The Big Tent

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For several years, I’ve grown tomatoes in my back yard. I usually have only four plants, and some years they have yielded lots of fruit (or are they vegetables?) while other years have been stingy. Even in this year, a good one, the size and quality of the tomatoes have varied widely.

Humans are like tomatoes. Our human genomes may be nearly identical to each other, and we may have many cultural similarities, but we’re also very different. And we like to compare ourselves to each other.

As I mentioned in a blog about the tendency to judge others, Christians who are serious about their faith find it hard not to disparage those who may not appear to be as zealous. In the Catholic Church, in fact, some have suggested that we should expect and welcome a smaller church, one that comprises the “true believers.”

It’s sort of a “take-it-or-leave-it” attitude about religion. If you can’t summarily accept everything the church teaches, you should leave, or shouldn’t bother to search for God. For some, this means that everyone should also accept the devotions and peripheral religious practices of some church members.     

Thinking about it, I may have been guilty of this kind of thinking. I used to mentally mock baseball players, mostly Latinos, who incessantly made the sign of the cross when coming to bat or starting to pitch. God has more important things to do than to help this player in a game, I thought.

I’ve changed my mind. What makes what I want from God more important than whatever the athlete wants, whether it’s victory or protection from injury?

I’ve also been reproachful of the religious devotions of the "uneducated," having a vague feeling that they “border on the superstitious.” I now realize you don’t need a theology degree to be close to God. In fact, that may not be advantageous at all.

A recent America magazine article by Frank DeSiano, a priest of the Paulist Fathers, whose special ministry is to estranged Catholics, explored this theme. 

He cited the famous Gospel parable of the sower and the seed, the opening parables in the gospels of Mark and Mathew. Jesus makes a point about seeds that are productive and seeds that are not, but also the gradation among the productive seeds – those that yield thirty, sixty and a hundredfold.

You can presume that Jesus was talking about a continuum from 1 to 100, acknowledging that our degree of commitment and the fervor with which we embrace the faith will vary widely. If you “score” in the 1-100 range, writes DeSiano, you are “productive.”

He uses another example that may definitively answer the question about who is, and who isn’t, in “the kingdom of God.” In Mathew’s gospel, Jesus tells the story of the judgment, when he separates the “sheep from the goats.” The sheep are rewarded; the goats punished. What distinguishes them?

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“I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink….” The interesting part of this story is that the sheep themselves are unaware that they did anything to warrant their reward.

“Master, what are you talking about?” the sheep ask, according to The Message translation of Mathew’s 25th chapter. “When did we ever see you hungry and feed you, thirsty and gave you a drink?

“Whenever you did one of these things to someone overlooked or ignored, that was me – you did it to me.” 

Doesn’t this mean that we can’t fit people into our categories about who is and who isn’t a child of God? And it may mean we shouldn’t try to fit ourselves into these categories, either. Writing to the Romans, Paul urges his readers to see things as they are, “each according to the measure of faith that God has apportioned.”

God, it seems, accepts anyone who seeks him/her, “true believer” or not, holding the “big tent” view long before the term was invented. But if so, why be a Catholic, or a Christian, or a member of any religion? Why not just settle for being a good person?

You can, of course, but the more you achieve goodness, the more you may want a closer relationship to God, the author of goodness. And, the more fulfilling your life may be. As my mother used to say, “Anything worth doing is worth doing well,” so it is a rational goal to improve our “spiritual” lives, becoming more empathetic and helpful to others and closer to God. And “cool” or not, religion can help us do that.

My view is that we’re each drawn to God in different ways. Or, to use the active voice, God draws us to him/her in different ways. Were we born into a religious family that has passed on its faith to us? That may be the right path for us. Or, we may feel the need to explore other paths that lead to the same goal.

So does that mean that the paths are equal, or that it doesn’t matter what path we take? Not necessarily. We have to find the right path for us, and traditional Christian theology maintains that God guides us in our choices. We should be open to his/her gentle invitations.

So, what about the “true believers” versus “ordinary Christians?” Do we all have to burn with zeal about religion, or talk and think about it all the time, or appear to be religious? No way. Trying to appear to be more than ordinary in our faith may be a fatal attitude. Truth is, we need to be sincere, persistent and patient in our search for God and understand that “finding” him/her can take a lifetime.

We should take a cue from the tomatoes. They’re big and small, flavorful and not-so-flavorful. And they take practically a whole season to ripen.