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.

Paradox and Mystery

     This is the second in a series I'm writing on the paradox, mystery, hiddenness, and seeming absence of God.  The first was "Christianity as a Mode of Being."  You may want to read that post first before continuing with this one.

Paradox and Mystery

     One day, some of the brothers came to see Saint Anthony, and among these was Father Joseph.  Wishing to test them, the saint mentioned a text from Holy Scripture, and starting with the youngest, he asked what it meant.  Each brother explained it as best he could, but to each one, the saint said, “you have not found the answer yet.”  Last of all, he asked Father Joseph, “What do you think the text means?”  He replied, “I do not know.”  Then Saint Anthony said, “Truly Father Joseph has found the way, for he said: I do not know.”[1]

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers

     To encounter God—and through encountering God to therefore follow Christ—means to encounter the twin pillars of mystery and paradox.  God is mystery.  He is both known and not known.  He is One and yet Trinity.  He is immanent, and yet He transcends all.  He is fully human, and fully divine.  Because of these things, He is also paradoxical.

     To be Christian also means that we cease following a religion, for the truth is that Christ is the end of religion.  This is why Christianity is not a religion, and a “religionless Christianity”[2]—to use the words of Boenhoffer—is the only way to fully follow Christ.  Religion implies a belief system.  It is the pagan impulse that is so prevalent in our human, fallen condition.

     If it is not a belief system, then what does following Christ mean?  Unfortunately, “following Christ” today means “studying” the Bible on a regular basis, becoming a “prayer warrior”, or engaging in any of the many clichéd “experiences” you can have or groups you can belong to at any number of fundamentalist churches.

     But this is not the way to truly follow Christ.

     Following Christ means, first and foremost, encountering the God of mystery and paradox—the God that is Mystery and Paradox—and then to live this encounter in the world, and through living this paradoxical encounter, to be paradox and mystery.  It is only at this point of being—a being that embraces and yet transcends all that is paradox and mystery—that we can be true to Christ, and it is at this point that he becomes our savior.  He saves us from an idol of God that we have made for ourselves, and he saves us from the philosophies that attempt to usurp this pagan idol-worship, but in the end only mire us in an attempt at life that ultimately rejects Christ.

     By embracing paradox fully, an ironic thing happens.  In a sense, it ceases to be paradox, for it no longer presents us with a problem that needs to be solved.  But it never ceases being mystery.  In fact, the further we enter into an encounter with God, the deeper the mystery tends to be—utterly and forever fathomless.

     And this Mystery that we encounter, and then live through and in, pervades everything that is our life, and everything that Christianity offers to us, and to the world that Christ has saved.

     This happens at many levels, and in many ways.

     The first way—and perhaps it is not the first way for everyone, but I think it tends to be—is that mystery pervades life, and by this I mean that it pervades our human existence, an existence that we would have previously encountered as an existential angst and pull.  When mystery enters into our existence, we cease searching for answers, or searching for satisfaction, or searching for meaning that we thought we would find in Christianity to begin with.

     In this encounter with mystery and existence, we are free to be ourselves, we are free to finally be human.  (And to be fully human is to enter into Christ’s way, and to become divine.)  We are free to not know.  We are free to be broken, and not pretend that we were ever anything else.  This is the true salvation that Christ offers.

     Our brokenness is not something to hide from.  It is not something that prevents us from “achieving” salvation—although I understand this is often how it’s presented.  In fact, our brokenness is the very thing that saves us.

     It is often thought that Christ loves us—and therefore God loves us—in spite of our brokenness.  But I don’t think this is true.  Our brokenness only doesn’t save us when we don’t admit it, when we don’t embrace it as the very fact of existing.

     This failure to admit brokenness—and therefore fail to encounter the God of seeming paradox in this instance—was the very sin that the Pharisees are guilty of in the gospels.  Repeatedly in the gospel stories, our savior hangs out with sinners of the worst sort, but he never berates them for what they are.  In fact, it seems that he is almost lackadaisical about just how broken they truly are.

     Personally, I never really thought enough about this as a path to salvation until I was reading a passage from the Russian martyr-saint Pavel Florensky[3]:

     “Why did Christ love so much the society of harlots and publicans?  Just imagine—these were real harlots who would fight, conduct indecent talks, and swear…  and Christ preferred their company to that of the Pharisees.  Just think, why is it said that the ‘power of God is performed in poverty’?  Poverty is not only weakness, not some poetic sickness like tuberculosis, but sinfulness, defilement.  Christ was with sinners not because they needed him more, but because, for Him, it was more pleasant to be with them; he loved them for their simplicity and humbleness.”[4]

     It was more pleasant to be with them; and it is more pleasant for Christ to be with us—in a real, palpable sense; mysterious yet utterly real—when we too admit our brokenness, actually get in touch with how broken we are.

     When our brokenness becomes real to us, so does God become real to us, and so does Mystery become real in ways that no words can ever do justice.

