Orthodox Asceticism and Spirituality for the Modern World

Orthodox Asceticism and Spirituality for the Modern World

Saturday, May 10, 2014

Entering into Faith Slowly, Through a Process of Doubt



      My life is not my own, not really.  It belongs to God.  It always has.  His love—this furious longing that He has for His entire creation—is pursuing, prodigal, purifying.
     There is nowhere I can go to flee from His presence.  Not in the pursuit of money.  Not in relationships based solely on lust, where our pursuit of pleasure ultimately, and simply, reveals that we are searching for the highest Pleasure of all.  Not in alcohol, or whatever it is that we use to numb our inner yearning.  None of these things—none of the demons that have pursued me in life, or, rather, that I have pursued—kept Him from finding me.  Where shall I flee?  In the loftiest abode, or in the lowest hells, His Presence fills all.
     No, my life is not my own.  It is His who fashioned me from nothingness.
     But it wasn’t always like this.
     I came to faith slowly, through a process of doubt.[1]  It is in my nature, I think—it is how God made me.  My faith was never one swayed or persuaded by revivals or fiery sermons.  When I was young and my family attended a Baptist church, I probably “accepted Christ” after some such revivalistic rally, but I doubt that had much to do with my real conversion.  Or, perhaps, I should say conversions—here I am reminded of the old Benedictine saying: “pray for my conversion, and I will pray for yours.”  Faith and conversion—they are both part of an ever on-going, ever deepening process.  As we enter into the depths—for God is not found in the shallows—of a relationship with Christ, with this Personal God that is the Truth of all things—He that fills all things—we are changed, molded, transformed, converted.
     Don’t get me wrong.  I am grateful that my parents took me to church every week when I was young.[2]  Perhaps I would not be Orthodox without it, for I did find Christ there, just not in revivals or sermons.  (I doubt I ever actually listened to a sermon, to be honest—I primarily tried not to sleep through them.)  I found Him in stories from a sweet Sunday school teacher, in friends who doubted like me, in parables from Scripture, and in my inner heart.  Christ did find me there—it just took me many years to realize it—and perhaps that is why He has pursued me ever since.
     He has pursued me through doubt.
     My doubt will always be there—I believe this to be a healthy thing—but now it is tinged with something greater: the presence of Christ.  His presence—a presence of love—is an all pervading Reality indwelling in all, and somehow indwelling in what, to me, at least, seems like the oddest thing of all: myself.
     My wall of doubt was first invaded with an understanding of the meaning of faith.  I had always thought of faith as something akin to belief—growing up, I heard the two words used almost interchangeably.  But one day I read what seemed like the weirdest thing at the time: belief is what you have when you lack faith.[3]  Slowly—ever so slowly—faith began to take on a new meaning.  It took on the aspects that it always should have.  Faith as trust.  Faith as surrender.  Faith as hope.   Faith as love.
     Love.
     That word has lost its meaning in our society, a society in which I say that I love the Dallas Cowboys, good craft beer, caramel macchiatos, and the music of Coldplay.  Perhaps it, somehow, goes hand in hand with our religious replacing of faith with belief, and, thus, our replacing the God of love, with the god of a religion that hinges on making sure we believe all the “right” things.
     But God is love, and faith must be forever infused with it.  The Christian God is unlike any other God, for He is love, and love alone is credible.  Religion before Christ came into the world, before He gave himself for the life of the world, was filled with gods that were petty, cruel, harsh, and vengeful.  If we turn our God into any of these things—and many people do—then we have blasphemed God, and created an idol of our own making.  Christ is the only way to salvation, which means that love (and Love) is the only way to salvation.
     Christ’s love must fills us, infuse us, and transport us to that place our souls yearn for.  And if we are to reach that Place of repose that holds the comfort of our soul’s yearning, then the process of doubt must include communion with That in which all of our doubt ultimately points toward.
     We must pray.
     We must pray to a God who often doesn’t answer—or doesn’t seem to in any sense that we can comprehend.  We must pray to a God who is silent, but not just one who is silent—the One who answers us in silence, and so we yearn for Him all the more, this hidden God.
     Perhaps it is His very hiddenness that reveals Him.
     He is hidden in the suffering of the sick, the downtrodden, the dying.  (On a personal note, I have always felt the closest to God—sensed a very real, palpable Presence—when going through difficult times, and I don’t think this is any trite sentimentality on my part.)  He is hidden in the touch of a lover’s caress, and in the kindness of a stranger’s generosity.  He is hidden in the depths of prayer, where words and thoughts cannot reach.  He is hidden in tears and laughter.  He is hidden in sunsets and sunrises, and in the cracks of daily life between the two.
     Perhaps He is simply hidden in plain sight.
     For now—for the sake of this essay—what I have written on faith, love, the hiddenness of God, and how they are intrinsically tied to doubt will have to suffice.  But one other thing I must speak of: belief.
     A few paragraphs ago, maybe I made belief seem as if it’s almost a non-factor.  It’s not.  But I don’t think it has to be—or even should be—the starting point of faith.  As faith unfolds, slowly, patiently, through a process of doubt, belief enters and begins to take root.  Faith becomes bound in love, in mystery (that is Mystery), in silence, in God’s painful hiddenness, in doubt, and, yes, in belief.  It is at this point that we can say: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible…”


