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The Religion Question Answered - Suzanne Scorsone
The question of religious revivals in the twenty-first century could be addressed briefly enough. There will be revivals in the twenty-first century as there have been in every other century about which we have knowledge. They will take many forms, and whether we think this one or that one is a good or bad thing will depend upon why it arose and what it does. That is a simple answer; for one person's ruminations on the more complex reality, read on.

The human heart has an inherent need for meaning. A restlessness impels us to seek for self-gift to something larger than our own wants, for answers to absolute questions. Philosophers and theologians only ask the same questions children begin asking their parents almost as soon as they begin to speak, the essential questions of the great Why, of good and evil, the self and the other, life and death, and the dilemmas and ambiguities we have no choice but to deal with as we walk in the half-light of our understanding.

There will therefore always be revivals, whatever the date. A millennium is simply the ticking over of a very round number in the human system of measuring a mystery of another sort, linear time. The hype aside, the year 2000 has no magical significance. The only people who, by logic, should be looking for cosmic import in the date are Christians, since it is counted from the birth of Jesus. Scripture scholars, however, squaring events and persons in the Gospels with ancient Roman and other records, have concluded that our present calendar is off by two to eight years. The most likely date for the birth of Christ is 7 B.C. For Christians, the year 2000 will be a jubilee, a moment for reflective rededication, but the real millennium has already happened. For everyone else that date is, or should be, irrelevant. We can all relax; God does not play numerological games with human history.

So the seeking will continue as it always has. We do it as individuals and we gather as groups. We do it as a steady life-search and in episodic waves of response to the personal and the socio-economic challenges, developments, alienations, and stresses we encounter. Since we have been human, we have sought; this at least does not and will not change.

With the seeking, however, comes the discernment of the validity of the answers. We need only look around us or read records of history to know that there can be almost as many experiments with answers to the fundamental questions as there are possible permutations of thought, and not all the answers can be valid, or even constructive. On the level of logic, all concepts are not simultaneously true. There cannot, for instance, both be and not be a God. On the level of practice, those who see all human beings as God's children and hence as family and, by contradistinction, those who account only members of their own ethnic or faith or ideological group as worthy of care cannot both be right. We have to choose, and who we are, or who we become, will be in part determined by our choosing.

There is a reality. The Real is not a mutable projection of our subjectivity. We human beings reach or are led toward it, and some perceptions must, by logic, be closer to what is actually out there than others. Ultimately, our perceptions and choices are the substance of what we think is the closest to the ineffable truth toward which we reach. Otherwise, why bother to act? People do not construct their lives around casual world-view preferences, but around what they think is true. Hence the personal and the communal self-investment in the answers. The seeking and the choice of answers are a matter of individual perception and conscience, but we must do it, not only freely, but knowing that what we choose does matter. Not that it is simple. Mother Teresa sought an answer in one way. Cults, cabals, and radical individualists try to do it in another. Most of us pick our way around the dilemmas somewhere in between.

From the perspective of a believer, one way of putting it is that God is speaking; some hear deeply, some have flawed hearing, and some arrange what they hear-or claim to hear-for their own emotional or even opportunistic purposes. Some people are fortunate in being psychologically or emotionally balanced and come freer than others to the hearing and the choosing. People with all sincerity reach differing conclusions. We must be chary of judging the motivations or the integrity of others-as we find our own freedom in loving them-whether we agree with their perceptions and choices or not.

The quest for ultimate meaning, moreover, can attract the brilliant, the sensible, the insightful, the cheerful, the lucid, the generous, and the robustly sane on the one hand and the vulnerable, the mentally ill, the manipulative, the dependent, and the obsessive on the other, even as it draws those of all states and stages in between-and we are all needy sometimes. Religious revivals, whether collective or individual, can be the earnest yearning for the eternal or they can be the apotheosis of the hokey. The world faiths have a certain wisdom based on experience in sorting out these encounters; new groups are doing it freelance. Every perception of religious experience, however, needs discernment like any other claim to knowledge. We can neither accept nor dismiss all religious movements or experiences as though they were a single phenomenon. They are not.

For that matter, secular movements and commitments can be attempts to wrestle with the same questions of meaning. This is why on the one hand we may see committed religious people and principled non-believers working together in political parties or civil liberties movements, and why, on the other hand, some particularly absolutist movements (Marxism and Nazism spring to mind, but there are others) have a history of attempting to replace religion with their own ideologies of an ultimate meaning of human existence. It is also one reason why political and social movements can be characterized by such fervour, sometimes for great good and sometimes for grievous ill.

In the end, each individual faces the Ineffable, who asks the one question: "Who do you say that I am?" Whatever our answer, the question of meaning is not resolved once, for all. Because groups perceive and gather around in waves in a constructive or flawed but always socially human fashion, there will always be religious revivals and movements of other kinds. For the individual, the question rises with every sun.

In the end, we have to discern the results. Does the answer engender love, serenity, and peace, a humour that is warm about the eyes and does not lacerate, kindness, understanding, and creativity, respect for the human dignity of others and a willingness to work with diverse people toward shared goals, a use of one's gifts for the common good, the service of others where there is no other compensation other than the fact that it was right? Or does the answer engender exaltation of oneself or one's own group above others, self-righteousness or a fear-bound loathing for oneself and for others, an in-grown scrupulosity, anger or power games or irrational dependency on a leader figure, a craving for wonders in contrast to the evidence, alienation or aggression, coercion or hatred?

Discernment, too, is not new. "By their fruits you shall know them."

Suzanne Scorsone is communications director for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto.

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