Finding my religion

It is appropriate now to describe how, for me, religious faith is now a part of me and hence a part of what appears here. I spent 35 years in a fairly constant argument with myself about the existence of God, and fairly consistently I had a hard time concluding God was there. The essential reason was personal : how can the sufferings and hardships of my life be justified if God created my life ? The facts of my life suggested to me that God didn't like me, much less love me as my catechism-limited Catholic upbringing would have it. No, I was content to see life through an imminently reasonable construction of logic and moral precepts sufficient in themselves. And as life progressed it seemed that everything could indeed be explained as a function of the extent to which I and others acted or failed to act in accordance with reason and conscience. I still think this is right. But what was missing, for me, was any real sense of joy in life. Rather, I could never understand the notion of "loving" oneself. I still don't. But in trying to learn how to live joyously, how to "love" myself and my life, it was pretty obvious that with just a few exceptions most of the people I knew who seemed to be content, even joyous, were those who believed in God. Maybe I was predisposed to think so because I had grown up in a largely Catholic world of parochial school and then Jesuit High School, where I learned to admire the academic rigor and disciplined thought of the priests. Indeed, maybe that's why my internal debate didn't simply end altogether when I first concluded, and then did so over and over again so many times for 35 years, that there simply was no God, no easy way to contextualize this life I was living. So, the bare threads of my theological self-dispute lingered on, parallel with the growing realization that my way of thinking - "reason plus conscience = good life" - was producing, with the passage of time and increasingly difficult challenges, the mentality that life was just something to be endured, and my task was to run out the clock. As my thinking became more desperate, so did my attempts at finding a remedy. As it occurred to me that following the road of living in "The World According To Frankie" was shaping up more and more as a dead-end; and also that despite my circumstances as a child, I'd never felt desperate or anything other than content and in control. So, more as an act of desperation than anything else, I decided to start going to church to see if any of the peace provided others there would help me. I did not go there looking for God, I went there looking for personal peace. What I found instead was the head and heart of my youth, of the person I was then, with all the potential of life before me rather than, as now, mostly behind me. And after I found that person there, only then did I start looking for God. But I didn't find him, probably because I was looking with my head, not my heart. My heart got involved on February 15, 2009, a Sunday afternoon after a Sunday morning spent at church. That afternoon, I learned that my son had been in a catastrophically violent auto accident - he'd run off the road at 80 mph, flipped in the air twice, then hit a tree sideways across the top of the hood with his body parallel to the ground and his head pointed arrow-like right into the tree, and he walked away from it, uninjured. As I studied the site and what remained of the wrecked car, it slowly dawned on me that there could be no real physical explanation for how he did not die on February 15. Something kept him alive, and if so then he was alive for a reason. The only rational, now, explanation I could come up with was that God did it, God kept him alive. And I felt this thought, I did not simply think it. I realized that for me to feel as I did, I believed in God. So, with the zeal of the convert, I immersed myself in trying to learn about God - I did not want to "cave" to my emotions, but rather I wanted to know what I felt, why I felt it, and whether I could intellectually support, with real internal integrity, such a radical repositioning on the central question of my, and everyone else's, existence. And the more I studied, the more I believed : the entire Christian faith is founded on the historical facts of Christ's life, death, and resurrection, as revealed in the New Testament. This was truly a 'revelation' to me, because as a Catholic born in the mid1950's I was completely ignorant of the Bible. As my faith has deepened, as my commitment to faith has become stronger, I have even experienced at times the joy I always thought was central to loving life. What I did not know but do now is that such joy is the joy of knowing that God is there. Here. In me. In everything and everybody, in all creation. And I think the task of life is to seek God, find him in life wherever he can be discerned. I am realizing that this is not easy, that like everything valuable in life it take much effort, and that I have been lucky to realize the importance of the search at all. But I am also realizing that if I put my head and heart to seeing him, he shows up every now and then, to let me know he's there. Maybe it is, as my friend has said, nothing more than wish fulfillment. But isn't that the nature of faith, anyway ?