On Serendipity, God and Religion, and Asking Big Questions (includes book review of “Santa Claus, Flying Saucers, and God (Is Anybody Up There?)”)

This Book Review Tuesday we are going in a slightly more serious direction than usual. The topic today: religion. I was asked to review Santa Claus, Flying Saucers, and God (Is Anybody Up There?) by the author, Donald Grey Barnhouse, Jr. He did not tell me anything about the book – just gave me the title and asked if I would be interested in reviewing it. The title immediately intrigued me, because it resonated with me as a reader, constant questioner, and college philosophy major. Plus, there was the fact that he was the second person to ask for a review of his own accord – I continue to find it extremely flattering that strangers want my opinion, I must confess. When I asked him how he managed to find me he said, and I quote, “I can’t tell you how I found your website; it was serendipity at its most anonymous.”

He went on to mention that he has a regular newspaper column and peruses the Internet with an eye for “information and ideas”, and that it was possibly through the good fortunes of Google that he found me. Well now, all that was well and good, and combined with the title of his book, would likely have been enough to draw me in and get me to agree to the review. But it was really the mention of serendipity that hooked me. I am a huge believer in the value of serendipity. I think it deserves more credit for spontaneous good things than it ever gets. Plus it’s fun to say. (teehee)

So serendipitous event that it was, Mr. Barnhouse asked me for a review and I am pleased to be able to deliver it.

First off let me say that I don’t normally read books on religion. Well, actually, scratch that. I don’t normally read books on Christianity and the path to faith. I am rather an innate doubter, a pessimist going way back to my youth and childhood. I am also a consummate questioner. I always want to know why or why not. I don’t come by these traits genetically or through training. My parents are very religious and involved in their church, as was my younger sister pretty much all through college (she also did Catholic grade/middle school and public high school, like me, and then went to St. Francis University, “the oldest Franciscan institution of higher learning in the United States” according to their website). I am the product of Catholic school from kindergarten through eighth grade and CCD (an acronym that, to this day, I do not know how to translate – all I do know is that it means after-school religious education classes for Catholics) through the beginning of eleventh grade. And I fought my way kicking and screaming through those CCD years, until I finally announced one day that I was through, done, kaput.

To this day, I don’t think my parents have any idea what happened – how their little girl went from being second in line in the procession from school to church in her white first communion dress and veil, to skipping church and hiding out at the local Pizza Hut for an hour each week and, only after mass was over, sneaking into the building to snatch a copy of the weekly church bulletin as “proof” that she had attended. To be honest, I’m not sure I have any idea myself. I suspect a lot of it has to do with the “Don’t Question Me!!” attitude of my Catholic education. I don’t have a problem with faith, per se, mind you – I can appreciate the concept as an adult. But as a child, I could never understand how or why all those people involved in “educating” me could (or would want to) keep telling me that I was wrong to ask questions in this one aspect of my “education” when every other teacher I had seemed to believe questions (within reason) were a part of learning.

I believe that my initial questions were asked in a genuine spirit of enquiry – if they wanted me to believe, I wanted to at least understand why they wanted me to do so. And I also wanted to hear from the opposition, so that I could decide for myself what to believe. Needless to say, this is not exactly how dogma works, and my “teachers” at the time were entirely dogmatic. Of course, I’m no angel. Once I started to get frustrated with the lack of answers and the unwillingness to even entertain that there were or could be questions, it is entirely possible that my questions became a tish, well, pester-y and annoying and asked for the express purpose of being so. (teehee again)

All I know is that at some point I felt like a hypocrite sitting through a service that those around me (including my parents) held as most solemn and holy and attended reverently, while I sat there thinking about anything and everything but God, religion, or the service itself. I told my parents this, when I announced that I was finished with church, thank you very much, and would no longer be attending. I was sixteen at the time.

As you would imagine, this announcement was not very well received – a fact that astounded me, as I thought I was extraordinarily grown-up about the whole thing. I mean, I was calm and rational, never yelled, never said “because I don’t WANT TO, that’s why!” or anything of that sort. No sir, not me. I proceeded in an orderly fashion to lay out what were, to me, perfectly well-reasoned and logical points as to why it was inappropriate for me to continue the charade of attendance. (teehee) Um, yeah. Try that with your parents, kids. Pick the thing they feel the most strongly about, the thing that they believe is the utmost example of good in the world, and then tell them you don’t buy it and will no longer be participating, thank you very much. Good luck with that. I suspect you will have about as much luck as I did.

Needless to say, despite my best-laid plans, yelling ensued. Not so much my yelling. Not at first. But after hearing about how I was a child and didn’t know what was important and that someday I would find my world falling apart and would need something to believe in, well, I reacted as a child would (because let’s be honest, at sixteen you are still a child, no matter how highly you think of yourself – and yes, I only came to realize that fact as I lived past the age of sixteen). I yelled back, I cried, I probably said mean and hateful things the way only your children or people who love you can. But I stood firm in my resolve, punishment be damned.

Since then I have dabbled a bit in religion. I have, at various times, found myself needing something in my life, and have tried a few forms of organized religion on for size to see if they could meet those needs. To date they have not. I have always believed in Something Larger – the concept of God is not my problem; organized religion is. It has just never felt like a natural fit for me. I don’t know if it ever will, or if I simply have not found the right fit.

Anyway, that is a VERY long way of saying that I was intrigued by the concept of Mr. Barnhouse’s book, and is also meant to give you a context for my review.

The book is divided into sections and laid out rather as a journey from questioning the possibility of a God/higher power (using aliens/UFOs and Santa Claus as the examples in a series of clever analogies) to exploring what such a concept might entail to developing one’s own faith in the concept. The writing style is straightforward and the journey is generally easy to follow, although there were a few times when I had to reread a section to make sure I was seeing what Mr. Barnhouse was trying to show me. I particularly noticed this as the writing became more impassioned during the discussions of faith and the acceptance of God. I can certainly appreciate getting excited about what one feels most passionately about, and know that can make it more difficult to lay things out objectively and clearly, but it made the reading in those sections a little more difficult for me, as one who does not innately share that passion/excitement.

Throughout the course of the book, Mr. Barnhouse’s faith is readily apparent but never in an aggressive or condescending way. I appreciated that, and found myself paying closer attention as a result. He is more objective in the early sections of the book as he is discussing arguments for and against God than he is in the later sections. Again, this is no great surprise given the nature of the subject matter and his own feelings on it. Still, at no point does he try to force faith on his readers or bludgeon them with his, and again, I appreciated this. While I got the impression that he would be pleased if he made/found converts as a result of his book, I rather got the impression that he would consider his job well done if he even got people thinking about the concepts of God and faith in their life. And that, I can clearly say, he did.