world youth day
16 Jul 2008
Lost Lunch and Luggage all Part of the Journey
Faith is an experience that is similar to love: it's hard to explain to someone who hasn't felt it, reports Catherine James from inside World Youth Day
If you consider yourself a staunch atheist, you're probably nodding to yourself that religion is indeed "the opium of the people" after seeing the enthusiastic hoards of young people at the World Youth Day opening Mass, that solemn ceremony of Catholic worship with Latin and incense to boot.
But if that's your starting point in trying to make sense of what this sea of teenagers and twenty-somethings are so nuts about, you won't get far. In fact, by the end of this article, you'll probably believe it even more.
I am also trying to make sense of what is going on here in Sydney because so far it's not like anything I have ever seen.
As a theist who identifies with Catholicism, I've known for over a year I would head to Sydney for World Youth Day. I've been going to frequent preparation sessions looking at the history, the structure, and the teachings - both the religious doctrines and the social directives - of the Catholic Church. I have my questions and I've sought answers to them - that is ongoing.
However nothing has prepared me for what I found when I got here. Over the next few days I will attempt to put some of it into words, but I don't expect it will satisfy the cynics. Faith is an experience that is similar to love in some ways. It's hard to explain to someone who doesn't have it, doesn't want to have it, or worse, doesn't even want to understand it. It's not just the "religious" who can be blinded by their beliefs.
But let's leave the esoteric stuff for later. World Youth Day is also an event on a scale of which Sydney has never seen. And some of us are feeling it.
I was on an overnight bus from Melbourne on Sunday night. It appears my group were directed to the wrong bus. Thirteen hours later, after very little sleep, we arrived at Homebush around 9:30am. We had been told another bus would take us to our accommodation (about another 30 minute drive away) from there. That never eventuated.
Four hours later, we were still at Homebush. Some of us hadn't eaten since the night before, and it was now lunchtime on Monday. But in preparation for World Youth Day, we had been reminded that we were not tourists, but we were making a pilgrimage - a tradition in the Catholic Church of a short journey that symbolises the journey of life towards God, which inevitably involves some sacrifice.
And so the hassles were part of the experience. None of the 21 people in our group made a big deal of it. I won't even try to explain this, but it may have had something to do with being surrounded by hundreds of our peers, some decked out in their national colours, dancing, singing, celebrating. It's infectious.
We eventually made it to our accommodation by cabs - paid for by the travel agent who messed up the booking - to a school north-west of Sydney only to discover that some of our luggage was missing. Mine still is.
But if getting to our accommodation was crazy, access to food and water is a whole other adventure - which I'll leave for another time.
We spent much of yesterday in the city before heading to Barangaroo for the opening Mass. In Sydney's Hyde Park, the celebrations - I don't know how else to describe the singing and dancing that is going on - continued most of the morning. National flags are the fashion norm. Everyone greets each other with broad smiles, perhaps the most universal language - if it sounds cheesy I assure you it doesn't feel that way.
I was one of the few lucky ones approached by NotoPope leader Rachel Evans yesterday. The fact that I know exactly what she looks like says something about the coverage her little campaign has been given in mainstream media and sure enough, amid all the amazing nationalities present at Hyde Park - I met people from Brunei, Reunion Island and United Arab Emirates - Evans was the only one being trailed by media.
She walked past me and offered a "World Youth Day condom". I said no thanks but she didn't even bother to hear the response. It was a pure stunt, that was obvious. As they moved on, a 16-year-old who was standing near ran after them. Tapping Evan's sidekick on the shoulder (Evans was hard to reach for the camera and giant microphone following her) she asked, "Why are you doing this?" Again, it barely registered. The sidekick just looked at her and kept walking.
Maybe they don't have reasons for their belief.
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Wow, and we atheists are supposed to be the arrogant ones. Faith is ‘hard to explain to someone who doesn’t have it, doesn’t want to have it, or worse, doesn’t even want to understand it’. What a completely ridiculous statement. Catherine, you seem to have never attempted to understand atheism. Atheism IS faith – it’s faith that people everywhere are united by their humanity, have implicit rights because of that humanity, and want to work to make the world a better place. It’s faith that people are capable of this without resort to superstition. It’s faith that people will do the right thing not because of fear of punishment, but because they have consciences and shared humanistic values. So you’re seeking to answer your questions? How exactly will you do that when your worldview is already restricted? How about you move to China and debate political reform? You can say anything you like as long as you don’t question the one-party system. Or you could move to the US and join a right-wing think tank. You could debate how to fix the problems war has created – you can suggest anything, as long as it involves war. Maybe you’d get involved in ‘faith-based policy’, something that we in the ‘reality-based community’, as one administration official put it, just wouldn’t understand.
