Patience with God

     I read this sometime ago, and I don’t remember who wrote it, or where it’s from, or if the writer was even Orthodox (probably not), but I thought it was fairly insightful:

Patience with others is love.

Patience with one’s self is hope.

Patience with God is faith.

     If I was going to add anything, or change anything, then perhaps I would also say that faith is actually a combination of patience with God and patience with one’s self.  We are, after all, made in the Image and Likeness of God.  And God, as much as we may come to know Him, will always remain a mystery in His Essence.  Likewise, we will all remain somewhat of a mystery, even to our own selves.  At the innermost part of our own being, there is always something unfathomable and beyond the ability to know.

     But what I would really like to explore here is how we know God – as much as it is possible to know God in this life; and we most certainly can know him – through patience, and therefore through faith.  And I would like to explore how this patience we must have with God sometimes appears as doubt – or at least goes hand in hand with doubt.  And since it has a lot to do with doubt, it also has a lot to do with many of the current ailments that plague our society: secularism, atheism, and non-theism.  (I think that most people who claim to be atheists aren’t really atheistic – at least not of the Richard Dawkins type.  Most are simply non-theistic – God just isn’t part of the equation.  And if He is part of the equation, He’s not a very big part, or maybe you could say that He is beside the point.)

     First, we need to realize that doubt is not in opposition to Christianity.  I realize that it’s all too often presented as such, but it shouldn’t be.  For instance, growing up attending a Southern Baptist church, I heard plenty of sermons that emphasized why the Bible is the literal word of God – as if it was written as some kind of history text – and why we can be certain that the tomb really was empty, and this can be proven by stringing point A with point B with point C, and so on and so forth.[1]

     The truth is that the opposite of Christianity is not atheism.  The opposite of Christianity is anything that makes God – and by extension the Church – something that He is not.  This means that many forms of “Christianity” – prosperity gospels, views of God as vengeful and wrathful, “churchless” Christianity – are actually the true opposites of true Christianity.

     The problem with atheism – or at least one of the problems – is that it lacks patience.[2]  Many atheists grew up in rather “fundamentalist” Christian households – or they grew up in secular households, in which the only forms of “Christianity” that they came into contact with were those of a fundamentalist bent.  They become impatient, and ultimately have disdain, for this form of Christianity.  They then either reject God (and therefore Christianity) altogether, or they find what for them seems to be a suitable replacement.[3]

     When a Christian – or someone who is exploring theism of God as Person – begins to doubt, or begins to feel as if God is no longer present, this is where patience comes into the picture.  The patience must be with God, and the patience must be with one’s self.  If there is no patience, then two things could happen.  The first thing, atheism, is obviously not the correct outcome.  The second thing, to not question, is less obvious as the inappropriate choice.

     Not questioning leads to a faith that is no longer faith, for it becomes belief.  Belief and faith are not the same thing, otherwise our definition of patience with God as faith would not be true.  If anything, belief is what you have when you lack faith[4].  Faith as belief is not possible, whereas faith as trust, faith as surrender, faith as a way of being is not only possible, it is how faith must be lived in the daily life of the Christian.

     To choose atheism is to choose not to endure.  To choose belief over faith is to take the wide road.  And to choose faith is to take the narrow path.  It is hard and it is difficult, but it is infinitely more rewarding.  It is the choice to not settle for shortcuts – to not settle for anything other than the God of Christ, not the mythic sky god of so many “believers.”

     So what does the narrow path look like when it’s put into practice?  What does it mean to live by faith as a way of being, and as a way of being patient with God, patient with one’s self?  Some of it can be explained, and some of it cannot, because some of it is mystery that can only be lived as mystery.

     This is where we encounter faith as praxis.

     For the Orthodox, faith as praxis is faith as asceticism.  Asceticism should not be confused with the “moralism” of Protestantism.  Here is what the late Orthodox priest and writer John Romanides has to say on the matter:

     “The biblical tradition as preserved by the Fathers cannot be identified with or reduced to a system of moral precepts or Christian ethics. It is rather a therapeutical asceticism which is not daunted by any degree of malady of the heart or noetic faculty short of its complete hardening. To take the shape of this asceticism without its heart and core and to apply it to a system of moral precepts for personal and social ethics is to produce a society of puritanical hypocrites who believe they have a special claim on God's love because of their morality, or predestination, or both. The commandments of Christ cannot be fulfilled by any simple decision to do so or by any confidence in having been elected. A person with broken legs cannot run in the race no matter how much he wants to. One can do so only when one's legs have healed and have been restored to a competitive degree of power. In the same way, one cannot fulfill the commandments unless he undergoes the cleansing and illumination of his noetic faculty and reaches the threshold of glorification.”[5]

     The most important aspect of an ascetic life is repentance.  In fact, repentance is the beginning and the end.  It is the one aspect of “spirituality” that must utterly infuse all other aspects: prayer (for prayer to ever be noetic, it must be repentant), reading of Holy Scripture, liturgy, and work.  A Christianity that doesn’t have repentance is, to be blunt, not Christianity at all.  It may be a Christianity with plenty of belief, and it may be a Christianity with plenty of “good” people, but it is not a Christianity infused with faith.

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[1] As an Orthodox, I certainly believe in the whole of the Paschal Mystery: the crucifixion, the death, the descent into hell, the resurrection on the third day, the ascension into heaven, and Christ’s Second and Glorious Coming as an event that forever changed the world, altering the very fabric of reality, and allowing me to attain union with the Uncreated Energies of the Incarnate Logos.  However, this doesn’t mean that Holy Scripture is meant to be read as history lesson.  Holy Scripture, rather, is meant to be read as a letter, written to me from the Eternal Logos.  Holy Scripture is the Word of God, but not in the way that most Protestants understand it to be.  Protestantism, unfortunately, is severely tainted by the stain of scholasticism – as is the Roman Catholic Church.  But, to be fair, not all the Western Christian writers were/are guilty of this.  Personally, I have been sustained by writers such as Soren Kierkegaard, Dietrech Bonhoeffer, the Czech Catholic Tomas Halik, and the esteemed 20^th century theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar.

[2] I am not the first writer to suggest such a thing.  Thomas Halik wrote an entire book about it, and the Orthodox writer – and convert from evangelical Christianity – Frank Schaeffer has written about it, as well.

[3] For me, this was “Eastern” religion – Buddhism and Taoism, specifically.  When religion is thought of as a way to make life more tolerable, or to bring about happiness (and this is the way Christianity is often presented in the majority of books that are popular today; self-help masquerading as Christianity) there are certainly better religions than Christianity.  Taoism, Buddhism, or the philosophy of ancient Greece (such as Stoicism) are more viable than the current trend of self-help Christianity because they tend to bring about a longer-lasting happiness – although it is a happiness that, in the end, cannot be sustained, for it lacks union with the Logos made flesh.

[4] Several Orthodox writers of the last few decades, such as Alexander Schmemann and Stephen Freeman, have made the point that Orthodoxy is not a “religion” because it’s not a belief system.  To paraphrase Father Freeman: Orthodoxy is not a religion, because religion is a belief system.  Orthodoxy is not a faith, either.  You have faith, faith sustains you, but that is different.  Orthodoxy is a life lived in Christ.  And that is altogether not the same.  I have discussed the issue of what exactly is meant by faith in more detail in previous posts.

[5] From “Jesus Christ: The Life of the World.”