Pillars of faith?

In an extract from his final book, Into Extra Time, Fr Michael Paul Gallagher writes about his concern for unbelief... 

A passion of my life has been to make faith real for people, especially those who find themselves far from church language or what they once knew as religion. I have been blessed all my adult life to have had close friends who were open and unaggressive about their lack of faith. In them I often saw deep generosity and goodness that did me good and that challenged me to live my convictions more fully. The causes of their non-belief varied greatly. Some had scientific reasons for finding God incredible. Others were alienated from and perhaps angry with the church religion of their childhood. Others again were more political, seeing religion as an escape from social responsibility. But many cannot be labelled so easily. Their situation was more of gradual distance than of conscious negation. But all of them were open, at least at times, to honest conversation and none had closed the door to questions and searching.

My concern for unbelievers had a definite moment of birth when I was 21, the year before I entered the Jesuits. I spent an academic year at the University of Caen in the North of France. I was away from the Catholic Ireland of my upbringing, and for the first time in my life I encountered widespread agnosticism among my new French friends, most of whom were baptised Catholics. Rather like Monsieur Jourdain speaking prose without knowing it, I discovered myself doing new evangelisation in my own intuitive way. Various kinds of dialogue with unbelievers – usually friends rather than official groups – have marked my priestly life, and it has been an exciting and personally challenging story. Of course the perpetual tussle between belief and unbelief goes on within me. I live a pendulum between grateful fullness and pained murmuring against the strangeness of God. And I am convinced that this fragility is shared by everyone if only they would admit it. This instability is expressed in so many of the psalms and is found in the narratives even of the saints.

In Caen a simple insight was born, one that was strengthened in later years as a Jesuit, working nearly always in university contexts. I became convinced that most blockages to faith were not on the level of truth but on the level of spiritual freedom. This was later confirmed when I studied Newman and discovered his stress on disposition. He insisted less on arguments than on certain inner qualities or attitudes as essential for a genuine search for religious truth: ‘with good dispositions faith is easy; and without good dispositions, faith is not easy’.

A second insight, born from a year in Latin America, was that in western culture our lifestyles, rather than our ideas, determine our religious openness or lack of it. What we call secularisation produces a sensibility of social distance from faith (and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has written brilliantly on this). A third dimension came from my exposure to modern literature: I realised that human imagination is the space where faith is either starved or nourished. The American poet Emily Dickinson expressed it with typical concision: ‘The possible’s slow fuse is lit by imagination’. In colder words imagination is our faculty of possibility, and if God is the greatest of possibilities, the light of faith needs to explode (Dickinson’s metaphor) not in our minds but in our imaginations.

So three topics – freedom, culture, imagination – came to be natural concerns for me, and in this spirit I explored the so-called frontier areas of fundamental theology, my area of teaching in these last twenty years. Perhaps a fourth horizon can be added. Because of many years in contact with students of literature, I was drawn to an existential spirituality of faith rather than to more academic theologising about it, and this remained my focus even when I taught courses on faith and unbelief in Rome. We live a pendulum, as the philosopher William Desmond would say, between astonishment and perplexity. This lived struggle of faith always seemed to me more in need of attention than the doctrinal content. Spirituality comes before theology: if faith is not an experience of encounter, we have little to reflect on except the words of others. And they will ring hollow unless touched by personal fire.

In all this I cannot leave myself out of the picture. My own faith has gone through times of struggle, even if never for long periods or ever arriving at rejection of God. I can resonate with the remark of an Italian bishop, Bruno Forte, that he wakes up every day as an atheist and only gradually climbs into faith. Or again, I am in tune with the claim of the Czech writer Tomas Halik that we need a lot of patience with God, and indeed that unbelievers often lack patience with the strangeness called mystery. So my concern with unbelief connects with the felt fragility of faith as I have known it. Probably the most common kind of ‘unbelief’ that I experience does not come from arguments or thinking but simply from a spiritual blankness where God becomes ‘unreal’ (a favourite word of Newman’s). At other times God becomes incredible because of the vastness of time and space. Or again, as a friend once put it, ‘faith tells a beautifully attractive love story; it makes perfect sense but is too good to be true’. All this tells something about a tug of war inside me, or at least a lifelong dialogue of different voices. It is honest to listen and fruitful not to run away. And these tensions over faith have sometimes been intensified in these recent months of my struggle with cancer.

Michael Paul Gallagher SJ died on November 6, 2015 after a year-long battle with cancer. During his life he wrote several books on faith and contemporary culture, including Faith Maps, Clashing Symbols and Dive Deeper. He was a lecturer in modern literature at University College Dublin before going to Rome where he was rector of the Bellarmino College and professor of fundamental theology at the Gregorian university.

Into Extra Time, his final book, is available in paperback, priced £9.99.