Points Summer Book Club

There's a book called "Chance of the Dance?" by Thomas Howard, an apologetic for Christian faith whose title poetically poses the question, "Is life random and meaningless, or is there a hidden order that gives seemingly random events a deeper meaning?" The question has everything to do with hope. Hope is not the same thing as optimism; hope is the fundamental conviction that no matter what happens, there is transcendent meaning present in human affairs. There is no such thing as meaningless sacrifice, because even if we can't fathom the meaning in a tragic event, we have faith that the meaning exists. To cease to have hope, then, is to yield to despair and nihilism. It is to embrace death, even though we may continue to live.

Here's a key passage from Chapter Six:

The front is a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen. We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. Over us, Chance hovers. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall.

It is this Chance that makes us indifferent. A few months ago I was sitting in a dug-out playing skat; after a while I stood up and went to visit some friends in another dug-out. On my return nothing more was to be seen of the first one, it had been blown to pieces by a direct hit. I went back to the second and arrived just in time to lend a hand digging it out. In the interval it had been buried.

It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hours' bombardment unscathed. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.

Once again, the soldiers are depicted as having been reduced to the level of beasts (who else lives in a cage?). The randomness of death has made them, in Paul's accounting, unable to believe any longer that there is meaning behind their deaths, and in turn, behind their lives. These Christian peoples have been regressed by the crazed violence to a pagan belief in Fate.

I don't know to what extent this represents Remarque's loss of faith -- he was raised Catholic -- or whether he is simply imaginatively rendering the way the war tore faith away from many of the men who fought in it. It did put me in mind, though, of the way I lost my Catholic faith (I converted to Eastern Orthodoxy last year). Without opening a debate comparing Roman Catholic Christianity or Orthodox Christianity, I want simply to say that I never imagined that I could exist outside of my Catholic faith. But having to write and investigate the child sex abuse scandal, and to enter into it at a level far deeper than most people, eventually changed me in ways I couldn't have anticipated. It made it impossible for me to continue to live as a Catholic. It wasn't so much that I rejected Catholicism as found it impossible to affirm it any longer given what I had learned and lived through.

Before I started my investigations, Father Tom Doyle, a Catholic priest who sacrificed his career speaking out against the cover-ups, warned me, "If you keep going this way" -- by which he meant if I keep digging into this story -- "you will go to places darker than you can imagine." He was right in every way: I couldn't have imagined what this experience would do to me and my faith. I thought it was all under my control. But as I would learn later, after a lot of dark nights of the soul, events robbed me of my ability to believe as a Catholic. To be sure, many Catholics have endured far worse than I did, and emerged with their faith intact. I'm sure that many soldiers came through World War I, and subsequent wars, with their faith intact, and maybe in some cases deepened. There were no doubt some Jobs in the trenches.

I don't want to be understood equating my confronting the child sex abuse scandal in the Church with a soldier fighting in the World War I trenches. Obviously, that would be absurd. I only make the comparison because it's the only way I can personally appropriate and relate to the point of this passage. When we undertake war, we run the risk of having the most precious thing (to me) any man owns -- his faith in God, and in the hope that entails -- stolen from him.

We think we are the masters of events, the captains of our souls, but to say so is hubris. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.