How I got to be where I am. (Part 1)

As a high school teacher of World Religions my students often ask, “so what are you?” As a teacher of students ranging from 16 to 18 years of age, I want to present the information in a way that is factual, historically accurate and untainted by what they might see as my personal biases. I do this when I teach Government. One year about half of my students thought I was a Democrat, the other half thought I was a Republican, a few even pegged me as Libertarian. So the deal I make with my students is to not tell them what my religious identification is until the end of the course. However this question presents a quandary for me.

A crisis of faith
The question "so what are you?" forces me to think about how to answer that question. I was brought up Catholic. Nuns in elementary school and all. And to be honest my upbringing was very positive for me. I was baptized, received my First Communion and did my Confirmation. So, in some was the easy way to answer the question is, "I’m Catholic." However, I don’t practice anymore. I experienced what at one point I considered a crisis of faith in the mid 1990s. It came to head when my parish priest railed with conviction about how AIDS was God’s punishment for the immoral behavior of homosexuals. His statement struck me as the most un-Christian thing I could imagine. Had Jesus not given us the example of love and compassion by healing lepers and consorting with prostitutes, both shunned by the society of their time? My priest and in fact to a large extent, the Catholic Church as an institution seemed to lack compassion. In that moment, the Church i had been brought up in, somehow became less genuine to me.

Today I have a better grasp of what I experienced then. It was not a crisis of faith, it was a crisis of belief. In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts makes the distinction between faith and belief. He defines belief as “the insistence that the truth is what one would...wish it to be.” Faith, he defines as the unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be.” I often tell my students today that confusion is a good thing. That confusion lies at the threshold of knowledge. Confusion is our brain saying, "what I’m reading or hearing now does not match up with what I recognized as truth just a little bit ago." When the truth in question is a strongly held one, a deeply rooted one, one which takes a lifetime to develop. When confusion arises over the institution that had so pervaded your life...confusion turns into crisis. So I walked away from the Church, not in anger nor curiously enough with a sense of betrayal, but perhaps with a sense of disappointment.

Perhaps walking away was a childish response to an unrealistic expectation. Perhaps the walking away was in and of itself an act lacking in compassion, nevertheless, an internal shift had taken place and my search began. Not that I immediately went from Catholicism to Buddhism. However I did have a sense that I needed to go within.

Next time...how I got to Zen.