Anyway, I hope you have a wonderful time. I hope you come away stimulated and find something that you’re looking for. But don’t presume to lecture atheists on faith.
philannetta.blogspot.com
Why should anyone be required to have reasons for disbelief, Catherine? It works the other way around.
If I assert there’s a teapot orbiting Jupiter (a statement with no empirical data or anecdotal evidence backing it) you don’t have to list your reasons for not believing me.
Rachel Evans sidekick was asked "Why are you doing this?" Isn’t the needless death of thousands of innocent men, women and children through Aids reason enough ?
Yes quite so LIsa.You don’t "understand" faith in the sense knowing in areasoned,demonstrable way. If you say I believe- that’s it. Statement. Unverifiable. Not capable of being understood in any objective way. GOT IT!
It seems very difficult to admit any alternatives to a belief held for fear of the possibility of being wrong. When this involves fear of death as a basis of faith it is very big stakes.
An infallible old bloke in medieval garb? I don’t think so.
An autocrat presiding over the declared second-class fellowship of women? I don’t think so!
And why is shelter given toCardinal Law(ex. BostonUSA) in the curia? Almost enough to shake your FAITH, eh Catherine.
michael
Catherine’s not describing "faith" so much as the thrill of being in a large crowd of like-minded people. People tell much the same story after going to a political rally, music festival, sports match, gay mardi gras. I’m sure it’s great fun.
It’s just a shame it builds influence for an organization with such irrational and harmful policies. Over 50,000 people will have died from AIDS during WYD, and Ratzinger is acting to increase the number.
Yes martin. A crowd of like minded people. Pappa Ratzi may even be reminded of those heady days as a young boy. There are no mistakes there are only lessons.
This is tribal not logical. Big groups are fun, ask anyone who follows a low ranked sporting team that wins a game. Following a poor footy team requires faith.
There are many strange things written in the bible but people like Pell cherry pick their own biases and ignore the rest. The followers follow the earthly leaders and their utterances instead of taking the painful task of working it out for themselves with all the doubt and uncertainty that goes with it. An atheist will change their minds when the evidence of their senses tells them that they were a little ignorant but that same ignorance is applauded when called faith. I am always surprised how little Christians know of the history of the church, even down to believing that the Bible is the direct word of God when it has been translated many times to suit the powers to be of that age.
I met a guy who studied Hebrew (the original speeches were in Aramaic) that said that the passage that ‘you should not suffer a witch to live’ was actually mistranslated from ‘you should not suffer the withered to live’, a call for letting the disabled to die after birth. Either one over rides thou shalt not kill.
Catherine, well, I’m an avowed athiest, and I DO understand faith, and I also know something of love, and yes they’re similar. What I do NOT understand is RELIGION - there’s a big difference and I really object to the way the religious industry (for thats what is is) has appropriated another useful word from our language.
I dont mind if other people are religious or have "faith" as many insist on calling it - go ahead, have all the medievil superstition you want, but please:
1. Dont keep parading in front of me and telling me I’m a lesser being if I dont participate
2. Keep trying to tell me how to live my life through trying to influence our laws (abortion, euthenasia, gay rights anyone?)
3. Make me pay for it through bollocks like government subsidy for World Youth Day and the immoral failure to tax entities as wealthy as the churches (especially the Catholics).
So go on, have religious faith if you want, thats OK by me, I still think you’re sadly mistaken because the whole thing is a lie - that goes for ALL religions.
If that’s like love, it can seem a little like an abusive relationship to me. "Don’t do that, or I’ll be forced to punish you; but it’s only because I love you so much."
Having been a young Christian, I can understand the swell of joy that goes with being in a group of like-minded people - with me it was with a youth group. However, as I emerged from my teenage years, I thought very seriously about what we were being asked to believe and just found that it didn’t make sense. There were too many internal contradictions in the Bible, too much picking, choosing and interpreting of the text to suit the society, too much insisting on the real truth, which just happened to contradict yesterday’s real truth.
In hindsight, it was a great way for a lonely person to find a ready-made group of friends (just add Bibles), but the beliefs were just crazy. How on earth can anyone believe in a just, merciful God who would either create something like the 2004 Tsunami or allow it to happen?
When you finally come to realise that this life on earth really is all we have, it makes you value it, and peace, so much more.
Who makes the most difference: half a million happy clappers or a few hundred faith-based volunteers working in places like Darfur, East Timor, India, etc? The WYD crowd seem from this distance to be rather self-indulgent and self-centred. Christianity that gets no further than worshipping or glorifying has always seemed empty to me. Might be great fun while it lasts but who does it help apart from the worshippers?
There is something holier-than-thou about these posts that makes me think that so-called atheists are not free-thinkers but merely followers of another theocracy, whose god is an absence of god and whose god must be swiftly avenged.
I think Catherine’s post is hardly sermonising and I think splinta’s comments are. As for DavidS, are you a volunteer in Darfur, East Timor or India? If you were you probably wouldn’t have time to write such self-indulgent posts.
