Faith Stories

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The Assurance of Things Hoped For

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. (Hebrews 11:1 – NIV)

In a lecture/ dialogue Monday night at Graham Memorial Chapel (Washington University), Heather Cox Richardson described our primary business in a democracy: to promote the idea that “all are created equal and have a say in our government.”  She referred to that idea as “faith in democracy.”

And I was struck by how similar “faith in democracy” was to faith in the religious context, because “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for  . . .”  Democracy continues to be an aspirational form of government, because it is challenged every day by those who want to use it for their own ends. This is not a political claim, because people on both ends of the political spectrum believe that democracy is on trial– just listen to the speeches on the stump of the Presidential campaign.

And some people of faith want to weaponize religion for their own agenda. It means making unholy alliances with political movements to advance a religious cause.  As Dr. Richardson urged, “Your politics should be informed by your faith, but it should not be used to garner power.” Just as religion is about the acquiring of faith, politics is about the acquiring of power. Religion should not be about the acquisition of power.

Faith is “the assurance of things hoped for.” It is not a bargain between religion and political parties, because partisan goals are political platforms, whereas religious goals are hopes yet unrealized. And religion was never intended to arm itself with political causes: look at (many of) the Crusades; the Catholic Inquisition; the Thirty Years’ War; the established churches in Europe before the American Revolution; the uneasy alliance between Christian churches and the Nazi regime of World War II. These were not the churches’ finest hours.

Those dark hours could be relived in a corrupted vision of American democracy. Those who believe the wall between church and state was not preserved in the Bill of Rights have no good designs on faith or democracy. They are using both faith and democracy to weaponize each other. It is not a good design for churches or political parties. It is corruption of both the sacred and the secular. In the word of Jesus, “Give, therefore, to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and to God the things that are God’s”(Matthew 22:21-22, NIV).

Dr. Richardson encouraged her audience to oppose the narratives of theocracy (merging of church and state) with their own narratives, whether political or religious.  The counter-narrative of faith, whether in God or in democracy, opposes the deceptive narrative of Christian nationalism currently on the rise.  Stories have power to disentangle the twisted narrative of a nation founded under one religion.

In our church this summer we began to write “faith stories,” a genre of personal writing meant to explain why we believe as we do. They are not so much “testimonies” as stories that illustrate the differences between faith experiences and “ordinary life,” stories that confirm or strengthen our beliefs. They are as diverse as the people that write them. Most of all, they are narratives that we can share with anyone who wants to know why we believe as we do. I can not share them here, because I do not have permission, but I will try to make some of them available, if anyone is interested.

We are not really evangelists, but we want to be articulate to share a story of our “conviction of things unseen.” I cannot doubt but what we share about our faith would apply to what might be shared about faith in democracy. Why is democracy, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “the last best hope of earth” ? (Annual Address to the U.S. Congress, 1 December 1862).  Many of us could echo the words of Lincoln, and it would be interesting to think and write about why we believe what we do.

Belief in democracy is not a partisan cause, but it can be corrupted for private purposes, religious or otherwise. It remains for those who can frame the story of why they believe to share with the overwhelmed and hopeless. Those with the “assurance of things hoped for” have a lot to offer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Trapped in the Struggle

 . . . the buck nearly died because it kept pushing forward on the fence without trying any other options, such as pulling back from the fence. It is so important in our faith to not get so set in our thinking that we aren’t willing to consider some changes in our beliefs and way of thinking.

I was thinking of Loren Polak’s beautiful faith story this morning

[ https://discoverstmark.blogspot.com/search/label/Faith%20Story , (Tuesday, August 29, 2023) ]

The image of the buck struggling with the barbed wire fence reflected my struggle to know God by imitating what others told me about meditation.

From my mentors,there were specific prescriptions about physical position: back forward from the chair, feet on the floor, head up, all this and a focus on breathing made the practice an exercise. I could not relax; my head was stuck in the fence like the buck’s.

This morning I forgot about the prescriptions, but I sat up and talked to God. The six minutes flew by and only once did I think about how soon it would end. Most of all, my frustration with my own ineptness seemed to loosen, and I no longer thought about my failure.

My image of God has languished as “the taskmaster,” expecting more of me than I could give. Some of it comes from my Evangelical upbringing, which gave me a love of the Bible, but too much focused on God’s unsatisfied demands on me.

Some of this image comes a general feeling of inadequacy, thinking I was always behind. I remember my teacher at some point in high school, sensing I needed to read faster. I was put on a reading machine which controlled the speed of the text rolling by and encouraged the reader to step up the rate to reach a point between discomfort and satisfaction. I got stuck somewhere between those points, and floundered, while some of my fellow students were zooming up to rates I never could reach. I have been a slow reader since then.

