Just the other night my wife and I watched the movie, ‘Angels and Demons’. In one scene Tom Hank’s character, Robert Langdon is asked by the Camerlengo, ‘Do you believe in God sir?’ To which he ultimately replies, ‘I am an academic…my mind tells me I will never understand God’. The Camerlengo then says, ‘and your heart?’ Langdon answers… ‘tells me I’m not meant to…Faith is a gift that I yet to receive.’
And in my mind and heart, that about sums it up… that belief in God is only possible through faith alone.
Even my 8-year-old son who ‘knows’ that Jesus Christ is God because of what he has been taught, can appreciate on a very basic level the difference between a belief and reality. One night a while ago as he went to sleep he expressed his fear of being alone because he was not physically near his mother or me. I tried to reassure him that Jesus was with him in his room but since he could not see or touch Jesus, that thought was no more comforting than knowing his parents were just 20 feet away in another room.
Unfortunately this conflict between belief and doubt exists in the lives of adults and perhaps to a degree even within the Christian community. Because we are human we have human weaknesses, and fear and doubt are just that, weaknesses. And this is why prayer is so important. Prayer, particularly when it is truly contemplative redirects our thoughts away from our weaknesses and our imperfect world and focuses them on God. And I firmly believe that when our innermost being, our soul, has God at its center, the belief that God exists is no longer a metaphysical concept but a physical reality.
(As an aside, just the other day, my son asked me, ‘Dad, can you transplant the soul?’ I proceeded to explain that you could not; that the soul was not an organ in the body that could be taken out. He asked me what the soul was. So, I told him that it was a gift from God that lives all through our body and allows us to be like Jesus and close to him. Seemingly satisfied with that answer he then asked me what organs could be transplanted and which one was the hardest to do…)
And so if prayer is a daily part of our lives, God will become a part of that life, and then our actions will truly become a reflection of Jesus Christ in the world in which we live.
‘Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” ‘
John 20:27-29
A while back I had been performing a spinal surgery in which I had to stabilize an area in the lower back by inserting some rods and screws into the bones of the spine. It is a procedure I had performed hundreds of time before but on this particular occasion I was employing a new technique. Thus, I relied on intraoperative X-rays and electrical neurologic monitoring rather than open visualization to insert the screws into the spinal bones.
For some reason I had difficulty positioning one of the screws despite the fact the X-rays indicated I had selected the exact entry point and trajectory that I should have. After multiple attempts, my frustration was apparent to all in the operating room.
It was at this point, I paused for a moment as I will occasionally do and took a deep breath. This time, however I rested my hands on the patient one over the other, bowed my head slightly, closed my eyes and said silently to myself, ‘God, Please help me’. I then opened my eyes, resumed the case and proceeded to immediately place the screw in the correct location on the very next attempt. I then let out a verbal sigh of relief, lifted my head and said aloud, ‘Thank you God’.
From the corner of the room, Peter, the X-ray technologist spoke out, ‘You just said a prayer there, didn’t you?’ I looked up and said to him, ‘You bet I did’. As I said that something occurred to me… not only did I rely on God to help me, which I often do but I professed it openly, which I don’t do enough! Not only is praying helpful to me in doing what I do but letting others know that I do and that it is important to me changes more lives than just the patients that I treat.
And so this brings me back to my original thought… the importance of faith in resolving the never-ending battle between belief and doubt…good and evil. Even I have doubts that creep into my consciousness: not that, ‘is there a God?’ but, ‘do my prayers really make a difference?’… ‘How can I be sure God really hears me?’ The thing of it is we can never be humanly certain, only faith can galvanize certainty in our soul. Faith truly is a gift and those without it should pray that they receive it.
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