Being Catholic and a student of literature, and having spent twelve years of my life in Seattle, it seems funny to me I’d never read Mary McCarthy’s Memories of Catholic Girlhood. Recently, though, I read it and enjoyed it. In engaging prose she details her coming of age. Besides the glimpses of old-time Seattle, what I liked best were McCarthy’s reflections on Catholic education, her account of life at boarding school, and her chapter detailing a summer trip to Montana.

Intriguing, too, was her account of her loss of faith. The whole business began with her gambit, as a twelve-year-old, to gain attention during a retreat. She decides to pretend to lose her faith and then regain it before the retreat’s end. The scheme wins her audiences with two priests, who try to bring her back into the fold by advancing proofs of God’s existence. By week’s end, however, McCarthy finds she actually has lost her faith.

The tale left me admiring the subtlety of McCarthy’s mind but also wondering how much faith she had to begin with. My own experience and countless encounters with believers and non-believers alike have shown me that rational arguments have their place but are peripheral to faith. I don’t mean that faith has no need of rationality. On the contrary, every believer I’ve known has had his or her reasons to believe – and for me as a seeker it was certainly important to learn that people I considered intelligent also believed in God. But people’s truly decisive reasons for believing seem typically to be grounded in experience rather than in assent to intellectual “proofs”. The believers I’ve known have believed, by and large, because in some sense they have met God. 

Thus does prayer ever stand as the true threshold between agnosticism and faith – for prayer opens the door of the heart to welcome God in. Taking this step is, in effect, a form of surrender to God. It’s a scary thought, even for one who, like me, has been trying to do it for forty-two years. The question remains: Do I dare let God take charge?