24: A Question of Belief

24 

A Question of Belief 

          A long time ago, maybe thirty years or so, I met a man passing through my hometown of Nipigon, Northwestern Ontario carrying a huge cross with a small roller wheel on its base to drag it from town to town; he was going across Canada on a mission.

I met him in the Nipigon Inn Hotel where he was given a room for the night by the owner of the hotel. When asked why he was doing this, his reply was simple: he believed that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and he was reminding us of Christ’s sacrifice.

Yesterday afternoon Penny and I went into Barrie for an afternoon movie and early dinner, and we caught the show Do You Believe? And wouldn’t you know it, the movie begins with a black man getting on in years dragging a cross, also with two small roller wheels at its base, through the streets of Chicago, and a pastor driving by stops to talk to him.  

The man dragging the cross asks the pastor, “Do you believe?” and that’s how the story begins, because no sooner did he ask this question and there’s a commotion taking place nearby as some black men hijack a van and the man with the cross goes over and tries to talk to the thieves on the error of their ways. One of the gang members called Kriminal holds a gun to the cross-carrying man’s face and threatens him with his life, but the man is ready to die for Jesus; and this sets into motion the dominos of the whole show’s action of how the Cross of Jesus miraculously touched the lives of twelve people.

Do You Believe? was definitely a feel-good movie, though the reviews panned it with noticeable secular animus for the in-your-face Christian theme; but about two thirds of the way into the movie I heard the silent voice of my Muse whisper to me in that special way that always alerts me to literary attention, “A question of belief,” and I knew that this thesis distilled from the movie would be my entry point for today’s spiritual musing… 

I was born into a Roman Catholic family in Calabria, Italy, so I grew up believing in Jesus; but I was also the black sheep of my family, and I had an inordinate curiosity that I sought to satisfy with voracious reading. In grade eight I read one book a day, and when I turned fifteen I ordered an encyclopedic set of books called The Great Books of the Western World, with two sets of companion literature to compliment the Great Books; but my older brother had to sign for me to purchase them because I paid for them on monthly instalments. I worked three jobs—delivering newspapers after school, spotting pins in the bowling alley, and working at the Bay Grocery Store on weekends—and I never missed a payment.

Inevitably all of my reading opened me up to the world and other teachings, and I began to question my Roman Catholic faith; but I had no idea how dogmatic and rigid it was until I stared face to face with the concept of eternal damnation. How could one mortal sin, like eating meat on Friday, be equal to an eternity of hellfire?

That was cruel and unfair, and I didn’t believe God would do that to us; and that’s how I began to question my faith and look for answers to my soul-consuming Christian doubt. And then I read Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge in high school, and I became a seeker like Maugham’s hero Larry Darrel; and I left my faith and the rest is history.

That was a long, long time ago. In fact, it was so long ago that it feels like another lifetime; and when I look back on my life today I can’t believe how far I’ve come in my quest for answers to life’s imponderable questions. And it’s only because I found answers to these haunting questions—which can be summed up in Paul Gaugin’s famous painting, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?—that I dare to write a spiritual musing on the question of belief that was inspired by the Christian movie Do you Believe?

For the longest time I had disturbing issues with Christianity; so much so, in fact, that I went way out of my way to resolve them, which, thankfully I did and wrote about in my novel Healing with Padre Pio (followed up with Why Bother? The Riddle of the Good Samaritan, and The Pearl of Great Price); and, like Joni Mitchell’s song, “I’ve looked at life from both sides now” and am free to explore the question of belief without prejudice…

 

When all is said and done, if we don’t believe in something our life will inevitably become empty, meaningless, and absurd. Even if we believe that the sun is going to rise tomorrow, despite no definite scientific proof that it will, we live in hope; and hope is what the Christian movie Do You Believe? is all about—hope for something better.

The Cross of Jesus, of course, is the focal point of one’s hope in this movie, because Jesus died on the cross for our salvation.; and we all need salvation from something—from poverty, like the young pregnant woman in the movie, from life on the streets like the mother and her young daughter, freedom from crippling grief for an older couple from the tragic loss of their daughter to a drunk driver, salvation from a life of crime for a young black man, freedom from extreme prejudice for a money-motivated lawyer, freedom from the god-complex for the non-believing doctor, and salvation for Kriminal for his unconscionable life of crime, to name some of the storylines in the movie; and had I not been objective enough to see both sides of life, I would have thought Do You Believe? to be a sappy, ridiculous movie out to proselytize all the non-believers.

Instead, I came away feeling good that there are people in the world that will go out of their way to help others, because it emboldened my faith in human nature; and despite the movie’s syrupy Christian bias, I know now that it’s not what we believe that matters, but what our beliefs have made of us, and regardless of what I think of Christianity today, as long as it encourages people to be good that’s all that matters to me. 

───