This I Believe, or, my preference, I AM Belief
Albert Sobol

May 3, 20009

I am not separate from my beliefs. They are no add-ons accumulated over a lengthy lifetime. They are as much an indivisible dimension of who I am, as the blood that nourishes my body with oxygen. Beliefs have no separate home within me, entirely distinct from the facts of my experience, or whatever scientific knowledge I have managed to acquire. Beliefs are the sanctifications of acts I have chosen, to one degree or another, mostly, certain of their goodness of intention, or the converse, that the acts could mean that I am a bad person.

My earliest belief was that if I ever inappropriately used my father’s letter-head stationary again I would be sent away from home.  I still remember being dragged to a pay phone, hearing him talk into the phone saying that if I did that dreadful act again, I should be removed from my home. Everything I learned about him subsequently denied that that would have happened, but in over eighty years since then, I’ve never been sure of what would happen if I failed to live up to rules I did not know existed. To know me is, doubtfully, to “see” me as a readily “obedient” person. My belief says, Yes, I am.

My next remembered sequence of events, and so powerful and complex belief system, arose because I was told that I was a “Dirty Jew”, and that I had killed Christ. I was around five, and took on this belief from fellow students in the grade school I attended.  As the only Jewish child in that school, the lesson was emphasized by rocks thrown as I went home from school.  And that was how I came to know that I was Jewish. Until that time I had never heard of Christ, and nothing much about being Jewish. My parents were non-observant Jews. No acquisition of facts, later in life, about Christ, and me, and the complex history of the major monotheistic religions, has excised that particular piece of my “Belief Anatomy”. When, in my mid-forties, and a tenured faculty leader of a group of Catholic nuns, one of them responded with outrage at my observation that I envied the absolute certainty of her faith in Him: “You could have that faith! All you have to do is believe!” No amount of loving sharing in that room, and it was deeply so, could bridge the chasm of our different learnings of what beliefs should be believed, let alone, how-on-earth one goes about changing beliefs should they be “wrong” and unwanted, at some point in our lives? There was no way I could choose to believe in Jesus, and feel good about myself.

Are you wondering what this “killer of Christ”, “Jew Bastard” was doing in an intimate sharing with a group of nuns in a Catholic college. How it had come about that I was teaching/consulting in three different Catholic academic settings, teaching Pastoral Counseling to nuns and priests in one of them? It is not my belief that that came about out of some late attention God paid to the hurts inflicted years earlier by His enthusiastic acolytes. It came rather out of the mix of my strong political views during the 1930s, the devastating effect of war service from 1942 to 1945, and an inchoate sense that the violence people do to people is the true source of evil. I chose Psychology as the vehicle to carry me towards the personnsess I aspired to. Helping people. Psychoanalysis, my special interest, what I had chosen to heal my pain and uncertainties, is after all, about discovery and the larger capacity to choose one’s own destiny. A Catholic Capuchin monk, the Chaplain of a very large Child-caring institution where I worked, introduced me to two of the three institutions where I was on the faculty for some eight years.

In brief summary, I believe that man’s sense of smallness and helplessness, led him to create God(s).  E. Fromm’s writings on the problem of enjoying our freedom, and our needs for a God elaborate this issue very effectively.

I believe humans hurt humans, and also heal them, with love. I felt more richly human out of my experiences within the Catholic Church, for God’s sake, than out of so many years on the analytic couch designed by Freud. A reading from  “The Little Prince”, at a concelebrated Mass, surrounded by nuns and priests, conveyed a depth of humanness unlike any other in my life.

I believe humankind has the knowledge and capacity to truly create a better world for all. But I also believe we are increasingly addicted to violence in the service of insane narcissism and material greed.  And yes, I believe in sanity and insanity, and the differences between them, and that we are all capable of believing that either are the reality others are failing to see.

I believe that we all want to be “finished” products and so fight against our unfinishedness. Thank you for listening to this still, wanting to be, unfinished product.