I want to have faith, and I want to understand faith. Please explain it to me.
No MikeFel you have missed the point entirely. Atheism doesn’t need faith or an anti-god. It just requires the basic senses that you are born with. Holier than thou is irrelevent because nothing is holey. All that is claimed to holey is that named by man, not by a non existent god.
You simply can’t compare people who will take each situation on its merits and judge it using rationality and the physical senses with people who just know everything because they read one old book and believe in an invisible friend.
As I read on some blog, calling atheism another religion is like calling baldness another hair colour.
Faith is a suspension of rational thought. Atheism is the (attempted, even atheists get emotional and that blinds you) maintainance of rational thought.
So far the most common characteristic of the atheist comment is the willingness to rubbish and dismiss Catherine’s significant experience without even considering that she may be describing something genuine. It is by no means a common experince that those who most deeply seek the truth arrive at an atheist position. You can take the Richard Dawkins route and define God in a way that few theologians would accept and then dismiss the already ridiculous idea. But it may be better to at least consider the idea that many deeply thinking people have encountered something at their own deepest level which they name as God. To ignore the universality of these experiences is hardly rational examination.
Much of these criticisms assume I have never considered, experienced, or understood atheism; that I have never identified with the belief the world was without a creator, let alone an interested creator.
In this article I merely spoke of one experience as a believer, but I have not given you an account of how I arrived at this, so be careful of unfounded accusations. (NB. This is not to suggest I have arrived at my final destination, but I will say I feel closer to it than I have been in the past.)
Another thing, I’ve actually always thought atheism was another kind of faith, albeit somewhat different. I’m sorry if I offended any atheists by apparently saying only I lived by faith, but I thought it would offend you more to suggest you were adhering to just another belief system. Ah, so complicated. Blame the dear person in my life who says he is atheist and always rubbed in that his world view was not faith-based but rational knowledge. He “knows” God doesn’t exist, as opposed to he “believes” God doesn’t exist. But thanks for your feedback. It’s nice to know some atheists recognise their belief is not pure reason.
And BPobjie, I note your request. It’s a tough one. I will seriously think about it. But for now let me say this: I really think having a sincere desire to understand is already half the journey to understanding completed.
BPobje
faith is like a peice of string. Is is like being told you have a place to get too but can only proceed by going half as far as you previously went. Its like knowing you have a square hole but have only round objects to place therein. It is denying representation yet representing. It is the mirror through the looking glass. It is the monad. I think it is a beautiful thing, yet at the same time criminal. Faith is love……… :)
DavidS
I am willing to bet that amongst the crowd of "happy clappers" you will find many of your faith-based volunteers (current and, hopefully as a result of WYD, future).
I’m not going to begrudge the "pilgrims" a few days of hope, celebration and inspiration.
That said, I agree with the sentiment that if you proclaim yourself ‘Christian’, then you better walk the walk or keep your mouth shut.
hahahaha I just read the article Hilarious …. faith is not nationalism, it is not given to you, it is essentially nothing. Holy jesus god botherers, where do you get off???????? Take you metaphysics, enquire into the Masons and then shut up forever…… or if you want an answer you will be able to less understand, Bergson, Foucault, Deleuze … I feel dirty hahahahaha
at least catherine has the guts to talk about her beliefs under her real name, not a meaningless pseudonym
sorry that was harsh batman. but the article is kind of condescending, in a you know if you don’t have it you will never understand kinda way …
So what you’re saying ryip, is that Jesus DOES want me for a sunbeam!
Incidentally Catherine, atheism is NOT a kind of faith, not at all. What offended people was not the suggestion that only you lived by faith; it was the suggestion that those of us who do not live by faith do not do so because we "just don’t get it".
And by the way, waiting around for a bus without complaining is not as superhuman as you think.
Okay. For the record, sorry for giving the impression that people without faith are idiots. If that was the case, I’m the idiot for phrasing things poorly.
When I said faith is hard to explain to someone who doesn’t have it, I meant it for what it said, not as to be taken as some message like “I won’t condescend to explain faith, pagan” or “you’ll never understand faith, thickhead”.
I felt the need to say faith was hard to explain because I couldn’t explain it, not because I thought people were too dumb to “get it”. There’s a difference.
Also, to BPobjie, regarding your previous post requesting to have faith explained: I don’t think I’m the right person to explain it. (And given the comments thus far, quite honestly I’d rather not try in this forum). It’s probably better discussed over a beer with a friend. I’m sure you have a friend or two who believes there is an intelligence behind our existence. Whatever their creed, why not just talk about it with them from time to time? At least if it doesn’t clarify anything it will give you more fodder for your satirical pieces.
PS. I didn’t get your dummy spit about the bus. Your right, waiting for a bus is not superhuman. Is there another subliminal message I’m not aware I’ve written?