Eastern rite mass at minus 15
I was to scout out a Catholic church for my wife to attend in Kiev. But instead of a cosy building, in 1990 I found myself standing in the snow at -15 C, on the steps of the “Museum of Scientific Atheism and Religion”.
It was an open air Mass being held in front of of the former Eastern rite Catholic church of St Alexander’s, under the auspices of a young priest, towards the end of winter. In what seemed like a great act of spite and cultural vandalism, the great religious building had been divided up and partitioned by the Soviets into exhibition halls, narrow corridors and small offices. The dome of the church remained, but it had been roofed off from the rest of the building.
In a fundamental way, Soviet atheism, through its continued low level persecution of religious people, and atheist education system, almost succeeded in separating the Ukrainian people from an essential part of their cultural identity - their religion. But Glasnost started the great political thaw, nationalism took over and broke the Soviet Union up into country-sized chunks. People were now free to go in search of their suppressed national and religious identities.
However, there was a problem. In contrast to Poland, where people had managed to hold onto their religion, generations of Ukrainians had grown up in a God-free society. From childhood they were taught by the state to believe that only ignorant and superstitious old Babushkas living in remote rural areas believed in God. It was difficult for the Ukrainians to begin to believe in God again after so many years of atheism and many who began to profess a belief in God did not sound authentic when they did so. It sounded like they were just pretending. Rediscovering the spiritual dimension of their Ukrainian identity was difficult for them. St Alexander’s was returned in sections. The first place masses were held in was the dome.
An old priest who was now permitted to give masses openly for the first time, chatted to me before the service and, in Russian, explained:
“We have many people like you in our society,” he said... “people who ask a lot of pointless intellectual questions about the existence of God. They do so because they don’t understand that belief is more a practice than the sought after prize at the end of an intellectual pursuit. They were brought up as atheists and somehow this makes the whole question of religion unnatural for them. It’s a big problem. They try and rationalise God into existence."
He laughed.
"What they don’t realise is that religion is a very simple matter. It is something anyone can do. Even the simplest person. For us," he said, "religion is there in the way we live our lives, and God exists - just like this pew here exists. Why question the existence of this pew?" and he patted the back of the pew. "We really don’t need to intellectualise over His existence.”
We miss a trick if we don’t recognise that intellectual justifications for the existence or nonexistence of God often a take back seat. People are more than willing to forgo a little "scientific" atheism if that will help them deepen their cultural and national identity and live a richer and more fulfilling life.
Moreover, God is not a Moriarty, inadvertently leaving clues for Sherlockian rationalists to pick up. Should God exist, logically God has a rationale for everything, but we don’t have a rationale for a rationale of everything. This would imply that we can know the mind of God – that we have a theory of mind for God.
I was to scout out a Catholic church for my wife to attend in Kiev. But instead of a cosy building, in 1990 I found myself standing in the snow at -15 C, on the steps of the “Museum of Scientific Atheism and Religion”.
It was an open air Mass being held in front of of the former Eastern rite Catholic church of St Alexander’s, under the auspices of a young priest, towards the end of winter. In what seemed like a great act of spite and cultural vandalism, the great religious building had been divided up and partitioned by the Soviets into exhibition halls, narrow corridors and small offices. The dome of the church remained, but it had been roofed off from the rest of the building.
In a fundamental way, Soviet atheism, through its continued low level persecution of religious people, and atheist education system, almost succeeded in separating the Ukrainian people from an essential part of their cultural identity - their religion. But Glasnost started the great political thaw, nationalism took over and broke the Soviet Union up into country-sized chunks. People were now free to go in search of their suppressed national and religious identities.
However, there was a problem. In contrast to Poland, where people had managed to hold onto their religion, generations of Ukrainians had grown up in a God-free society. From childhood they were taught by the state to believe that only ignorant and superstitious old Babushkas living in remote rural areas believed in God. It was difficult for the Ukrainians to begin to believe in God again after so many years of atheism and many who began to profess a belief in God did not sound authentic when they did so. It sounded like they were just pretending. Rediscovering the spiritual dimension of their Ukrainian identity was difficult for them. St Alexander’s was returned in sections. The first place masses were held in was the dome.
An old priest who was now permitted to give masses openly for the first time, chatted to me before the service and, in Russian, explained:
“We have many people like you in our society,” he said... “people who ask a lot of pointless intellectual questions about the existence of God. They do so because they don’t understand that belief is more a practice than the sought after prize at the end of an intellectual pursuit. They were brought up as atheists and somehow this makes the whole question of religion unnatural for them. It’s a big problem. They try and rationalise God into existence."
He laughed.
"What they don’t realise is that religion is a very simple matter. It is something anyone can do. Even the simplest person. For us," he said, "religion is there in the way we live our lives, and God exists - just like this pew here exists. Why question the existence of this pew?" and he patted the back of the pew. "We really don’t need to intellectualise over His existence.”
