I found myself last Wednesday reading Archbishop Charles Jason Gordon’s book, 12 Reasons to Believe in God (2022). He had given it to me, graciously inscribing, “With gratitude and blessings.”
The book is his reasoning about the existence of God, how the clash between faith and reason is resolved, whether the universe had a beginning or is eternal, and the perennial debate over biological evolution vs creation theory.
The book is spiritual therapy in a saddening environment filled with daily doses of ugly news, murders, and propaganda exchanges, leaving no room for fresh ideas or proposed solutions for progress.
However, the “ugly news” has a profitable market, the “whole, whole, whole blinking market,” so much so that even those in places to bring light get crowded out. So we are all going down the road together.
The great value of the very affable archbishop’s book is that even atheists and “lost souls” will find it educational. He writes with such humility and intellectual honesty. Faith in the existence of God has become a shelter, not only for the depressed or lonely, but also prompted by a spiritual impulse to fill a yearning space.
Fr. Gordon’s 95-page journey, from a skeptical Saul to a well-qualified theologian, spiritual philosopher, and now inspiring missionary, explains: “You may say I am writing all this because I am a priest and an archbishop. I can assure you that I am a priest and an archbishop because I struggled hard and long with belief and unbelief.”
He humbly confesses his own early weaknesses, his taunting doubts over faith, and the spiritual struggles to fully believe in God. He admitted the two times he “bumped into doubt.”
Once, at 20 years old, he recalled: “As I walked out of mass on a Saturday evening, I heard myself saying: unless I find a reason for going, I do not think I will go back.” Like many others, I too faced such doubts, especially when I think like a social scientist.
I see the doubt which faced Archbishop Gordon not just as a cognitive experience, but the temptation from Satan himself. And at that time, he apparently did not yet have the spiritual fortitude to say, “Get thee behind me, Satan” – a test we all face at one time or another.
His “second doubt” arose when, in his third theology year, he went to the soup kitchen at Duncan Street, Port of Spain. On his way back to the seminary, he questioned: “If the poor have a special place in God’s heart, why, when I pray for trivia, I get it, but when the poor pray for serious stuff, God does not answer?”
Well, when it comes to “God not answering prayers,” half of the world is likely asking that same question. Poor people praying but still starving, families praying but their homes are bombed out, priests pray and still get robbed, etc. Even in Trinidad, so many churches, so many prayers, and so many murders and crime against the prayerful. And still, the faith remains.
Of course, I understand Fr. Gordon’s light-hearted examples of doubt. But I also believe that there is something else, something higher,
