Naïvité

We read “I Heard The Owl Call My Name” in my literature class last quarter. It is the story of a priest who is stationed in a remote Native American village on the coast of British Columbia, Canada. At this village was a teacher, a man there to make good money so he could then travel to Greece to study a culture he was actually interested in.

The priest and the teacher bumped in to each other at one point, and had a brief interaction. The teacher bluntly told the priest that he had no respect for religion, that it was misguided and that “all religious people were naïve.” The priest agreed and responded saying, “there were two kinds of naïvité, he said, quoting Schweitzer; one not even aware of the problems, and another which has knocked on all the doors of knowledge and knows man can explain little, and is still willing to follow his convictions into the unknown.” I think this is a brilliant response, but not the point.

The point is that we had group discussions about this particular chapter and one group, in response to the question “Why does the teacher call all religious people naïve?” said “Because they believe something that he doesn’t believe.” Perfectly put, and it made me realize something. The non-religious like to put the “burden of proof” on the shoulders of the religious, to prove that what they say is true and not tomfoolery. But often it is forgotten that the acceptance of a reality of God is as much a question of what a non-believer or atheist does not believe as it is a question of what a religious person believes. Christians believe that Jesus was the son of God. Non-Christians disagree. Perhaps Christians, or other “religious people” can’t “prove” that God exists, but neither can the non-religious prove that she does not. To even make the claim, in fact, seems as far-fetched, if not more, than the former.

And I can’t say much, but I can say that being here, I have seen people accept and see the reality of God day to day and it is a humbly experience. It makes me sad to think of how quickly “Christianity” gets disregarded as antiqued, simple-minded, and especially arrogantly exclusive in North America (at least the two most Northern countries). For some, perhaps this is what Christianity means. But to so many, it is so beautiful, so rich, so full of truth and so incredibly inclusive that I often wonder how it could have found itself so misrepresented. It makes one begin, just begin, to understand and relate to why so many Muslims are so frustrated with the misrepresentation of their own religion across the globe. As Nietzsche says, the less you know about something the easier it is to have a strong, clear opinion about it. I just hope all the truth and beauty in the profoundly rich traditions of the world could start to get a greater amount of the attention and focus in these increasingly secular days. That's all I got.