Is there a place for God in the post-modern world? The priest lamented in his homily how attendance of Sunday masses all over the West has decreased so dramatically to only a “handful.” He accused the post-modernists of not believing in God. From where he sat with his family in the church, one of the faithful wondered why the Mass celebrant thinks as if post-modernism was some sort of insidious movement out to destroy religions. For his part he lamented this notion and wondered if this might be the reason religions seem to be losing their place in the world.
Post-modernism is only a set of words now used to refer to the changed nature of the times since modernism. It does refer to changing attitudes among people. But it is not a concerted movement, not an ideology, not a conspiracy, not even a philosophy to justify a lifestyle. It is only a study of how people change or have changed over time. And the picture is not entirely bleak. Or if it is, you cannot blame it all on post-modernists. That would be like saying, we are blaming everything on the fact it is 2012.
And it is worthwhile to recall that when we were kids, priests also worried about modernism and how it was producing a libertine world preoccupied mostly with sex and pleasure. Even then, they blamed it for how churches everywhere seemed less vibrant than say, in the time of the Renaissance when artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo produced some of the greatest art of human history.
From where he sat, he felt his attention drifting slowly away from the homily. He wondered to himself: So if modern and post-modern times have not been good for the Mother Church, when was the Mother Church’s best of times? When were her golden years? He thought backwards and decided that could not possibly be the time of the Renaissance. Those were a time of the Inquisition and a period of many wars marked finally by Martin Luther’s rebellion. He kept thinking backwards in time until finally he realized that every epoch seemed both the best and worst of times for all religions in general. What were the golden years?
He decided finally it would have to be the time soon after the Resurrection, the time of the apostles and St. Paul when Christians were mostly persecuted and it was an unlawful religion. At those times, the church would not have been saddled with so much institutional baggage and so much bureaucracy. There would have been very few Christians and priests were not trapped inside convents and churches but travelled far to where they were most needed. Christianity was still to be the idea that would change the world, instead of what it seems to have become; a religion that seems so afraid of change.
And yet, the world will change notwithstanding what names we use to describe that change. Modernism and post-modernism are only names, really. And we coin them simply out of the need to talk to each other about these changes that become obvious all about us. How could we talk about them if we did not have names to describe them with? If there is a waning of religion now? It is not because of post-modernism. It is because of everything else besides.
From where he sat, the post-modernist Catholic wondered how his Catholicism is different from the Catholicism of a previous time. Both the ancients and the modernist believed the truth was universal. The word universe itself presumes there is only one single universe. Consequently, there is only one true God and He would outlast all the other “false” ones.
For himself, he believes that question was not for him to answer definitively. The Gospel according to St. John begins: “In the beginning was the Word…” That told him that religion was the written story of God. If he believed the story, he must believe out of love and faith. And yet he knows his own belief is neither superior nor inferior to what others believe. At most they would only be equal. What would keep a just and loving God from designing the universe so that every God would be just as good and important as another? And why not provide a place here for all manner of faith? Where he sat, he prayed to his God that he and his children would never have to die for their religion. And then he prayed for the grace that they would never ever have to kill for it.
But if religion is the written story of God, it is a story that is being written even now in these post-modern times. Our own stories eventually become part of it. We too determine how it will finally be told. These are times when the veracity of all religions is repeatedly being questioned by what we now know because of science. Yet the real truth will always be beyond the grasp of even the most advanced sciences. We will always need faith. But what good is faith if it does not build for us a more loving and tolerant world? Is there a place for God here? It seems the height of human hubris to think we provide God his place in the universe. If we believe we must also know that it is not us who provide God His place. It is the other way around, as it always has been and will ever be.