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…”

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[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.

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.

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

Christianity as a Mode of Being

The essay that follows is an introduction to a series of essays that I would like to do on this blog.  All of them deal with the hiddenness, the paradox, the Mystery, and the apparent absence of God.  I would like to note that all of these essays—as opposed to the more traditional posts that I also want to include regularly—do not necessarily reflect a purely Orthodox view.  Errors in Church teaching that may (or may not) follow are purely my own.  These are simply honest reflections as I try to work out certain philosophical—as opposed to theological—views within my own (hopefully maturing) thought.

Christianity as a Mode of Being

     Much of what passes for Christianity today is nothing more than paganism.  Religions before Christ came into the world—before He gave Himself for the life of the world, and thus ended all paganism—were belief systems.  They were cultic, and it didn’t matter whether they were the cults of the Greek gods, the cults of Western Europe, or the pantheistic polytheism of India.  These paganistic systems were steeped in many of the same essentials: believe the right things to gain favor of your god(s) and do the right things—whether it was sacrifice or ritualistic worship—in order to not just gain favor, but to get specific things out of your deity.

     When looked at through the same lens as this brief definition of paganism, the current trends of Christianity are essentially the same thing.  Christianity of today is based on either believing the right thing—such as accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior—or doing the right thing—such as being sure to attend a church service on Sunday, or not use any profane language, or not drink any alcohol—in order to win the favor of God/Jesus.  The Christian cults that we have created in our “modern” world—cults that make nothing more than an idol of the Divine—are all about getting God to change His mind about us, as was ancient paganism.  However, early Christianity of the ancient East—the kind of Christianity these essays attempt to express—was different.  It was—and is, when still practiced—about us changing our minds about God.

     Christ did not give his life for the world in order to usher in the “right” form of paganism.  He gave His life in order to conquer death and to allow man to enter into a life lived in Him—in which we move, and dwell, and have our being.  But just what does this life lived in—and not just in, but through—Christ look like?

     The answer given by many Christians today—usually either “progressive” or “liberal” Christians—is that Christianity is a “way of life,” and that Christianity should be practiced, and should never be seen as just a belief system.  I sympathize with this approach to Christianity, and I would have to agree that it is a better or “higher” way to practice Christianity as opposed to the pagan variety, but I still think that it is wrong.

     Christianity as “belief system” ends up being just one form of belief amid the myriad of other pagan beliefs.  And the same is true of Christianity as a way of living—it is just one form of philosophical living among many others, for it becomes just that: a philosophy.

     Ancient philosophy—what I would call true philosophy, not the dull, academic armchair variety that is now in vogue—came out of paganism, and in many ways was the fullness of paganism.  And that’s precisely where the problem lies if Christianity is presented as a philosophical way of life.  Because the truth is that there are better forms of philosophy than Christianity.  For instance, if you just want to gain peace of mind, or be better equipped with handling the many stresses that daily life will throw at you, then certainly the philosophical, neo-psychological approaches of the different Asian religions are better suited.  And it’s not just the Asian religions, either.  The ancient Greek philosophies of Stoicism and Epicureanism are certainly better than any of the current crop of self-help masquerading as Christianity that pervades the bookshelves of “Christian” bookstores.

     And so the question now remains: If neither philosophical Christianity nor “pagan” Christianity is the answer, what is?

     If you want to truly usher in a life lived in Christ, then the answer must be that Christianity is neither philosophy nor religion but a mode of being.  It is a mode of being that encounters God.  And it is not an encounter with God that occurs just on Sunday morning, or when you pray, or when you practice anything that is liturgical.  It is an encounter that transcends and—yet at the same time—goes within all of these things.  It is an encounter not with a belief or a concept, but with the very Mystery that is God.

     It is an encounter on several levels.  The first—as just said—is an encounter with God as Mystery.  Anything that we make of God, or think of God, is not God, for as Evagrius Ponticus pointed out in the 4^th century: “God cannot be grasped by the mind.  If he could be grasped, he would not be God.”  This also means—and this is one of the major focal points of this book—that a life lived in God cannot be always “grasped” either.  Life is often hard, and it is often difficult.  It is filled with regret, pain, stress, and suffering.  To try to figure out the “why” of these things—such as trying to give them a concrete meaning through some sort of “God’s plan”—is to not live in the Mystery that is our Creator.  And this also means that we—who are made in the Image and Likeness of God—are also somewhat a mystery even to our own selves.  At the deepest parts of our beings, there is something unfathomable, beyond the realm to know.

     God, life, and our inner selves must all live in this very mystery of being.

     The second is an encounter with God as Christ, and, therefore, Truth as a Person.  It must become a relational mode of being.  As we encounter Mystery, and enter into Its very depths, we must discover that we are in relation to this Mystery that is Christ.  And if we are to do justice to Christ, then this relationship must be true by honoring all that Christ truly represents.  It can’t be some fake god of our own making—mythic, butler-ish, vengeful, you name it.  It must be the God of the cross, the God that suffered, and by doing so showed us the path that we too must follow—the narrow road that leads to life.

     It is also an encounter with God as Trinity, and God as hiddenness.  These, of course, are very closely tied with God as Mystery—you could say, in some ways, that they are one and the same.

