What Does Real Faith Require of Us?

“How do you feel about faith?”

“Faith?”

“Yeah, you know — God, life after death, all that.”

The man to whom I put the question — a handsome middle-aged priest, a few years younger than I — looked puzzled.

Our paths crossed just once before, 20 years earlier at the home of a mutual friend. Then he was an angry young rebel who had disrupted the tran­quility of the local diocese by staging an antiwar demonstration at the cathedral. Afterwards he went on to still more radical protests, including an action against one of the major corporate villains of the Vietnam War, for which he was brought to trial and convicted. He has mellowed over the years, but his idealism remains fervent, and today, to his credit, he is still a scandal to Catholics who prize respectability above all else, and a source of inspi­ration to those working for peace and justice.

“Well, I’m not sure how to answer. I guess I haven’t thought about it that much. I’d be willing to accept some kind of afterlife, I suppose, but I don’t know if it’s that important to me. I’m sure that life has meaning, and that every person’s life and death has significance in terms of something greater.”

The priest is an authentic hero. And I like him.

But I was losing interest in the conversation. I wasn’t especially thrilled at the prospect of meet­ing where the dead are always alleged to, “on the lips of living men”; nor do I think slaughtered in­nocents take much comfort from being part of that vague “something greater.”

The priest is happy in his work and much ad­mired, and people happy in their work and much admired — alas, sometimes even priests — have lit­tle occasion to wonder about such things as faith or, God help us, life after death.

But I do. I always have, in fact.

When I was a child, I noticed with surprise that the normal expression on people’s faces was a resigned sadness. They might become angry, fear­ful, shocked; they might smile or burst into laugh­ter; they might look tender and loving; but, inevi­tably, sadness took hold once more. Is life, I thought, really so unhappy despite the efforts of the kindly grown-ups around me to reassure me that it isn’t so bad? It says something about the background from which I come, by the way, that nobody ever tried to persuade me that life is a joy or even a marvelous challenge. Success wasn’t es­teemed or trusted in my family. I suppose you’d call us losers, but if we were losers, we came by the title honorably.