Spirituality and Certainty [jenna]

Perhaps I shouldn’t laugh at something so tragic, but when a recent MSN article entitled “Rediscovering Your Spiritual Self ” offered this advice—“Gaze into the night sky and think of the stars as holes in the darkness letting heaven shine through”—I admit to snickering. It’s not that a little poetic imagery bothers me, though I do object to something so suspiciously like cheap greeting-card poetry, but this suggestion came in the context of advice for relief from suffering through spirituality.

America, as we all know, has experienced quite a revival in spirituality since atheism wore out of fashion. When Muslim terrorists brought down the Twin Towers and part of the Pentagon in 2001, we reminded each other that not all of Islam deserved censure because of the actions of radicals. Personal website hosts such as Myspace and Blogger automatically post your astrological sign on your profile. Some form of transcendental or New Age meditation was taught my class, at least, when I was in grade school, and megachurches advertise their ‘friendly, welcoming atmosphere’ on television.

The problem with the driving force behind these concepts (regardless of the merit or danger of any particular notion) is that it’s empty; a sheer senseless void that has American culture wandering in its colorless waste. In all the positive energy, the acceptance of all belief systems as equally valuable, the encouragement for each to find his or her own way, the pagan meditation and holistic ideas of therapy and healing, there is hardly a word of actual sterling truth—and truth, of all things, has the ability to provide sanity and healing.

John Henry Cardinal Newman, in his Grammar of Assent, gives us the following words:

“Now truth cannot change; what is once truth is always truth; and the human mind is made for truth, and so rests in truth, as it cannot rest in falsehood … It is of great importance then to show … that the intellect, which is made for truth, can attain truth, and, having attained it, can keep it, can recognize it, and preserve the recognition.”

There are a lot of reasons for the pervasive hopelessness and depression rampant among us: overdosing on sugar (and alcohol and drugs), instability in the family, general feelings of isolation, widespread amorality, early exposure to violent imagery, et cetera ad infinitum. I wonder, though, if more of the problem than we ever admit has to do with the loss of any concept of stable, solid, concrete, absolute truth.

We are asked nowadays to treat all faiths as equal and private; however, the idea that faith is merely personal, a matter of choice, is meaningless. The concept that all religions lead to some general heaven, regardless of how different their description of heaven itself or the requirements for entry, removes all logic from religion itself. Without logic, there is no knowledge; without some level of knowledge, hope is fragile at best. Probably few ideas, in and of themselves, have done more to destroy hope among Westerners than that stripping of all certainty out of faith.

Some of my peers assume, as one young ex-Christian, that “Nobody in this vast world of ours ever comes to the logical conclusion that if every member of every religion thinks he just happened to be born in the right religion it simply means all religions are wrong ones”—but the one thing that his argument does not have is logic; for the simple fact of disagreement between two men has no bearing on the actuality that one of them may be right and the other quite wrong. Others take the popular stance carried by the Baha’i faith, like the chant reputedly led by Bono at one of his concerts: “Jesus, Jew, Mohammed: all true” without ever reasoning that the literal and absolute contradictions between the doctrines of the three preclude such a possibility.

To me, one of the strongest arguments for believing in literal truth is the mess that humanity becomes without it. Once that confidence—with all its glory and fear—has been sacrificed, the structures of morality and security that maintain our decency, dignity and sanity crumble and dissolve.

Not that sheer confidence that one has found the truth is enough to build a structure that can support all those good things. But as G. K. Chesterton said, “It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands” (Orthodoxy, 1995 reprint Ignatius Press p. 108). If, then, truth exists, my duty is not to figure out what I think and be true to it; my duty is to find what is truth and align myself faithfully to it.

This means that of necessity I believe in right and wrong; not merely morally—that’s an outgrowth of deeper things—but philosophically and yes, spiritually. That I have confidence in the truth of Christianity should be clear from the above.

Christianity requires plenty of recourse to faith, of course; so does Islam, Buddhism, pantheism, etc.—and so does atheism, evolutionary science, agnosticism, hedonism, and all the other secular religiosities out there.

But I do believe that, centrally at least, certainty is possible. The fact that it takes time, effort, and faith to achieve it—however daunting that may make the search—does not take away from the existence of the truth itself. The matter of whether truth exists or not is only half the question; the rest is this: do we dare to know the answer?