As Good
Friday was approaching, I was reflecting on one of the most consequential
events in human history—the death of Jesus of Nazareth on order of Roman
authorities. Paula and I were both raised Catholic, and, through different
paths, ended up as ex-Catholics. As ayoung woman, Paula began visiting other
churches as well as synagogues. My break with the mother church was more
abrupt. “Losing interest” would be an understatement.
My dad taught for many years at my home city’s only Catholic
school, and so it was especially embarrassing for him when I refused to go through
the rite of Confirmation. This was not simply a case of being stubborn—though I
had a well-deserved reputation for stubbornness. I also caught a whiff of
hypocrisy. When we were rehearsing the event, our C.C.D. teacher told us that each
of us would tell the priest why we wanted to be confirmed. I asked him, “What
if I don’t want to be confirmed?” This threw him off his rhythm. I can’t recall
his precise words, but the sense was that I should say something even if it was
untrue.
A less maddening adolescent would have gone through the
motions, reciting words that meant nothing to him, and put the procedure behind
him. Instead, I announced to my parents that I’d decided not to be confirmed.
Neither of my parents was pleased by my decision, but my dad was especially
vexed. Catholicism was central to his identity. He grew up in the 1920s and ’30s,
when Catholics were mistrusted by the Protestant majority.
When I met Paula, I was pleased to learn that she, too,
was an ex-Catholic. For years we didn’t attend church. But we reconsidered our
church-less lives once we were expecting our first child. We met with a
minister in an Episcopal church in Harvard Square about baptism, and the first
question I asked her was whether her church welcomed agnostics. Her response
surprised me. Not only did her church welcome agnostics; the minister suggested
that, she, too, at times, allowed doubt into her faith.
When our son was in preschool, Paula began taking him to the
Episcopal church during Advent and then for Sunday school during the school
year. At first, I did not attend, but these were years when I was reading a
fair amount about Christianity and other religions. Of all the books I read,
the most consequential for me was James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword: The
Church and the Jews. I’d been reading Carroll’s column in the Boston Globe for years, and his
perspective was unlike that of any other writer I knew. He mixed politics and
religion in unexpected ways. In the mid-1990s, he won the National Book Award
for his memoir An American Requiem: God,
My Father, and the War that Came Between Us. In the sixties, Carroll’s dad
was an Air Force lieutenant general who directed the dropping of bombs in
Vietnam; Carroll at that time was a young Catholic priest opposed to the war.
Constantine’s Sword was a more ambitious work. When I
held this 700-page tome in my right hand recently, I was reminded that I still
have vestiges of carpal tunnel syndrome. As the subtitle suggests, the book is
about anti-Semitism going back to the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine,
under whose rule, fledgling Christianity emerged as the state religion—with
calamitous consequences through the centuries for Jews.
My main takeaway, some fifteen years later, is Carroll’s
heterodox interpretation of Jesus’s resurrection. The death of Jesus was, first
of all, a disaster for his followers. Their gatherings, according to Carroll,
“were like those of a bereft circle, and they were built around lament, the
reading of texts, silence, stories, food, drink, songs, more texts, poems—a
changed sense of time and a repeated intuition that there was ‘one more member’
than could be counted. That intuition is what we call the Resurrection.”
Carroll continued: “To the eyes of faith, Jesus was really
present. Whether a video camera could have recorded his ‘appearances’ or not is
less important than the fact that for those who loved him, and for those who sensed
the full power of the love he’d offered to them, the continued presence of
Jesus was no mere delusion…His presence, of course, was different now.” Carroll
went on to underscore the concept that “This is not knowledge of Jesus, but
faith in him.” Carroll describes himself as “one of those haunted friends who
found themselves incapable of believing him simply gone, but I am also one who
knows him in the first place only through the story those first friends
gathered to tell.”
Do I share Carroll’s interpretation? Anyone with a deeply
secular outlook on life—and by this I mean, a skeptical one—has a hard time conceding
that the laws of natural science were once suspended for a brief period twenty
centuries ago. The best I can say for myself is that I am consistent in my
unknowing.