The Good Book

A parent often speaks to a child in analogies and metaphors that the child’s mind is ready and able to comprehend. These analogies and metaphors get revised from the most simple, when the child is an infant, to real life ‘that’s how it really is’ facts as the child matures. The parent always speaks truth, but that truth is presented in a language that, given the intellectual and social development of the child, he or she is capable of grasping.

I think that God speaks to humanity through his revelation in a similar way as a parent speaks to and teaches a child. God uses analogies and metaphors and parables, and reveals them through the lens of a particular historical moment in humanity’s intellectual development; and, further, through the prism of a given culture that is also in progressive stages of intellectual development.

Thus the stories of Creation, Adam and Eve and Abraham, for example: did God really make the world in only six days; did our first parents really blow it for all of us and bring death, suffering and pain into the world by eating an apple; or is God revealing his truth to us through analogies and metaphors and parables, and at a particular time in human development (3,000 to 5,000 years ago)? Did Abraham really almost murder his beloved son to please God, or is God making a point that human sacrifice is wrong, and not what he wants, by using an analogy that a culture, surrounded by pagan sacrifice of first-born sons to Baal, could mentally grasp?

This does not discount the fact that God revealed truth, and inspired the writers whom he used as vehicles to record that truth. But it tells us that God continues to reveal the same truth in progressive stages of history and culture, when humanity’s intellectual development reaches another level of comprehension.

So, when science presents the biological and anthropological picture of plants, animals and humans evolving over billions of years, this is really not in conflict with our faith. The fact remains that our loving God did truly create us to know, love and serve him. How that fact gets across to us is dependent upon how much we are able to grasp at the time. Could Moses or Isaiah have begun to understand a biological process that unfolded over billions of years at a time when mankind believed that the sky was a canopy with holes cut into it for light and water to get through? If archeologists find some physical proof that Moses really didn’t part the Red Sea in two, but that such a thick fog settled over the beach between the Israelites and Pharaoh’s army that Moses and his people were able to escape, that finding doesn’t diminish the truth that God did indeed rescue and bring the Israelite’s out of bondage.

And if we found out some day that Jesus didn’t use magic to multiply a few loaves of bread and fishes to feed a multitude of people, but that his goodness and love inspired people in the crowd to generously share the food that they were hoarding, that would no way diminish who Jesus is and what his redemptive mission on earth was all about.

Let us reflect on the essence of our Catholic faith: God is the source of all goodness and love; God made us, loves us, and knows each of us by name; God asks us to love and forgive each other as he loves and forgives us; God wants for us to be happy with him forever. That essence is timeless and limitless and unchanging. As we intellectually evolve through human history and culture and are ready and able — through advances in science, biblical scholarship and medicine — to understand and experience more of God’s universe, let our faith and our hearts and our minds not be troubled.  In the words of Saint Teresa of Avila, a great Carmelite nun and 16^th century doctor of the church, “let nothing disturb you, let nothing affright you; all things are passing, God never changes.”