     And, finally, it is an encounter with God as prayer.

     All of the essays that follow are attempts to express what it means to live out Christianity as a mode of being that honors and expresses all of these ways.  This is not an attempt to create some systematic theology that explains these various approaches and encounters—to attempt to do so would actually be a step backward, and would make all of this nothing more than another belief system, and therefore a regression back into paganism.  No, everything that follows are simply thoughts written down on paper; written as much for myself as for anyone else.  May you find as much solace—and sometimes discomfort—reading these words as I will attempt to find in writing them.

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.”

Living in the Divine Presence

In today’s world, many people have given up on religion.  A lot of times, this isn’t such a bad thing.  When people give up the cultural conditioning of their childhood, it is often because they are seeking authenticity, and they are not finding it in religion.  As an Orthodox – even though I belong to what a lot people would call a “religion” – my life is one lived in Christ.  (Or, at least, it’s an attempt to do such a thing – I fail miserably a good bit of the time.)  This Orthodox life is not a religion, then, since it’s not a belief system.

Despite the fact that it appears as if “religion” is dying, many of these people who have given up the religion of their childhood are nonetheless searching for something more.  This something more is often what is referred to as “spirituality.”

And, yet, the “spiritual” life can be just as dangerous as the “religious” life.  And by “dangerous” I mean that it can very easily lead one off track, so to speak.  It can lead away from a life lived in Christ, a life lived in – and through – the Presence of the Divine.

Many religious people practice their belief system because they want to give their lives meaning – nothing wrong with that in and of itself.  But what too often happens is a religion that is all exterior – it is about insulating oneself with a myriad of beliefs, and then finding other likeminded people to gather with, thus ensuring that your beliefs will rarely be questioned.  And when your beliefs are questioned, well, you have plenty of support to assure you that you were right all along.

This is what often happens with Protestants in our country.  (Although not always.  There are some exemplary contemplatives – and others – that have come from the Protestant traditions.)  But it can also happen to Orthodox, as well, especially when Orthodoxy, too, becomes nothing more than a belief system, nothing more than one of the many religions of the world.

I know more than a few people who were actively involved in their churches, and even tried their best to cultivate a “spiritual” life, as well, but became burned out.  Why?  Because too often what is taken to be a “prayer” life, or a “biblical” life is one that is simply lived around the edges of true prayer.  It skirts the outsides of it, or it hovers about it, but it doesn’t become a life lived within it.  Or, even more likely, it never becomes a prayer life that understands to be truly contemplative, then the life must embrace – and live out – the beneathness of things.

The spiritual life – for it to be true – must not be all edges.  And it cannot be a life that occasionally goes within the spiritual, only to retreat to the edges for the remainder of its being.  (Here I am thinking of the person that attends Divine Liturgy on a regular basis, receives the Sacraments and thus enters within for a brief period during the course of the week.  And this person tries his/her best to say their daily prayers, to read the Gospel and Epistle of the day, yet never enters into the withinness of the truly spiritual – never understands the true gnosis that the early Fathers spoke of – because their life is still edges.)

What, then, is one to do?  First, you must participate in all of the Sacraments, and it is good to read the Gospel and Epistle of the Day, and to pray the Divine Hours.  But this is not all.  You must pray unceasingly.  (The best way to pray unceasingly would be with the Jesus Prayer).  You must be vigilant in your practice of watchfulness.  (Along with prayer, watchfulness should be the other pillar of the life lived in Christ.)  But reading Holy Scripture, practicing watchfulness, and constant prayer are also not all that must be done.  For these things are still only tools that lead you directly into a life lived in the Divine Presence of the One who loves you and desires for intimacy with you.

And this quest for intimacy with the Divine is what people are often seeking when they talk of being spiritual, or when they say they are “spiritual but not religious.”  But too often, this “spirituality” is worse than the “religion” it replaces.  It becomes nothing more than a narcissism that replaces God with man.  (We were created in the Image of God, but He was not created in ours.)

Often, “spiritual” people will even talk of intimacy with God, or practicing the presence of God, but too often, all they are talking about is a feeling, nothing more.  (In Christian circles, too, this has become common.)

But living in the Divine Presence – and thus partaking of a life lived in Christ – is not a feeling, it is a reality.  And it is a reality lived out in the Reality.

Not just in, either, but through and beneath.  By a true spiritual life that embraces the beneathness of Christ, I mean living the kind of faith that moves mountains.  When Christ spoke of having the faith of the mustard seed, enough to tell the mountain to move, and it will, is, of course, not to be taken literal.  But it doesn’t mean, either, what a lot of Christians think it means.  It doesn’t mean that if you have a lot of faith you will be able to pass the exam, win the marathon, or become Mayor of your town (or President of the country) – even though this is typically how it is interpreted.  Rather, it means having the kind of faith that is even more shocking than making a mountain move through the sheer force of your prayer.  It means loving others who don’t love you, even those who hate you.  It means forgiving seventy times seven.  It means clothing the naked and feeding the hungry.  It means ministering to prisoners, even murderers, rapists, and child molesters.  In short, it means doing all of the things that world says are crazy, a world that too often claims to Christian but is never lived in Christ.