What else is there?
Nat wrote a great post about choosing what to believe, but I don't know if I fully believe (hah) it. I feel like I'm trying to choose to believe something right now, and I'm struggling. I'm piling evidence and prayers and experiences and I'm ultimately waiting for a light switch that will suddenly turn everything on for me.
I keep coming back to something I wrote in an earlier post: "well, you don't have to be Catholic." The implied question here is, so why put yourself through all this? My answer in that post was an insufficient one, and one that even I wasn't convinced by. It was an answer that I gave to be a bit more palatable and a little more vague to the atheists in the room. An answer lacking conviction and certainty.
When American novelist Walker Percy was asked a similar question, "Why be Catholic?" his response was, "What else is there?"
Those words have been ricocheting around in my head ever since I heard them. It's a beautiful response. It immediately marks any other alternative as lacking. There is only one answer, and one truth. My brain knows this. My heart is moved by it. But there is still something inside me that resists.
In that same interview, Percy is then asked, "How do you account for your belief?" He says, "I can only account for it as a gift from God."
This quote specifically is why I hesitate to say that we can choose what to believe. At least, that one can choose to believe in God. I've heard from multiple times that faith is given. Faith, after all, is a mystery. Maybe we can reason our way to God, but without faith, we're still not quite all the way there.
That then brings to mind a question that I'm too afraid to ask out loud, and one that has been on my mind for a long time now.
Are some people just not meant to know God, no matter how hard they try?
Now, I've only been trying for a few short months. And honestly I don't know what I'm doing whatsoever. I recently talked about these struggles with someone who I hope to confidently call as friend in the future. He said that to be in it is how you grow. He invited me to a faith study group, which I did sign up for. I'm nervous. I already feel like an imposter. But I want to be in it. I guess choosing to be in it is a form of choosing to believe it.