A Homily for the Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Isaiah 55:10-11 Romans 8:18-23 Matthew 13:1-23

Can anything be further removed from nature than language? Our ability to wield words sets us apart from the rest of the natural world. But as the Gospel sees it, our words share this much with Mother Nature. They both experience seasons. There are times when words seem to fall on sterile soil; there are other times when they bear a great harvest.

The title of Christopher Beha’s new book is both explanatory and intriguing: Why I am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer (2026). This is both a spiritual autobiography and a penetrating critique of contemporary options for nonbelief.

If you are not a slightly depressed lover of philosophy, the book is a bit of a challenge. But Beha admirably accomplishes his goal of guiding the nonspecialist through the writings that produced the anti-spiritual, excessively materialist worldview of modern life.

Beha was raised Catholic. He attended a Jesuit high school. But when the choice became his to make, he quietly abandoned the faith. Yet he still needed a worldview that could replace Catholicism, because such a personal perspective is more than a set of facts. It also tells us what is morally significant, what matters.

Beha quickly realized that scientific materialism is easily espoused but truly impossible to live as a creed. What is one supposed to strive for? If only the material is real, what motivates us to pursue the good? Indeed, what could the good possibly be? 

Most folks do not mind muddled thoughts, but Beha is not one of them. He followed materialism from its modern, mostly Anglo-American exponents through Locke and Hume all the back way to Descartes. When that search failed to satisfy, Beha retraced his steps, this time pursuing the philosophical path of continental Europe.

Eventually he chose to describe himself as a modern-day Nietzschean: There is no truth. There is only the creative expression of the will. Perfect fit for a writer!  

Then what happened to the romantic idealist? He fell in love. He married her, and they had two children. The value of every word he had ever read or written began to shift, like the changing importance of each chess piece after a new move. 

Summing up his spiritual and intellectual journey, Beha writes:

All of these appeals had proved insufficient to me, leaving only the romantic idealist option: There is no foundation; we are standing over an abyss. But this had proved unlivable—and now it was proving untrue. For I could tell that my foundation was sound. I just wanted to know what was underfoot. So I told myself, Suppose you start with love. That was the one clear and certain thing in my life. What would it mean to start there? To begin with the certain reality of that love and build whatever could be built on it? If I took this for true, what else would have to be true with it?

To believe in love—not as a physical sensation, a neurochemical process in the brain, an adaptive strategy blindly hit upon by the genes in control of us survival machines, but as a foundational reality—means abandoning strict materialism, for the kind of love I’m talking about simply can’t be reduced to physical processes. It also means abandoning the idealism that says the world we experience is entirely or largely our own creation, that we project upon the raw facts whatever meaning and value and order we find there. From this perspective, love is a “mood,” part of the subjective apparatus with which we take in objects of experience. But to really feel love is to be certain that it is not simply a projection, just as to stand in the warmth and light of the sun is to be certain that the sun exists outside ourselves.

If you want to understand intellectually how it is that words have their seasons, you can follow Beha through his excellent introduction to continental philosophy, because those whom we have come to call existentialists insist that meaning has moments when it simply bursts forth.

But the same truth is already presupposed by the Gospel. The difference between words received indifferently and words received efficaciously is what our faith calls grace. The proclamation of the Gospel is either accompanied by the presence of the Holy Spirit, the God who offers his own self to our freedom, or it remains just another collection of words.

Again, through his own journey, Beha brings the question into clear focus:

Real love requires freedom, for it cannot be coerced. This freedom includes the freedom to reject love, to turn away from the good of the world. At the same time, to love another person is to recognize them as a person—that is, as something with an essential self, not just a collection of free choices. It requires that certain things endure even as most things pass away.

Everything I’d learned in my years of study told me that this could not all be true. No one had yet explained how subjective mental selves could operate within an objective physical space. No one had yet reconciled individual freedom with a law-governed world. One way or another, you had to choose. All I could say in response was that my starting point, my foundational principle, told me otherwise.

Beha began returning to church. At first, he chose something that some would describe as “Catholic lite.” It looked a lot like Catholicism. The difference, which eventually came to matter a great deal to Beha, is that it did not seem to demand a worldview, a commitment to what one believes to be true. 

The very thing that had allowed me to participate—the fact that participation didn’t require belief—began to feel like a problem. Something in me wanted to be asked to believe. I wanted to find out whether or not I could do it.

Beha is now back where he began his journey, but so many seasons of the Word have passed. Those seasons are one place where Gospel and modernity meet on common ground. Both agree that truth is not a once for all find. It is a journey outside ourselves, towards something greater than we are.

Last words to Beha, commenting on the liturgy he came to love again:

What I heard surprised me. It wasn’t that the teachings had changed over the previous decade, or that I had not really understood them when I rejected them. Granted, I understood them differently after years of wandering, but what surprised me was the extent to which what I heard spoke to my deepest needs. 

I heard the expression of a worldview that recognized both our human freedom and our human limitations, one that had room in its picture of reality for great suffering and great joy, one that acknowledged that our lives on this earth were short and bound to come to dust but gave us cause to do something with them in the meantime. I found a balance between the material reality of the physical world and the spiritual reality of the individual person. I found beauty and humanity’s capacity both to create and enjoy it treated as essential features of reality rather than evolutionary accidents. I was told that I wasn’t going to figure everything out, that certain things would remain mysterious, that my greatest problems could be solved only through love. Perhaps most important, I was told to stop worrying so much over the riddle of my own existence and to try to serve others.

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.