     For Mystery to pervade our life, and for God to become an ever-present state of being, I think that something else must occur: we must often enter into our faith slowly through a process of doubt.[5]

     Now, I’m not saying here that conversion happens through a process of doubt.  In fact, I think that true conversion has little to do with weighing all of the rational arguments for and against God.  No, our initial conversion when it is true—and by true I mean that it is not contrived, but rather it is a deep pull, a longing of the heart—is centered in the heart, when we encounter things such as truth, beauty, love, and mystery.

     When I think about initial conversion[6], I am often reminded of the story of how Russia was converted to the Orthodox Catholic faith.  To those who are Orthodox, it’s a common enough story.  For others reading, I think it bears repeating[7]:

     Prince Vladimir of Kiev and of all of Rus wanted to find a religion to unite his imperial court. Any religion would do. He just wanted to find the right one. So he did what a good ruler would do—he took emissaries from the royal court and sent them out and said, “Find out about all the religions out there and come back and tell me which one is best, and that’s the one we’ll use.”

      They went out and visited many different religions, many different forms of Christianity. Christianity was not yet firmly divided in the way we think of it today, but there were already longstanding schisms by the time of the conversion of Russia. We often think of the Great Schism as being the schism between the Roman West and Constantinopolitan East. But this was a late schism, much sadder. More divisive schisms had happened long ago—schisms, for example, at the time of Chalcedon (451 A.D.). Schisms which, lest you think history is all in the past, still divide us today in 2010. Lord, have mercy.

    So he sent out his emissaries and they visited here and there. By one tradition, they went to the Islamic court, asked about Islam, and wrote back to Vladimir and said, “It’s a nice religion, but they don’t allow alcohol, and this would never go over with Russians.” They went to Germany, Europe and throughout the world.

     One group of envoys went to Constantinople. This is what they wrote in their own words, “When we stood in the temple [this is Hagia Sophia where you can still go today, the Church of Holy Wisdom], we hardly knew whether we were in heaven or on earth. For in truth it seems impossible to behold such glory and such magnificence on earth. We could not possibly relate to you what we saw in that place. But one thing we know, there God dwells among men, and all the worship of other countries is to us, forevermore, as nothing. We cannot forget that beauty which we saw. Whoever has enjoyed so sweet a sight will never be satisfied with anything else; nor will we consent to remain any longer in paganism as we are now.”

     We cannot forget that beauty.

     It was not some system of catechesis that converted the Russian people, nor was it some long-winded diatribe—as you might find at your average fundamentalist church on any given Sunday morning—but it was beauty.

     But after that initial, genuine conversion, then what?  This is where entering into faith slowly through a process of doubt comes into the picture.  This is where a process of doubt allows us to deepen our conversion experience by making it constantly experiential.  We must encounter doubt as a path of not knowing that is deep, abiding, and never settles for shortcuts.

---

[1] Adapted from “The Sayings of the Desert Fathers” by Benedicta Ward.

[2] By “religionless Christianity” I certainly don’t mean a “Churchless Christianity.”  What I mean is a Church that loses all sense of paganism (see my previous post on Christianity as a way of being).

[3] Florensky was a martyr that was killed under Russian communist yoke in 1943.  His thoughts should have a wider readership, but he is little known to the Christian world outside of the Orthodox Church.

[4] From “Salt of the Earth,” pg 16.

[5] I am borrowing this phrase from the Czech—and Roman Catholic—priest Tomas Halik.  He writes of this in his book “Night of the Confessor,” chapter 5, entitled “Discreet Faith”.

[6] I say initial conversion because we must not think of conversion as something that happens once, and then is done.  (As is so common among “born-again” evangelicals who speak of “being saved” or “knowing our Lord Jesus Christ as our personal savior”.)  Rather, conversion is an ever ongoing, ever deepening relationship with the Triune God.

[7] The story as told here is quoted from Archimandrite Irenei’s “Orthodoxy and Mysticism” which you can find elsewhere on this blog, or you can listen to his series of the same title on Ancient Faith Radio .  For a more in depth account, see Metropolitan Kallistos Ware’s book “The Orthodox Church.”

The Divine Other as Person

a.k.a.: Why I’m not a Buddhist

The other day I received an email from someone asking – after reading my previous post on the Noble Eightfold Path – why I didn’t just stick with Buddhism.  I thought I made myself clear in my post that I am in no way, shape, form, or fashion a syncretist, but apparently that’s not the case.  The danger, I suppose, in writing something such as a post on the Eightfold Path is that readers, unfamiliar with either Buddhism or Orthodoxy, will come to the conclusion that either one of them is good, that either one of them is okay – why not just use them interchangeably.  (And there are plenty of writers – Buddhist and Christian – who say just that kind of thing.)

But I’m not one of them.

Buddhism and Orthodoxy are different – as Bikkhu Bodhi so succinctly puts it in the previous post.  So why am I Orthodox?  And why not Buddhism?

