Without one’s most cherished beliefs, one is left in the dark, without any sort of guide. A false idea provides more direction than no idea at all, and that’s what those around me adhered to, ideas that no longer made sense but went unquestioned nonetheless. They were a placebo to their woes, reassuring them in the face of a chaotic world. I thought somehow the path of independent inquiry would be a short one that an answer would automatically follow after my question. Perhaps if I had a simple question the answer would have been more forthcoming, but I asked the question of how to live, of how to make one’s life meaningful. It was a question that became all the more urgent to answer once the edifice of religion came tumbling down around me. Without a creed to guide me, I had lost my moral compass. What was wrong and what was right? I had to find answers elsewhere, looking beyond what I knew, where I was, and how I had previously thought. I had to critique the very idea of thought and asking questions while trying to find answers for myself.

I remember when my religious convictions evaporated. I was sitting in the middle of mass, wearing one of my thrift store three-piece suits with a bright orange shirt, my hands folded in a gesture of humility. At that moment I considered myself a Christian, more specifically, a Catholic. Somehow I had managed to resolve the issues I had with Church doctrine and Christian practice. I had buried all my doubts at the back of my head, like those around me in school and in the community, barely even acknowledging their existence, let alone the questions they raised. I went to mass with my family, stood up when they said, “Rise,” and sat when they said “Be seated” and always made sure to be the first to say “amen!” before anyone else. It was early February, before Lent began, and the Church year was at a standstill. With less pomp and pageantry going on, my eyes began to wander.

My gaze drifted away from the Priest, who was giving his sermon. I looked around at the congregation. They were all cowered over; their heads softly tucked in their laps like a tornado drill was taking place. I was sitting upright and could see over everyone. I wondered why they were all bent over, why they felt they had to act so humble here when they drove to church in Cadillacs with personalized license plates from their two story homes with those nice bright green lawns. I left the question as it was and brought my line of sight to the ceiling of the church. It was a pale yellow that brought a queasy feeling to my stomach. Before looking back out at the alter I loosened my tie so that I could move my head easier. I looked right in front of me and saw the altar, covered in an immaculate cloth not stained by the touch of sin from us lay people. I remembered what I was told as a youngster, that the altar had a piece of the church’s namesake saint in it. The priest

would kiss the altar before each mass; to pick up some sort of holiness. Looking at the priest I wondered if he was somehow holier now, because he had kissed the fossilized toe of St. Anne.

Soon I began wondering about the spectacle of irrationality before me. What in it was true if it was all simply what we believed to be true? Then if I believed that Christ was not the messiah and pork was evil, would that be any less true? If I perhaps believed that God had an elephant’s head or changed himself into a bull and seduced young maidens, wouldn’t that belief be just as true? Then, if religion was about personal belief how could anyone be sent to hell for eternity if God never revealed himself twice in the same way?

As these questions began to emerge from the shadows of my mind, my eyes continued to wander, desperately trying to find an answer in the church around me. I wanted the answers to be written in the walls surrounding me. I could find nothing that assuaged my concerns; the doubts were growing with each passing moment. Every statement the priest made only brought forth new questions to me, questions which the priest seemed unwilling to acknowledge.

My eyes then came to the centerpiece of the whole church, a massive crucifix on which was attached a wooden Jesus, his hands rising off of the cross. I stared at the figure which hung above the congregation. I looked for an answer in that figure of Christ, I wanted it to tell me what he and his message were all about. Yet the crucifix was silent. Christ’s chiseled face looked down at me with contempt. This had been a man, but the man within him had disappeared into something alien I could no longer relate to, something unnatural and removed from my person. The whole building that was housing him, the priests who spoke for him, and the people who thought they knew him, it all become removed from me. None of it meant anything to me. All I wanted to know was Jesus the man, not Christ the edifice that I had brought up in. I looked one last time at the Crucifix and it had become transformed. It was no longer a man, nor was it a God to me; it was just another piece of wood.

God was dead, I was his murderer. I had nothing left to believe in. I felt alone and helpless. My suburb, which had previously seemed like the ideal pace to live, had become a wasteland before my eyes. I realized that my problems and doubts were not just limited to me; everyone seemed so lost, not knowing why it was they kept going.

My whole generation was cast out in the cold, but was not brave enough to do anything about it. They were lost in a haze of apathy. The solutions of previous generations didn’t make sense to us, but nobody around me was trying to work things out for themselves. It the midst of confusion they all sought refuge in false Gods and idol messiahs. I could sense sympathy from my fellow students, an understanding of my questioning, but none of them wanted to take up the struggle. At this time I was living, but I did not know for what purpose. With the fear of God removed from my life, everything was possible. I could choose do whatever I wanted to, yet no action seemed better than any other. My questioning had led to a grey area where the myriad directions I could live my life in were all equal, leading nowhere. I had become paralyzed from inquiry.

I tried to find solace in philosophy. I thought that reason could replace faith and find a meaning in life. Of all the philosophers I encountered, I felt the closest affinity to Descartes. I saw him in the same predicament as me, standing at a time when human thinking was rapidly changing, when the old beliefs were being challenged by contrary evidence and were consequently falling down. As I read his Meditations on First Philosophy, I felt myself stepping into his shoes. I was able to follow him from his investigations to his conclusions. The work reeked of lonely introspection, the kind I had grown accustomed to. I wanted to believe in Descartes’ model, of a universe controlled by the mind and following rational principles.

