We Are More Alike, My Friends, Than We Are Unalike -Maya Angelou (Human Family)
Christianity is sometimes considered a dirty word in today’s world. There are Christians who serve God on Sunday and then spew hatred the remainder of the week. This version of Christianity often discourages others to take sides or to simply walk away. Many of us are proud to be Christians and are looking for ways to communicate with those who choose not to follow any spiritual journey.
David Brooks (NYT 11.13.25) recently quoted the author Tomas Halik from his book The Afternoon of Christianity, in which Halik said, “A person’s way of being human is the most authentic expression of their belief or unbelief. A person’s life speaks more about their faith than what they think or say about God.”
Brooks continued adding:
“Halik is cutting through the categories we commonly use to define people. These days, a pollster or a social scientist might call you up and ask some superficial questions and put you in a box like “believer” or “none” (a person without belief). And somehow people are content to accept and live within these crude categories of separation…When you look at people only at the shallow level of their stated beliefs, you see ideologies that are likely to clash. But when you look down into the depths, you see struggling people in all camps, wrestling with impulses they can barely control or understand.”
Brooks is not the only person examining Halik’s book. Ron Rolheiser, a Catholic priest, and theologian contends Halik is not proposing that faith, Christianity and churches are dying but that Christianity “finds itself in a certain cultural homelessness, in a time where so many social structures that once supported it are collapsing, so that the Christian faith is now needing to seek a new shape, a new home, new means of expression, new social and cultural roles, and new allies.” Rolheiser determined Halik believes the challenges facing Christianity today invite us to bring faith into a new space, like Paul did when he brought Christianity out of the confines of the Judaism of his day.
John Saxbee (Churchtimes 4.26.24) contends Halik’s vision of Christianity “is gilded with hope for the future of faith predicated on affirming, and fanning into a flame, a hunger for spirituality seemingly at odds with the siren voices of secularism. It will be more about faith as trust than faith as belief. Halík tempers such radicalism with the hope that faith can still be religious — but it is religion that must be more spiritually experienced than theologically dogmatic: “the Church is founded upon a rock, but it must not be petrified.”
David Brooks explains, “we have been a hopeful people, a people on the move, defined more by our future than our pasts… American history has been at its best when the passion for spiritual and moral growth has been just as strong. When people have said: ‘I want my heart constantly enlarged, my nation constantly moving toward fairness.’ Eventually, Americans, restless as any people on earth, will want to replace threat with hope and resume our national pilgrimage. When that cultural and spiritual shift occurs, a lot will change in our religious and political life.”
Halik contends that we need to search for Jesus Christ not just in our scriptures, our churches, our worship services, our catechetical classes, our Sunday schools, and our explicit Christian fellowship, though, of course, we need to search there. As the world makes less and less explicit space for Jesus, we need to search for him more and more in those places where he is anonymously present:
“Let us search for him 'by his voice' like Mary Magdalene; let us search for him in strangers on the road like the disciples on the road to Emmaus; let us search for him in the wounds of the world like the apostle Thomas; let us search for him whenever he passes through the closed doors of fear; let us search for him where he brings the gift of forgiveness and new beginnings.”
As I listen to the news and the malignant, deprecating verbiage crossing the airwaves, I will catch onto Halik’s coattails as I try to remember the words of Abraham Lincoln from his first inaugural address in 1861, which still gives me hope:
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Eileen Brogan