We miss a trick if we don’t recognise that intellectual justifications for the existence or nonexistence of God often a take back seat. People are more than willing to forgo a little "scientific" atheism if that will help them deepen their cultural and national identity and live a richer and more fulfilling life.
Moreover, God is not a Moriarty, inadvertently leaving clues for Sherlockian rationalists to pick up. Should God exist, logically God has a rationale for everything, but we don’t have a rationale for a rationale of everything. This would imply that we can know the mind of God – that we have a theory of mind for God.
This is almost a logical trap, by taking the presupposition that God exists and then extending it to, since we know that God exists, we don't need to rationalize his existence, he nullifies debate on the assumption that his untested presupposition is true. But you could replace the word God with anything, so it almost becomes a thoughtless exercise. Secondly, did he not see the irony in patting the pew, something that he could objectively proove the existence of? The fact is, even if God exists, it will be rationality that helps one discern the nature of God, hence there is deism and monotheism and polytheism and monism all the other isms and the religions that have sprouted from them. He might be right in divining that one cannot rationalize God, but then why must we be certain of anything at all, if rationality is a dead end, then why not adopt a healthy agnosticism and be open to everything, excepting that in ultimate terms we will know very little of anything, God or not?
ReplyDeleteYou see. You can't rationalise God into existence. Either he (or she)does or he (or she)doesn't exist. But he (or she) doesn't exist or not exist by virtue of rationalisation. Should God exist God would not be the "object" of rationalisation, but the subject - the agent.
ReplyDeleteIf God existed as a being and not as a philosophical conundrum or the clumsy murderer in a detective story who leaves ready-made clues everywhere, then rationalising would not be a Sherlockian fantasy, but it would mean having a theory of mind (TOM)for God. The question would no longer be. Does God exist? but What is God thinking. That's an even bigger leap.
ReplyDeleteBut we cannot even try to answer the first question without using rationality, of course I understand your point that if God exists his existence is not contingent on our rationalizations of it, we become the objects of history, but that in itself says nothing about his existence, which brings us back to my point, if it is impossible to rationalize God into existence and therefore there are no means by which we can know if a God does indeed exist, then why try to know the mind of something that cannot be known, why be anything but agnostic about the whole matter?
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree.
ReplyDeleteExcept...
Though you may not be able to rationalise the existence of God you may experience it. "A presence" Many people have.
If you are brought up inside a religion and you pray every day then you develop a side of yourself and your psyche that is not there if you are an agnostic and you live as if God were real and to all intents and purposes s/he is. If you walk round an invisible stone then after a while the invisible stone shares some of the properties of the real stone.
In this sense faith is like a bridge. Let's say that in order to communicate with God you need to first be sensitised to his or her presence, because if you don't focus out into what Joseph Campbell called the Ugnown then you never develop that sensitivity.
Well in that case the invisible stone always was real and only by acting as if it were real could you percieve it in the first place.
In other words, there is a bridge of the imagination that takes you from what is real and material to what is real, but in another sense.
Perhaps people who refuse to kneel an pray in stillness to God cut themselves off from ever crossing that imaginative bridge.
Just a thought.
The point is not that nothing can witness to the existence of God, but that th
I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family and I lived with all of the demons and superstitions that came with it, as I left for university I became interested in Buddhism and developed a sense of expansiveness which coexisted with the Pavlovian foundation of my Christian teaching, I almost converted to Islam for some time, was probably looking for something that was familiar but infused was a mysticism that could not come from bible belt Christianity, that same conditioning existing as I went further down the trail of deconstructionism that later led me to atheism, but I think I rebounded back to agnosticism because Ilike many people recognized 1) atheism is too much of a statement of faith in something that cannot be prooven and 2)I needed some inkling of hope in my life. The point being, we develop sensitivities to whatever we believe because we process our information through these paradigms. When I was a Christian God was everywhere, when I was an athiest he was nowhere, when I was a Buddhist I felt myself at one with things, you get the point. What it really amounts to is that walking around an invisible stone to the point of seeing it is not creating a bride but developing a psychosis. Bridges of imagination could lead us to something transcendent, or they could just lead us to controlled disassociation. It's not that I don't want to believe in what you want to believe in, I would like for there to be something more, for there to be consequence to the universe, but I cannot know, just as you cannot know if your brige is, as became popular in the American political cycle with Sarah Palin, a bridge to nowhere.
ReplyDeleteI can smell burning bridges here.
ReplyDeleteAtheism here just sounds like a kind of sanity restored a reset button pushed. But that's not the point is it? Resetting to zero is your healthy agnosticism. This is personal and psychological to you.
How many people in the US would benefit from pushing the religious reset button. Quite a few.
Then there is the question of religion and identity. Of course Palin is not a religious woman. She is extremely irreligious and blasphemous against life with her gun and her neo-liberalism.
That's just a carapace, of course. Identity mixed with religion like a stiff paste making a papier mashe and straw man caricature of religion - but then you knew that.