As Descartes meditated by retreating to a room with a furnace, I kept myself in my room, only going out for necessities and school. I curled up in my room around the Meditations, engrossed in Descartes methods. He himself was possessed of doubts, concerned that the whole world was the construct of some evil demon. He flirts with the idea that all reality was but a dream. I could relate; everything that had seemed so sure in my life had disappeared in my grasp, vanished like the specters of people and things in my dreams whenever I woke up. Despite his doubt, Descartes could not deny the existence of this mind, and since this mind was never in flux, only his sensations were. Descartes put reason up on a pedestal and I was willing to worship it. Yet there was one problem. He returned to God, or needless to say, never actually questioned God. He could not shake off a belief in God. If he did his whole rational system would collapse, for God could be deceiving Descartes with reason like the demon he had been imagining. Reason was good only because God was good. Descartes’ system had a fatal flaw and it was soon added to my growing rubbish bin of ideas.

I turned to literature to find an answer to my problems. Perhaps freed from the constraints of reason and the impersonal structures of treatises, an answer could present itself. I became immersed in a Russian novel, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I knew the Russian novelists were philosophers at heart, and so I decided to continue my search into the steppes and taiga. As I read the novel, I came to see its plot as schizoid, consisting of two stories. The first is the more famous story of Anna and her tragic love, but the second one is what stood out to me. It was the story of a man named Levin who has a crisis of faith through the novel. Levin comes to see death all around him and in the midst of this darkness he tries to find a light that will lead him. He eventually finds his answer, that the key to life lies is voluntary suffering, in loving one’s fellow man. His solution appealed to me because it was immune to criticism. It could not be assailed by doubts because Le

vin himself understands the irrationality of this way of life, even though it is the only really meaningful way to live. The life of love is without reason, but it is not without purpose for it gives one a point for living. It requires a leap of faith to be believed in; it requires an overcoming of oneself and of one’s own mortality. In the words of Tolstoy I had found the key.

Yet Tolstoy’s philosophy was just words to me, they had yet to be realized. I was without a striking example for me to live by. Who around me was qualified to serve as a beacon by which I could guide myself? I had only read about the way of life I needed to follow, nothing but more words. As I left for Europe for a class trip, I was still searching, this time for a role model. I found one, in the transfiguration of a person whom I had previously rejected as a guide for me in the twenty-first century.

The trip was through Rome, Florence, and Monaco. In a giant tour bus, we meandered our way through the narrow streets to catch a glimpse of the landmarks. Few of those around me knew how to appreciate all the history and culture around us. I walked the ruins of the past alone, while my compatriots drank themselves under the ruin of the present. When we went to St. Peter’s Basilica, I separated myself from the group immediately; I wandered through the sanctuary, seeking solace. I was not paying attention to the artwork around me. It was all the same to me at that point, gaudy baroque freezes and statues. I came to an area with benches, set apart from everything else. I turned to look at what was before me. It was Michelangelo’s Pieta.

It was smaller than I thought it would be. I guess I had read about it and seen so many pictures of it that I thought the statue was going to be enormous. I kept imagining Michelangelo carving it from a mountain, using dynamite, cranes, and jackhammers to make his vision a reality. Yet as I stepped closer, I gradually came to realize that it was not some massive edifice: it was a carving or mother and son, chiseled into its form with nothing more than a sympathetic eye and a pair of skilled hands. At first I shied away from it, not wanting to look at another religious artifact. I thought that was all it was, a piece of propaganda for the Church. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to relate to it, that the process of uncovering the truth underneath the marble would be too much effort; I thought I would get nothing from the sculpture except being able to tell people that I had seen a famous work of art.

I looked at it and at first my worse fears were confirmed. I saw nothing more than an object, some carved mass. It was religious, particular in its appearance to a European mindset, not expressing anything universal. It was a fetish, something revered for magical powers of bestowing “culture” on all those who came in contact with it. I decided to looked at it some more. I made my mind willing to gaze at the edifice critically, with eyes open to taking the work in as a whole, not as just two figures, or a couple of body parts. The pieta began to transform in front of me, it began to reveal its true, underlying content.

For the first time, Christ and Mary were presented in a way that was inviting, not awe inspiring or fear inducing. I stepped closer still and was able to consider for a moment who they were, what they went through, or, more importantly, what they represented and continue to represent to so many people. The marble had a special shine to it, making it look smooth, pure. The subjects were serene. Mary had the face of youth and Christ laid in peace. There was no trace of blood or suffering, Jesus’ wounds were but small holes in his hands. Christ’s body was not that of an Adonis, yet it retained a passive strength from its relaxed dignity. I expected something massive, something towering. What I got was something human, something so real that it made me feel like I was the one made of stone. I saw my model before me. The idea, that the meaning of life is voluntary suffering, became concrete in the form of Mary and Jesus. The suffering of Christ for what he believed in and Mary’s suffering in raising a son that she knew would have to become a martyr, were both voluntary. In choosing how to suffer they gave meaning to their lives, they overcame their own mortality. In the midst of death they are figures of peace.

I wondered why I was able to relate to this sculpture, to this lifeless piece of marble carved centuries ago, and not to my own church, to the flesh and blood representations of God’s will on earth, the priests. Why was it I could relate to the pieta, in fact a more overtly religious work of art, then to my local parish? I think the answer lies in the fact that the appreciation of art is as difficult as asking questions. Art is open to interpretation, it never presents itself clearly, and its meaning must be gleaned by the observer. The church and the priest had no answers for me, because they did not let me ask questions. They forced a meaning on to me. The crucifix I saw repulsed me because it did not allow me to come to my own conclusions, rather it forced a single world view upon me. Unlike the Pieta it was not human, it did was not open to interpretation. Yet looking at art, like asking questions, is difficult because of this openness, art presents no easy answers and challenges the viewer to find meaning within its depth, not from a superficial appraisal of its surface content. The Pieta modeled the human need for questions and answers, beneath its seemingly religious appearance was something deeper, thus I could find an example of loving kindness that I needed to make my solution to the problem of life a reality.