisis—and given our creaturely status—I take the approach that we must be incredibly careful, discerning, and humble before we say the whole edifice has broken down. I think that what drives Sedevacantism is this notion that they must see every piece, must see the big picture, etc. and because there’s too much discordance, they throw up their hands and say “This man can’t be the actual pope.”

So I would never suggest we toss reason, but we must accept the limitations of our vision. Part of that limitation is just due to being in the midst of the crisis—of seeing things unfold in real time and having to process them in real time instead of having decades or centuries to reflect on what it all means. Problems whose solutions seem evident to us in retrospect were not as easy to find when they were happening. For example, there was a time when many Christians could not understand how a sacrament could be validly confected by a priest who had committed grave sin. Those who could not reconcile this variance slid into the Donatist heresy. The answer, of course, is that provided by St. Augustine: that the efficacy of the sacraments derives from the power of God acting through the priest, which He is able to accomplish regardless of the priest's personal worthiness. But this answer eluded generations of Catholics who struggled bitterly to make sense of this conundrum. 

There are many other examples we could give, but the commonality is that the Church encountered a new dilemma it had to learn how to "digest." It is, to some degree, like trying to assemble that puzzle in the dark. The "digestion" is waiting for the light to dawn that helps put the entire thing into perspective. This is, ultimately, what faith means; what else does "walk by faith, not be sight" entail if not something like this? (2 Cor. 5:7) Faith is being able to say, "I don't understand how this all fits together, but I'm sure it does, and I trust God to reveal the solution in His time." Until then, we persevere. It is the little way, the childlike way, the way of trust. Letting go of our need to sort it all out allows us to hold on to God tigher.

"When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?"

(Luke 18:8)

*Special thanks to Peter Kwasniewski, whose private conversation helped shaped the line of thought taken in this essay*