This morning, I walked by my host mom cutting up a pineapple for breakfast and I began to think again about a topic this has been on my mind a few times at different points during my two months in Costa Rica: how did humans find out that some particularly unappealing fruits and vegetables were palatable and, in fact, quite appealing? How surprised must that person have been who first laid eyes upon a spiky pineapple and decided to cut it open, revealing sweet yellow fruit? What was the person thinking who first plucked a dirt-covered carrot out of the ground and into their mouth? How long did it take for people to realize that bananas taste exponentially better if you wait for them to turn a little brown? Potatoes, kiwis, cantaloupes and coconuts: the list of weird fruits and vegetables is very long. Yet, for all their strangeness, these foods provide just what the body needs.
If you will allow, I would like to propose that Christianity is very much like the discovery of the aforementioned"weird" edible plants . To understand how humanity arrived at either, we must begin with hunger. Just as people have a physical hunger that can only be satisfied with external food, we also have a psychological hunger to know the being or force that created us. Yet neither the "weird" foods nor Christianity were necessarily found on the "first try"for many civilizations. Many fruits and vegetables were undoubtedly tested by humans. Yet some of these did not satisfy the need for nourishment. Likewise, the world's great religions are monuments of man's search for God. They contains some truths, but ultimately we cannot sustain ourselves on them because they do not reveal the living God that is inexhaustibly expressed in the Christian Mystery.
What do I mean when I say "the Christian Mystery"? At its core, I think the Mystery is that the Divine Creator, God, intends nothing less than to share eternal life with us. This earthly life we are all engaged in right now certainly contains mysteries and is itself worthy of tremendous wonder and contemplation. Yet this life is at least tangible to us. We may not understand it all, but we could at least conceive of its existence without God. In contrast, the Christian Mystery-- that the destiny of humanity is not simply a life that is given, whether by God or random chance, but rather a life that is shared in full and everlasting communion with the Trinitarian God-- is a concept that is otherworldly and thus could come through no source other than God. This movement of God, the search for us after our rejection of Him through pride, was so strong that that He willed to make Himself man, in the form of His Son, Jesus Christ. God's quest to bring us back into His grace, to reconcile us, and a account of pure love; a love which had no beginning and will have no end.
At this point, my head hurts and, if you have made it this far, I suspect yours might hurt as well. Yet whereas with many mysteries we can throw up our hands and say we've exhausted all there is to know about the topic, with the Christian Mystery the utter opposite is the case. It is a mystery, not because we can only say so much, but because we can never say enough! It not a mystery shrouded in darkness, but rather one obscured by too much Divine light! Isn't it fitting that the very story of God, who is pure light and goodness, is too bright to fully see from our terrestrial vantage point. Many modern atheists like to point to what the Christian cannot fully explain about God--why He permits suffering, why He allows Satan to exist, etc.-- as evidence of God's non-existence. But the Creator, by definition, cannot be fully understood by created beings. Our lives are but a meager paragraph in the Book of Life. Our inability to explain the ways of God is more a weakness in the general human capacity to comprehend, rather than it is a peculiar fault in believers or in Divine Revelation itself.
In the final analysis, the atheist (not the questioner or doubter, but the person who has definitively determined for themselves that there is no God) is a tremendously pathetic figure. He or she would never think of eating a spiky pineapple or a dirty carrot, just like he or she would never think of believing in a God they cannot fully see and understand. What the atheist fails to grasp is that God is necessarily ungraspable by us, by merit of His place as Creator of us! To grasp is to control. The great irony is that the only god the atheist could possibly believe in is precisely the one that would be imaginary, a figment of the atheist's mind borne out of a deep need to control. In lieu of this, the atheist is left with a world that, devoid of God's warmth and life-giving love, is cold and sterile. Or worse, the atheist, incapable of coming to terms with the result of their "beliefs", tries to construct their own religion, preaching the gospel of cultural relativism that permits what Blessed John Paul II wisely called the "Culture of Death".
In the midst of all this sham and drudgery, one of the greatest expressions of the Christian Mystery we can have is hope. With our culture turning itself over to a bizarre and hitherto unseen militantly secular disposition, one which is not only dismissive but antagonistic towards God, it is essential to remember that the Truth of Christ is the same as it's always been, and the Grace of God remains with those who seek his love. Not to take any credit away from the President's efforts to make Catholics go against their consciences, but the Church has been through far worse persecutions under Roman Emperors. Yet the Church is still standing while Rome fell long ago, and will continue to stand long after the United States is mere history. You see, in the great Christian Mystery, Jesus has already won the victory for us. We need only stand on the right side.
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