I just started teaching a weekly class for people who want to become Roman Catholics (which is the main reason why I can't make it to the Getaway this year). It's an interesting challenge, because I want to be very careful not to create a bunch of fundamentalists who think they know all the answers. I'm trying to encourage people to explore the questions of the mysteries of life and death and love and God - and to be satisfied NOT to have complete answers. This is making some of my students and team members a bit uncomfortable. Who knows - maybe by the end of the course, I'll be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail...

This week, we covered creation and evolution. I started the class by reading the first of the two creation stories in Genesis, Genesis 1:1-2:3 (the second story is Genesis 2:4-3:24). The second story is good, but the first one is an absolute gem - it's the seven-day creation story, and each day ends with "And God saw that it was good." It's a colorful, poetic, profound story that's a real pleasure to read aloud.

After the reading, I tried to get the class to draw the meaning out of the story. As I see it, the message of the story is that God has been intimately involved with the world, with creation, since the very beginning - and that God sees creation as good and wonderful, as something to be loved. I think that's something that can be understood only through the eyes of faith, so it certainly shouldn't be taught in public schools. The basic Catholic teaching is that God created, and that God loved that creation. Catholics are free to believe in a literal interpretation of the seven-day creation story, but they are also free to believe in evolution. I tell my classes that I think that God created through the wonderful, miraculous, NATURAL process we call evolution.

I think my class is ready to accept that, but they got a little uneasy when I told them not to be too doctrinaire about the concept of "soul." One older member of my team said that the idea of evolution is OK, but that we must remember that God intervened in the process and gave humans a soul. She got a bit distressed when I asked her not to get too definitive about this "soul" business, because the idea of soul comes from Aristotelian philosophy, a school of thinking we don't completely understand nowadays.

So, we left it at that. We'll see if they've got the tar boiling for next week's class.

-Joe Offer-