It was one of those perfect, sunny-spring days. I was driving a friend to a little country church, complete with Stations of the Cross alongside the walls and beneath the windows.

Since my companion hadn’t had many courses in catechetics, and was convinced I had had a sufficient number for the two of us, she would prudently go over her lesson during the fifteen- minute drive, long enough to delete any heresies she had inserted into the fifth chapter of the second grade First Communion book.

Well, not always. Marian liked to embellish the script a bit, here and there, while I had made up my theological stance years ago that, no matter how entertaining, in my class, Baby Jesus would never make little birds out of paper and send them flying over the playground, complete with names and addresses.

However, they were encouraged to play teacher, telling their brothers and sisters at home all about Jesus’ healing the lepers and inviting Zaccheus to come down from that tree to tell the cook to set an extra place at the supper table, because Jesus wanted the crowd to know he was a friend of Zacheus and had forgiven him for having charged the people higher taxes than he should have, so he could put more in his own back pocket, money he should have left with those who had already paid their taxes. Jesus reminded him to return it to the right people, and then Zacheus sat down at the table next to Jesus and everything was o.k.

Very nice of Jesus, who forgives little children, too, who forget sometimes to be kind to people at home. Grown-ups sometimes forget, too. That’s how wars get started in big countries and small.

This thing called faith; Volpe tells, is not like solving a puzzle. Read five books on the problem. Get yourself into five university courses on theology, and you’re set for life, whichever way you want to look at it.

Volpe tells us that we begin to understand faith when we are brought up against the brick wall of doubt, such as when he discovered his neat world had been shattered by thirty-two minutes of film, a documentary after the end of World War Two, Night and Fog, containing and emphasizes the indifference of the world in the face of the greatest atrocities in history. David J. Volpe was twelve years old. He tells us:

“The image that shocked me into disbelief was of corpses bulldozed into huge holes in the ground. These were once living human beings, mothers and children and siblings and grandparents. I walked out after seeing that movie, unto the green sloping field of the camp at the lake, convinced there was no God. I was soon to find someone whose words made my conviction many times stronger.

“Losing faith is not a discovery that a proposition, once believed, has proved to be false. You may find out that a medicine does not really work or a relative whom you remember fondly is actually mean-spirited. These are nasty shocks to the system, but not like losing one’s faith.”

“I believe in God is not the same as 'I believe in a good education.’ “ Faith is where we stand in the universe, not an idea that has been checked off in the truth-or-illusion column. Losing one’s faith is stepping off the planet to find oneself spinning in a new orbit.”

This might be a book one would slip into a youngster’s bag when returning to wherever.

My prayer goes with this to you, your families. We are all seekers after the same God. In the words of Tiny Tim, “God bless us, everyone.”

Next week: “David Volpe meets Bertrand Russell”

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