2001 CONFESSIONS
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Contents © 2001
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

DECEMBER 2001 CONFESSIONS

FRIENDLY DISCUSSION

During college, I visited an old high-school buddy of mine who was attending USC. An atheist -- or at least a person who did not believe in anything like a personal God -- he had fallen in with a bunch of bluff, good-natured Catholics who had attended Catholic high school in Chicago. My immediate impression of them was that they dragged themselves to Mass on Sunday, but that they did not let being Catholic interfere with having a good time. My friend told me that he suspected that he knew more about the Faith than they did. My response -- thought of weeks later -- was that, however little they knew, they knew that what they knew was true, and that was no small difference.

I once proposed to begin a correspondence with this fellow regarding my faith, and he agreed to participate. But when I sat down to write the opening salvo, I found I didn't have the heart for it. Perhaps because it would have been just that -- a salvo, a strike against his unbelief. I think I sensed that unleashing a storm of arguments for faith, however brilliant, would probably not result in his conversion, and a storm of arguments was all I really had to offer him. I did not love him much by then, and as my old Jesuit confessor once said, "Christianity is essentially an intellectual religion, but souls are most often won for it through the heart."

Far better, according to the little "How to Evangelize" pamphlet I picked up at a youth retreat in Steubenville, to begin by "making a friend." That way, efforts toward conversion would not have the character of an attempted conquest. And now I find that I have done just that, though not with any eye towards conversion. I find that my circle of intimates, so small as to be hardly worthy of the name "circle," includes a non-Catholic, possibly an unbeliever.

I say possibly -- how can I not be certain? How can this man (call him David) whom I grace with the name "friend" have a spiritual life that is unknown to me? Part of it has to do with his mode of relation -- more than anyone I know, he continually asks questions. He doesn't hide behind them -- he answers my own questions readily enough -- but his curiosity seems limitless. He has a gift for getting me to talk. He is an excellent listener; part of the reason I blather so is that I feel I have in him a sympathetic, interested ear. I tell him of my struggles against Satan, of my efforts with prayer and penance, of saints' interventions and signs of God's providence. I have no idea what he thinks of all this. I flatter myself to think that it serves as a kind of indirect witness.

David attended the same Catholic college I did. We were not particularly close then, but he married a friend of my wife's (a Catholic herself), and that proved the occasion for our friendship. One of his wedding party failed to show up; I stepped in. I listened to him promise to accept children willingly from God, and to raise them in the faith of the Church.

Later, I became godfather to his first child. When our families get together, he almost always joins us at Mass.

He has kept his promises at the altar, but children are cause for worry. It is axiomatic that fathers play a huge role in determining whether or not their children remain in the Faith. I am godfather to his son -- how to explain to the boy that his father does not share the faith in which I hope to keep him? How will he answer his son's inevitable questions -- "Dad, why don't you receive the Eucharist?"

My mother, who is very fond of David, nevertheless thinks that it is pride that is keeping him out -- he knows the Church, he loves its members, he obeys its teaching. I tend to be softer in my own judgement, perhaps out of sentiment. I sympathize somewhat with an attitude I can imagine -- a desire not to be converted by simple proximity, to join the fold just because those you love are already inside. A soul might be loath to be absorbed as if by an amoeba. A soul might balk at an otherwise reasonable step. And of course, faith is not reason. Faith is a gift. Even the desire to pray for the gift of faith is a gift, as Augustine argued, citing the line from Paul, "What do you have that has not been given to you?"

I feel such a commonality with him; it is easy not to think of this distance between us. But it is there, and I have to think of it. I fear that the question "What do you think of the Church and the faith it proposes as true?" might make him feel that all that came before was merely prologue, an attempt to soften him up for the business of getting him into the club.

I fear the loss of a great friendship. I think I am going to have to ask him anyway.

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