First off, and let me be as clear as possible, I learned a lot from Buddhism (and from Taoism, too, for that matter).  But in the end, it just didn’t work for me.  And, truth be told, I don’t think it will work for anyone else, either.  Not because it’s necessarily wrong, but because it’s incomplete.  Why?  For me to explain that, then the rest of this post is going to have to be personal.

I’m not going to lay out the details on any Orthodox catechism or apologetics.  Those too often come from the head, and – quite frankly – stay in the head.  What I have to say comes from the heart.  If what I say appeals to you, leads you into an intimate relationship with Christ, leads you into the depths of the Orthodox faith, then good.  If, however, it doesn’t, that’s okay, too – there are other ways to make your journey into Orthodoxy, and therefore into the heart of the true Christian faith.  As Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnika puts it, there are many ways to scale the mountain, but there’s only one mountaintop.  There is the way of the priests, the martyrs, the ascetics, the apostles, etc.  What I offer here is my way. (Maybe we’ll call it the way of the bedraggled, the broken, and the burned-out.) It works for me.  It may not work for you.

It Started With a Meditation

For a few months, I had been reading all I could get my hands on with regards the mystics of Christianity.  It didn’t take me long to realize that Protestantism held no sway over me – I had given up on that when I had given up on Christianity almost 20 years ago; which left me with Catholicism and Orthodoxy.  It wasn’t easy to get my hands on much Orthodox stuff, so I mainly read Catholic writers (I really enjoyed Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Avila) and the occasional Eastern Christian stuff that would come my way.

Despite all of this, I was still essentially Buddhist.  I sat in meditation every morning and each night.  I still read a lot of Buddhist literature, and held a very Buddhist worldview.  (The Buddhist view of the world and reality, I must admit, is at least better than a lot of what passes for a Christian worldview in this country.)  As much as I enjoyed reading the mystics of Christianity, there was one thing that I really had a problem with: the idea that God is a Person.  It was easy to take from some of the medieval mystics (Meister Eckhart, for example) and even easier from a lot of modern-day Catholic contemplatives that God was an Impersonal Absolute.  You could get intimate with this Absolute, sure, and you could feel a very personal relationship (in some ways, at least) with this Absolute, but it was still a stretch for me to believe that God was a Person who loved me and cared for me.

But, one night, everything changed.

I sat down on my zafu and zabuton for meditation.  After about 15 to 20 minutes of following my breath, and once I had sufficiently calmed my mind, I stopped following my breath to allow my consciousness to rest in open, vast awareness (that’s neo-Buddhist jargon).  As I did, something happened, something I was in no way prepared for.  In my room was a Presence.  This Presence wasn’t just in the room.  It was in me.  It was in me, and yet It was beyond me.  It was beyond even the Transpersonal That which I had taken to be the end of the road –as far as contemplative practice goes.  This Divine Other wasn’t just beyond everything, and It wasn’t just in everything, including me.  This Divine Other loved me – in fact, the Divine seemed to love me with a reckless, raw intensity.  It didn’t love me for what I wasn’t, and It didn’t love me for the great contemplative that I was trying so hard to be (as if that was going to happen).  The Divine Other was a Person who loved me just as I was.

At first, I didn’t want to think about it, but I knew the truth: this Person was Christ.  I knew it in a way beyond what any words can possibly describe – try as I might in these pages.  Christ loved me, prodigal son that I was (and still am).  For the first time, I knew what Saint John the Theologian meant when he wrote, “God is love.”

My eyes watered.  Tears found my face.  God, I don’t deserve to be loved like this, I thought.

Here’s another truth that I didn’t want to admit to myself at the time: Despite all my hours of meditation, despite the fact that I could enter deep meditative states where it seemed as if time and space fell away for an hour or more at a stretch, I was not a very changed person.  I was still capable of being the same irascible jerk as before my Buddhist practice.  I was still capable of being completely selfish and unkind to others.  I was still capable of being rude to co-workers, friends and family.  I was still broken.  I was still one screwed-up individual.

But Christ loved me.  He loved me in all of my screwed-up brokenness.

Only the religion of Christ offers a God that loves unconditionally, and wants you to join in intimate union with Abba – a word best translated as “papa” or “da-da.”  This is the God of Christ; the God who craves intimate union with me, with you, with all of His creation.

The Buddha was a great teacher.  But he was before Christ, before the Logos (the Dao, the One Who Was, Is, and Forever Shall Be) became flesh and walked among us.  He, as with other great teachers from Asia, knew Christ only indirectly, whereas we can know him directly, intimately, and can attain theosis with the One who made us in His Image and Likeness.

Journey to Orthodoxy

For those of you interested in others who have made the journey from the Far East to the Truth of Orthodoxy, here's a link that may be of interest:

http://journeytoorthodoxy.com/category/convert-stories/non-theists/buddhists/

It is on the website "Journey to Orthodoxy"—which has some other great pages, as well.