A few Sundays ago, I felt the ‘pull from outside.’ I won’t say it was the first time, but it was the first time I gave it that name.

I had just watched a video on the Spanish Civil War, which spoke of how much of the Spanish population in those days were dead-set against anything that seemed to oppose God or to diminish the place of the Church in public life. Now, whatever else I am, I am an American, born and raised with American ideas and sentiments, and these linger long after intellectual assent has been withdrawn. So my initial, visceral reaction was a slight discomfort; a sense of ‘well, even if we believe it ourselves, I don’t know about demanding it be part of the state government….’ This wasn’t a thought so much as a natural reaction. Pluralism is the air we breathe, as Americans, and has been to a greater or lesser degree from the beginning.

Anyway, a few days later, while praying before Mass, I was thinking over that video and the Spanish of the 1930s. And that’s when it struck me:

“Oh. They treat God as if He were real.”

That’s when I felt the ‘pull’. That tug on the line, as Prof. Lewis put it. The sharp distinction between an idea, held in speculation, and a reality that you can run up against.

Most of us, most of the time, while we believe and we would defend out belief, in practical terms we treat religion as something internal; a ‘deeply held belief’, one that is akin to our political views. That is why we consider things like switching churches if we’re ‘not being fed’ or ‘don’t feel welcome’ as a legitimate possibility.

I don’t mean this as an attack on anyone’s faith; as I say, this is the natural consequence of living in a pluralistic society, where we’re obliged by law to treat all religions as equal. Where ears shut and lips curl the moment you start talking of God’s rights. People tend to believe as they act, and when we have to treat all religions as valid, we start, unconsciously, thinking as if they were (which is to say, as if all were equally subjective and thus invalid, but that’s another story).

But it’s a very different thing to conceive of God as a concrete reality in our life; less akin to a philosophical tenet than to a public figure. To pray and realize that you are actually speaking with a living person; one infinitely superior to yourself. Then it becomes less a matter of belief than of obligation.

I can’t say this sensation has remained constant; I’m not far enough along for that. But it’s a profound experience when it comes: when it stops being ‘what I believe’ and becomes simply ‘what is’.