THE JOY OF THINKING [M, 7-13-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

THE JOY OF THINKING                   [M, 7-13-20]

I have always been a bit of a problem for agnostics, and especially for atheists. It is not true that I seek them out just to make them discomfited, although that is sort of a side benefit when I do happen to encounter one.

Apparently, they don’t run into many religious people who are also rational. Probably not surprising. Religious folk and non-religious folk don’t run in the same circles. Except when religious people are writers who would rather hang out with secular authors than those who write Christian drivel. You’ll never catch me at a gathering of “Christian” writers!

I don’t take a lot of credit for being a thinker. I suspect it’s just the way my brain is set up. I enjoy thinking. I do it just for fun. Also, it’s helpful sometimes, but it’s always fun.

I was in a discussion group at a clergy conference. One of the others in the group shook his head in wonderment and said, “You see what’s behind what’s behind.” I was surprised. I thought everybody did.

You’d think that such rationality would have translated into being good at games like chess, but not so. I may be rational, but I’m not patient.

Helen recently said that one of the things that impressed her most about me when we first met was that I had already thought about things. Whatever came up, I had already considered it, rationally. It wasn’t just that I had an opinion ready; that’s easy enough to do without thinking. But I could “show my work,” tell the steps I had taken in logic or planning to get to where I ended up. In fact, I proposed by explaining all the steps that had convinced me we should wed. She married me, anyway.

It’s one of the things I’ve been criticized for in my career in the ministry. “You think too much,” or some variation of that.

There are plenty of times when I’d like to be thoughtless. It would make life much easier.

Easier maybe even with atheists. They can understand why thoughtless people are religious. But not thinking people. At a writers conference, I met a man who shook his head in disgust instead of wonderment and said, “I just can’t believe that someone who thinks as well as you do can believe that religious crap.”

Actually, I don’t believe that religious crap. There’s plenty of that around, and it defies logic. I do believe, though, that there is a whole lot more going on in this vast universe than we can comprehend with our thinking. That’s only logical.

That’s usually where agnostics and atheists get hung up. If they can’t get their minds around something, they think it can’t be true. That limits the truth so much. I’m logical enough to know, with Blaise Pascal, that “The heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know.” I say that as one who has thought about it.

John Robert McFarland