Catholic-ometer: 4 of 5
Enjoyability: 3 of 5
I'm going to get the basics of this review over with right away in this first paragraph, before moving on to an explanation of why I think this way. For theologians, I would steer clear of this book. It contains no significant theology. For Catholics who recognize the difference between Catholics and protestants, but are just looking for a means to improve your prayer or devotional life, this may be the book for you. Everyone else should not read this, in my mind, since it may either mislead them, or sour them to the faith.
I've spent a while reading books about suffering and faith, and understanding the Christian explanation for how the two of them jive, and in order to explain the problems that this book has, I feel I should give some examples of how people could be misled by it.
Say you're a modern teenager, just starting to realize that the part of your life that was dominated by television and games is essentially over, and you begin to hate the world for being so demanding and authoritarian. Because you have this outlook on life, you suffer for every responsibility that's put on your shoulders; more than most adults would. You pick this book up, because it promises to tell you the truth about the troubles in your life.
You start reading this book, and inside, you find talk about Christianity, descriptions of different kinds of suffering, and not a few anecdotes by the author, being used as examples. What you do not find is an up-front explanation of how there can be trouble if God is good. This is the book's first problem; its unwillingness to rope people in with something interesting or amusing, and encourage them to keep reading.
However, suppose that you come across a very patient reader, who decides to give this fairly recent author the benefit of the doubt, and continues to slog through these pages. On page 76, they will find the phrase "Reconciling evil and the goodness of God is a pressing personal problem."
This is the sign of problem number 2; a tendency of the author to treat real, theological truths as if they depend on our belief in them. This thought process is protestant; not Catholic. Furthermore, any very patient, protestant young person who's also logical will immediately say to themselves, "Well, if it's personal, what do I need this book for?" Then, out it goes in the garbage.
However, as if that wasn't bad enough, the very next page contains the phrase "He (God) berates Job the creature for daring to question his Creator. He tells Job that he is not capable of knowing the answer to his questions or of judging God."
Every teenager in the world who hears this will instantly conclude "Well, duh! That's because Christianity can't be reconciled with logic. Thanks a lot, Christian book, but I could have figured that out on my own." Then out into the garbage it goes.
These first three problems; slowness of pace, protestant thought processes, and denial of human logic are the bain of nearly every modern book that tries and fails to reconcile God's love with our suffering, and I'm afraid that this is yet another in a long line of such books. In fact, I've seen them so often, that whenever I see a book about suffering use the phrase "the book of Job," I immediately brace myself for another disappointment. This book, and others like it, give Christianity a bad name. By refusing to reconcile faith and reason, they help contribute to the war between God and science that's been brewing on both sides for at least the last couple of centuries.
God created reason and science, the same way that he created faith and emotion, and he wouldn't have given us these faculties if he intended for them to be useless. Man's inability to perceive the full truth of God is not like his inability to perceive the shape of the wind. It's more like his inability to perceive the curviture of the Earth. However, he can still explain it by comparison ("it's round, like an orange.")
Likewise, even though we can't see God, we CAN understand certain things about him, such as why there is suffering, evil and danger in life. We can understand why there is Hell and free will, why there are demons and angels, and why he gave man the chance to screw things up. To claim that this knowledge is impossible to acquire is almost an Islamic viewpoint, to say nothing of completely denying the worth of theology, and on a baser level, all Catholic truth.
Of the three problems I mentioned at the start, this is the one with the greatest potential to destroy our spiritual growth; protestant thought processes. Several times in the book, the author makes statements that seem to imply that Catholics should be happy, because of the growing number of "Christians" in the world, particularly presbyterians. What? Why would we be glad about that? Catholics and presbyterians are both Christians, sure, but we're still two different religions.
This approach to the Catholic faith is what I like to call fake ecumenism. Whereas real ecumenism is about approaching protestants in such a way as to lead them back to Catholic truths that they've lost or rejected, fake ecumenism is trying to pretend that there's no difference between Catholics and protestants, and that we can therefore all get along, hold hands, and sing kumbaya.
I've been working in a large company, in a big city recently, and I work on a team with two other people. At least one of them is protestant. I'm not shy about discussing my faith with her, and she's not shy about discussing hers, so we've gotten into some fairly colorful conversations, as you might imagine. We've talked about all kinds of Catholic and protestant subjects; the rapture (p), the priesthood (C), morality, etc, but I think the discussion that disappointed me the most was when she brought up the hypothetical situation of a woman with three kids, who has an abortion to save her own life. Her perspective on abortion was "well, it's not very nice. I certainly wouldn't do it. It makes you feel all dirty and stuff even talking about it, but if there's an emergency, we ought to have it available."
So there you go. She's pro-abortion, and she still goes around thinking she's in good standing with God, and there's a lot of other people just like her out there, who live their lives by the mentality of "Well, that teaching doesn't make me feel very good, and might not be practical, so... I'll decide not to believe that." Nope. You can't do that. Some things are always bad and evil, no matter what the situation. Abortion is one of them, by the way. This is the LIFE issue. THE big issue of our lives; our right to live in the first place, and two people; one Catholic, and the other protestant, can't agree on whether human beings have the inherent right to not be murdered.
Now, I'm well aware that many protestants are not like this. There are some very decent and saintly protestants out there, who really believe that their religion is absolutely God's truth. I'm aware of that, but moral relativism is one of the most anti-Catholic beliefs there is, and it comes straight out of the protestant revolt; the belief that human beings have a right to protest against truths revealed by God if they don't like them, or don't feel right about them.
If you're Catholic, be Catholic. Learn the church's teaching, and why the church teaches it, then live it. If you're not going to be Catholic, then go off and become an atheist, or join another religion. There are plenty to choose from. However, you can't lead people to God by acting like all Christian religions are true to the same degree. We need to know the truth; the whole truth. If you know the truth, it sets you free. If you don't know the truth, you become confused, and maybe even pro-abortion like my coworker.
Some may ask what kind of arbitrary standard I use to rate Catholic books, movies, etc. Well, this is it. Will it come right out and just tell us the truth, like it should, or will it try to tell us that we could never understand, and act like we're all the same? Does it contain the full truth, or does it not?
I'm sure that Michael Scanlan is a decent and holy man, who only wrote this book to try to lead people into a better devotional and prayer life. In that respect, you could do worse. However, I've never enjoyed any book that put God and logic at each other's throats, and that's one of the things that this book does. What more can I really say?
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