Beyond the Model

March 01, 2024 2 Comments

When my son, John, was ten years old, I gave him a model kit of the solar system for Christmas. The sun was a plastic yellow ball attached to a cone shaped base. There were nine balls of varying sizes to represent the planets. A set of paints came with the kit, along with a full color poster of the solar system and a set of instructions detailing how to paint the planets so that they would appear, "life like".

One winter day, when the kids were out of school due to a snow storm, we covered the kitchen table with newspapers and set out to build a solar system. Following the kit's instructions to the letter, we carefully painted the planets - gray for Mercury, brown for Venus, red for Mars, brown and orange for Jupiter, golden brown for Saturn, blue-green for Uranus, blue for Neptune. We took our time with Earth, painting it a clear, true blue, with patches of green and brown and topped it off with vanilla swirls.

"Is earth the very best planet?" asked my five year old, Anna.

"It's the best planet for us," I replied, "because it's ours."

After all the planets had dried on a baking rack on the kitchen counter, we set about attaching them to wire rods which we then inserted into the plastic base of the sun. John was very careful to position the rods just so, using a ruler to measure and re-measure the distances between planets. Finally, he pronounced them in perfect alignment and we stood back to admire our masterpiece.

Anna picked up a paintbrush from table. "I want to paint the rods holding up the planets," she announced. "What color should I make them?"

"You can make them any color you want," I replied.

"But what color are the real rods?" She asked, squinting at the poster.

"They're no color," John answered patiently, "because there are no rods."

"No rods!" Anna exclaimed, "Then how do the planets stay up?"

John rolled his eyes and launched into an attempt to explain gravity to a five year old. I thought he did a credible job but was proven wrong a few minutes later when we went through a version of the same conversation regarding the base of the sun. Anna demanded to know what color to paint the base to make it "real". John tried to explain to her that in reality, there is no solid base holding up the sun.

When my husband came home from work that evening, we made a big production of unveiling our masterpiece and demonstrating how it worked. Joe made appropriate oohing and ahhing noises over our collective genius in having re-created the solar system on our kitchen table. Then we ate dinner in the dining room lest the planets be knocked out of alignment by someone passing the ketchup.

Later that night, John and I went outside to drag the trash cans out to the edge of the yard for morning pick-up. It was a bitter January night, perfectly still, so cold that it hurt to breathe. The snow in the yard reflected the moonlight, except where tree skeletons made blue shadows on the ground. Our snow boots crunched irreverently in the deep silence. On our way back to the house, I paused to pull off my hood and look up at the night sky. It was inky black, fathoms deep, and strewn with shimmering stars. The half moon had a silver mist around it. I grabbed John's arm as he crunched past.

"Look at the sky." I commanded.

He stopped, tilted his head back and gazed up in silence for a few seconds and then snorted with laughter.

"That solar system we made sucks, doesn't it?" he observed wryly.

As we trudged back towards the house, I was struck by the difference in our reactions to the beauty of the night sky. John was amused because the model we had built did not measure up to reality. I was overjoyed that the reality was so much more than the model.

I think about that winter night from time to time. It comes to mind when I find myself disappointed by my human limits, when I struggle to accept some reality I have encountered that will not conform to my ideas about it. It comes to mind often when I am involved in an internal or external debate concerning religious faith.

I was raised Catholic, but all of my life I have had powerful spiritual experiences that are outside the boundaries of Christian and Catholic dogma and doctrine. These experiences have given me a reverence for both life and death, boundless faith in the power of unconditional love and a deep commitment to the teachings of Jesus. But because of my life experiences, I have struggled mightily with my thoughts and feelings about the religion I was raised in, and religion in general.

"Why have you stayed Catholic all these years?" Many of my nonreligious friends want to know. "Why be so intimately involved with a Church whose doctrines so often clash with your life experiences and the insights gained from them?"

I always answer those questions with the same one word: Love.

I stay, quite simply, because I love the the people in my Catholic community. My love for these people is stronger than my thoughts and opinions about doctrines written hundreds of years ago by people I have never met.

I recite the prayers, sing the hymns, and take part in the intricate rituals of the Catholic faith because it keeps me connected to the people who gather in this Church to celebrate and mourn, people who long to be more loving and compassionate when they leave Mass than they were when they walked in.

But even as I stand in church to make the sign of the cross and recite the words of the ancient creed, I realize that these rituals are like the rods holding up my son's plastic planets. They stand in for a powerful reality that no words can convey and that no dogma or doctrines can define. They stand in for an Infinite Love that no religion can capture, much less own. To me, the Catholic Church, in all its flawed beauty, is like that solar system that once sat on my kitchen table - an intricate model of reality that is in some ways different, and in some ways the same as many other models.

I remain Catholic not because I adhere to a particular set of doctrines but because I feel the same profound loving connection with the people gathered around my church's altar that I felt with my family, gathered around the kitchen table on that distant snowy night. I remain Catholic because I want to explore, celebrate and mourn my way through life with these people who have always been a treasured part of my story just as I have been a part of theirs.

Is the Catholic religious community the best one? It is for me, because it's mine.

When we die, will it matter what color any of us have painted the rods that aren't there? Or will we leave our models behind, like solar systems on kitchen tables, as we slip into a reality alive with infinite beauty and light?