[1] I first encountered this phrase in the writings of the Czech Catholic priest Tomas Halik.  It rang with such truth to my ears that I knew it described my personal journey.  I am not saying that this is the only way to come through faith, but I do believe it is one of the best ways to ensure that faith is deep, and that it rings with the truth of classical theism.
[2] My parents are Baptists, and let me make this perfectly clear: they are two of the sweetest, most loving parents that a son could ever ask for.  Without them, I would not be the man that I am today—their goodness has forever affected me for the better.
[3] I can’t remember where I read this, but it has struck a chord with me ever since.

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Faith as a Deep, Abiding Trust in God




     Today, I had several conversations with people that cemented my faith in a loving, personal God.  To be honest, none of the conversations are probably of the type that you may be thinking about when you read about cementing faith in God.  No one told me some kind of life affirming story.  No one gave me some clichéd line about how loving Christ is—words such as that turn me off more than anything else.
     God is not a cliché, although we do get clichéd versions of Him.
     God is not a caricature, although many of those proclaiming to be His followers often turn Him into one.
     God—the true God that is revealed through Christ—is not the kind of God that you believe in.  He is the God that you put your faith in.
     Now, back to those conversations.  The conversations, to varying degrees, all involved suffering, which is why I was reminded of God.  I am of the firm conviction that in suffering you find God, or you at least discover His presence, even if it’s an absent presence, which, in some odd way, makes His presence all the more real.
     A dear friend of mine told me this evening about how hard it is to live with his father.  His father has severe dementia, and is often quite violent.  He tries his best to take care of his father, but some days it feels as if it’s too much.  Immediately before this, we were discussing God, and I could sense my friend’s question, although he never really asked it.  Where is God in all of this?  Why does life have to always be so difficult?
     My wife called me at lunch-time today, to tell me about a friend of ours who is going through some very difficult times, and she doesn’t know what to do.  She recently lost her job, doesn’t have another one, and is going to have to move out of her house—along with her children—but has nowhere to go.  I wanted to tell her that it would be okay, that God has a plan for her life, as hard as that is to fathom at the moment, but I didn’t say it.  (I, after all, try my best to not represent God in any clichéd manner, either.)
     The third conversation, I won’t go into any detail over.  It was simply too personal, but let’s just say that a friend of mine feels as if his life is pointless.  God has taken away everything that matters to him—or, at least, that’s how it seems.
     I sat down at my computer with a cup of coffee this evening, and I had every intention to write something decidedly different than what you are currently reading, but then I thought about these conversations, and then I thought of a quote from the Romanian priest George Calciu: “Christ did not come to explain human suffering, or to eliminate it.  Rather, He came to fill human suffering with His presence.”
     This is the God we worship as Christians.  This is the God that we put our faith in, that we believe—if we want to talk about belief—illumines our lives in all of its messiness, and in all of its brokenness.  In all of its suffering.
     And this is why, I think, that we can talk of faith as a deep, abiding trust in God.  This is faith as trust, faith as assent.  In Latin, it would be translated as assensus.  If we are to talk about belief, then we must talk about this kind of belief.  The belief that Christ is good, that we can trust in Him, that we can assent to his path, to following his Way.
     This is the Christ spoken of in a well-known prayer from Celtic Christianity[1]:
     Christ under me
     Christ over me
     Christ beside me
     On my left and my right.
     This day, be within and
     Without me,
     Lowly and meek,
     Yet all powerful.
     Be in the heart
     Of each to whom I speak,
     In the mouth of each
     Who speaks to me.
     This day, be within and
     Without me.
     Lowly and meek,
     Yet all powerful.
     Christ as a light
     Christ as a shield
     Christ beside me
     On my left and my right.
     And it is this Christ that fills life’s suffering with His presence.

     Faith as a deep, abiding trust in God.  Faith as a deep, abiding trust.  Faith as deep abiding.
     I abide in Him.
     He abides in me.
     Together we abide in one another.
***
     My favorite living filmmaker is Terrence Malick.  I also happen to think he is the greatest Christian filmmaker working in cinema, a fact that, unfortunately, seems to be lost on both his critics and Christians alike.
     Suffering, and the presence that fills that suffering, is at the heart of his recent movies.  In his most recent work To the Wonder—his most critically maligned film, I might add, once again because not many seem to understand it—the main character Marina falls deeply in love with Neil, but he leaves her for another woman, comes back to her, but then leaves again later.  She loves him, but her life is primarily filled with suffering due to this love.  At the end of the film, she is still suffering.  It seems as if it won’t end.  And yet her final words are: “this love that loves us… thank you.”

     Life is suffering.  But He abides in us, and we in him, this Love that loves us.
     Thank you.



[1] This is only a portion of the full prayer, often attributed to Saint Patrick.