Pentecost: Creation is not a lab experiment

Today, we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost. Jesus is no longer with us in the same way he walked among us in Galilee and Jerusalem. Now God dwells among us through the Holy Spirit. Jesus is in heaven and he is here through the Holy Spirit. We experience the Spirit of God in

1. In the scriptures; and
2. In the Sacraments; and
3. In prayer; and
4. In the Church

The notion of faith, that we believe in a man who was executed, but is still alive; who ascended, but who never left us, is dismissed by some as juvenile and unthinking. Reasonable persons know things, they would say, they don’t believe them. To say that you believe is to say that you rely on others for what you think.

The autonomous individual
The American ideal is the person who stands on her own two feet. But, isn’t trusting myself to another inevitable?  

1. You have to believe to live.  Don’t you believe in Proctor & Gamble to know how to make toothpaste, you don’t observe firsthand the way they manufacture toothpaste. You don’t perform a chemical analysis on that squirt of paste on your toothbrush in the morning. We rely on others for almost everything of importance in our life. There is no real option, of course. St. Augustine said, “In practical life, I cannot see how anyone can refuse to believe altogether” (De Utilitate Credendi, 11.25).  Religious faith is not different except “the things believed, not the act of believing them … is peculiar to religion” (John Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, 123).
2. History and science are different kinds of knowledge.  We might actually acquire the necessary expertise to chemically analyze our toothpaste every morning, but no amount of time, equipment and brain power will produce certainty about past events. History and the scientific method are different kinds of things. Belief that the British Colonies declared their independence from Great Britain in 1776 requires us to trust generations of Americans who have passed that knowledge on to us. We don’t know through observation because we weren’t there. But, we all pay our taxes to the U.S., just the same.
3. Science and knowledge of another are different kinds of knowledge.  I can learn about you from your resume, —your hometown, your date of birth— but that is not the same thing as knowing you.  Unless you disclose yourself to me, I can’t know your earliest memory, your greatest love, your deepest fear - it’s you that I cannot know. That is the nature of personal knowledge and it is susceptible of abuse through lies. Please do not respond to an email supposedly from me telling you that I am in jail in Nigeria and to send me bail money. Many think of the Scriptures, Sacraments and the Church like that – spam email making unbelievable claims. Scripture makes claims about reality and we ought to be cautious because it is such a different world that is described.

The Miraculous and the Cosmic Machine
Not everything is an it; some are a who. There are material things in the world and there are persons. Think of the world that faith discloses. God, a who not a what, is the Creator, of the seen and unseen, and sends his Son, another who, who dies on a cross and rises from the dead; all for us. He ascends to where he came from ( if that is the right way to even think about it) and sends his Holy Spirit, another who, who now lives among us. The Spirit of God who moves us through the Scriptures, enters us through the Sacraments and dwells in a Church paradoxically known for saints and criminals, Peters and Judases. The people of God are not all good and they are not all bad and they all believe that God is merciful and hears their prayers.
 
The competing world view comes from the 18 ^th Century Enlightenment movement; the universe is a cosmic machine. It is as predictable as any chemist’s experiment. There is no room for miracles because machines don’t have miracles. The laws of nature are generalizations about what we mostly experience to be the case. What about the exceptions to the general rule? Do they exist?

• As a law, your beloved grandma is a kind person who makes chocolate chip cookies for you. But, one day, a trustworthy friend tells you that they saw your grandmother dropping f-bombs down at Fry’s in the checkout line. You basically have two options. (1) Deny the experience, saying that did not happen because it couldn’t happen; or (2) Adjust what you understand to be possible.
• As a law, people don’t recover from paralysis or blindness in an instant. If someone tells you they were spontaneously healed through prayer or at Lourdes, you can deny the experience or adjust what you understand to be possible. If someone reports a near death experience, you can deny their experience or accept that the world is a mysterious place.

At Lourdes people are healed for no apparent medical reason. That is what we mean by a miracle. Maybe medical science has an inadequate knowledge of the bodies capacity for spontaneous healing. If the body can spontaneously heal itself from paralysis, cancer, blindness, and rise from the dead, then, the world is no machine at all. Miracles happen according to the Creator’s understanding of his Creation, not ours.
 
The abuse of reason
Once you accept miracles like the Resurrection, you are not freed from reason, but from an abuse of reason that attempts to put human limits on Creation and the Creator. Our Creator saves all of his Creation and each us from being just things to be exploited. At the end of the work day, the scientist leaves his chemistry lab, picks up his Limited Edition Avenger lunchbox and goes home to his wife and children. He leaves a controlled environment and enters one that is not controlled. Creation is not a controlled laboratory environment or a cadaver to be dissected but the dwelling of the unpredictable, uncontrollable Spirit of God.