Recently when I was walking across the campus where I teach with a student who is an atheist, she said, “The new pope is pretty dope.” (That’s a good thing, by the way.) Her name is Sofia Knutson; she responds especially to the pope’s conviction that belief in God is not necessary for living well; rather, what’s needed is following the promptings of one’s own best self with regard to the world and our place in it.
This is the pope who called proselytizing “solemn nonsense.” Like the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes (“Joy and Hope”), he takes freedom of conscience very seriously. Although the idea has often been honored more in the breach than in the observance, it runs deep in the church’s tradition that the divine speaks to each of us in the depths of who we are. It is something that many of the church’s more sensitive and alert members—such as St. Augustine, Julian of Norwich, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Teilhard de Chardin, as well as the current pope—have long known. As Pope Francis emphasized in a recent interview, “truth, according to Christian faith, is the love of God for us in Jesus Christ and therefore truth is a relationship.” Thus, however important certain discursive propositions—such as statements of the creed—might be to a given believer, they pale in comparison with truth in this ultimate sense, which has more to do with our loving connections to the divine (however one might conceive of her or him), each other, and the planet than with ticking off items on an agenda of beliefs.
When I showed an earlier draft of this column to my young friend Sofia, she wrote back that she really likes the “focus on how faith/love is—or at least should be—the most fulfilling aspect of Catholicism despite what the Catechism tells us!” I responded that I agree with her and the pope in this regard. As far as I can tell, I remain devoutly Catholic—I attend weekly Mass, do a daily meditation, pray at least some small portion of the divine office every day, and at night say a brief litany of the saints who are my personal patrons, but I can’t say I’m the same kind of Catholic that I used to be. In the past I spent too much time, and wasted too much good energy, worrying about being right about the proper beliefs, even to the point of obsession; I wouldn’t wish such a thing on anyone. The fact that I continue to say the creed at Mass does not mean that I believe I know what it all means. As Pope Francis wrote in his encyclical letter Lumen Fidei (“On the Light of Faith”), the creed is not merely a matter of assent, but also an invitation to embark on “a journey toward full communion with the living God.” I think we can well translate the statement into even more inclusive terms by emphasizing that our pursuits should take us on a journey toward our fullest realization, whether one believes in God (as I do) or not.
In my early college days, I wanted to get everything right, a desire that included knowing how my life would go. So every few days I would decide on a new path for my life: I would become a Trappist priest, a Franciscan brother, a Jesuit, a lay theologian, a lay missionary, a priest in the Franciscans Third Order Regular, and so on and on and on; I could convince myself for only a few days of what the pattern of my life should be before I had to change my mind, and then change it again a few days later. I was making myself sick, and was eventually diagnosed with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Instead of living my life with the uncertainty that comes with being human, I was trying to determine the story of my life before I lived it. In the meantime, my life’s story was becoming constant worry over the story of my life. It’s no wonder I became a literary scholar and writer of poetry; having found myself trapped in an obsessive narrative that was going nowhere, I needed to figure out how to write myself into an alternate story. It was when I transferred to the seminary from which I would eventually get my BA, that I met the people who would help me allow the narrative of my life to be open-ended and uncertain.
Pope Francis touches on a related theme in his encyclical, where he alludes to Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity as closing down the novelty and adventure of human life. It isn’t so much that the pope objects to Nietzsche’s critique as that he objects to a Christianity that conforms to Nietzsche’s description. A faith worth living opens into novelty and adventure. About halfway through the letter, Francis states that true faith must be open-ended—not that it would necessarily disavow the need for a creed, but rather that our lives, including our lives of belief, are at best journeys likely to take unexpected turns: “Far from making us inflexible, the security of faith sets us on a journey, it enables witness and dialogue with all.” As the theologian David Tracy has written, authentic dialogue has to mean openness to the other and a willingness to be changed. Pope Francis makes a similar point in Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”): “Efforts made in dealing with a specific theme can become a process in which, by mutual listening, both parties can be purified and enriched.” For the pope, engaging in dialogue with persons of varying backgrounds and beliefs also always engages an ethical commitment: “In this way we learn to accept others and their different ways of living, thinking and speaking. We can then join one another in taking up the duty of serving justice and peace, which should become a basic principle of all our exchanges.” Allowing, again, for a fully inclusive translation of terms, the ideas expressed here become a good model for liberal arts education—engaging in an open-ended, scholarly, creative, inclusive, adventurous, and ethically committed dialogue. That is pretty dope indeed.