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.
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