One of my best friends is an atheist. For some reason I’m thinking of him when Paul writes about our gifts. He doesn’t worship anything. “Look, it isn’t like I don’t respect what you do,” he tells me, usually with that special intensity that comes after the first cigar, second piece of cake and third bottle of wine. He does worship, everyone does. As the late novelist David Foster Wallace remarked in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address:
“Here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
It’s not his atheism that bothers me. I really don’t care. I suppose I should, but I’m much more a proselytizer for our National Parks than I am for my religion. I guess I let two thousand years of theology and tradition do the talking for me, but it is his certainty that bothers me. I don’t mean to be insulting, but it reminds me of stubborn pre-teens.
My buddy thinks I’m a pretty smart guy and doesn’t know why I would believe in an ancient superstition. I think he’s an open-minded guy and I don’t understand how he can close himself off from such a large aspect of human existence.
I guess this is why I think of him during this week’s reading. He has gifts that can enrich me regardless of his views. Aren’t I a better Catholic if I authentically question what I believe and ask myself why I believe it, and wouldn’t my buddy be a better believer if he understood the complexity of faith. We return to Wallace’s point of “Everybody worships.”
From the intentional burial by Neanderthals to the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux, we have had to grapple with the meaning of our existence. Like Paul’s reading this weekend, everyone has the ability to accept the gift of God. It’s what St. Augustine calls “capax dei” (De Trinitate XIV, 8.11) or “capable of God,” the idea being that everyone is capable of God because everyone can love.
St. Augustine famously wrote, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee” (Confessions, Book I). In these unsure and strange days our hearts are restless! We’ve called it boredom, depression, anxiety, but that is why everyone worships, to fill that restlessness.
“Whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons” (1 Corinthians 12:13), Paul’s radical equality is stressed. Now, I understand that I am interpreting this reading in ways Paul never would have imagined (or approved), but then again, Paul never met my atheist buddy and he has “gifts of healing, assistance, administration” (1 Corinthians 12:28). As Paul himself reminds us, “the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I do not need you’” (1 Corinthians 12:21), so perhaps the challenge to us is to accept those people with different points of view, beliefs or unbeliefs as ours and take Paul’s words to heart. Maybe it won’t help my atheist buddy, but it’ll help us. Besides, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, as Alexandre Dumas in The Count of Monte Cristo has a dying Abbe Faria say to Edmond Dantes: “It doesn’t matter if you believe in God, He believes in you.” Have a wonderful week.
I’ll be seeing you,
Elliot