I found out reading was a chore unless I lingered over it. I needed to immerse myself in the text without hurrying, so I could enjoy it. I found comfort in a book by Thomas Newkirk called The Art of Slow Reading. The late literacy specialist Mike Rose said of this book: Newkirk reminds us why words matter, that words on page or screen are not there just to be ‘processed,’ but to savor and enjoy, to help us think and see more clearly, to touch our hearts and help us touch the world.

I learned this when I was teaching graduate school. I was already fifty years old! I had struggled against slowness, not realizing it could be a virtue. Not realizing reading could be just for pleasure. My job as a teacher educator was to help beginning teachers see the pleasure of reading, but I had lost my own joy. I actually recovered it by reading young adult books with my students.

This brings me back to Loren’s image of the buck stuck in barbed wire. To Loren’s eyes the buck looked dead, so hopeless was its position, so stuck in the struggle to push forward. When Loren came around to face him, the buck pulled back in alarm and suddenly freed itself from the fence. The story summed up my position seeing God as a taskmaster, and my stubborn push forward that locked me in place for nearly thirty-five years! I was a slow reader. So what?

Stubbornness can be a virtue when we are faced with a task that needs our full attention, but it is also a trap, that keeps us from backing up and seeing a different perspective. I have been learning about God’s “Yes” and my “No” that keeps me from experiencing the actual love of God.  It changes faith into futility, an endless struggle that distorts our view of life.

I appreciate Loren’s faith story, because it gave me the image of stubbornness that can lead to death. If we don’t stop pushing in the same direction, we can die there. I have begun to understand this in my struggle with reading and with meditation at the late age of 75. Better late than never!

 

 

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Meandering on Match.Com: A Faith Story

The day  before I met Victoria I mused about my hopes and expectations on my laptop.  I didn’t read those musings again until I opened up my laptop three weeks later on my return visit to St.Louis, December 9. Then I was stunned to realize I had met a woman exactly like the one I described here. Like seeing a prayer before and after it was answered.

If I had any doubts that it was Grace that brought Victoria and me together I no longer had them. When I went to St.Louis the second time I felt we were meant for each other.

 

Three weeks earlier in the  lounge at the Marriott, St. Louis I read  these words on a woman’s profile on Match.com: the hope of meeting “a man who also acknowledges that life is a meandering journey bolstered by faith” Just hours before we met I wrote:

I wanted to meet the woman who wrote this (meandering journey, etc.).

Match is a place to find every cliche and wishful thinking of single women. You find out how much they like to laugh and be charmed by looks, touches, and thoughtful gestures. You find out they don’t like men who take themselves too seriously, are carrying “baggage,” or want someone to cook for them.

O.K, I get it. We are starting over at age 60 or 70 and want to correct all the mistakes of earlier marriages. We have a short time to redeem the unhappy years of former relationships or exhaustion of the working years.

But even in retirement there must be more than letting ourselves go and breaking every rule we lived by for the first sixty years of our lives. Life has just as much meaning to retired people as to working people, or how could we retire contented? Are we all destined to drink ourselves silly on some beach on our bucket list?

I wanted to meet a person of faith, but there are code words on Match.com for that, too.  I am not sure how to de-code them. According to the Match.com profiles, I should “love the Lord” or “believe in God” or “attend church.” None of these are sure indicators of faith. Faith is something you live by and alters the way you make decisions. It is not a badge or membership card or an attendance record.  These are the trappings that drive people to call themselves: “spiritual, not religious.” But even that classification is more of a disclaimer of religion than a positive assertion. Not attending church is no more a sign of faith than attending it is.

I like the “meandering journey” part, because it shows that faith is no guarantee of the future . How could it be faith if it carried guarantees? We pray, we listen and we act as we think is spiritually wise, but we don’t have a highway through the Red Sea or even through the eye of the needle to walk through. We are seekers our entire life. It is a meandering journey.

Who is this shrewd woman who has come to understand faith in this profound way?And what is she doing on an online dating site? Is she as frustrated as I am trying to find a life partner in the grocery aisles of love? Has she cracked the code of the Profile to find men who see faith as an adventure, not a ticket to heaven? Until I found this meandering woman I had not deciphered the “spiritual, not religious” or “loves the Lord” that label a believer on her pilgrimage of faith.

It’s all words, so maybe there’s nothing to learn from them until you meet the writer. Still I admire the woman who finds words that fit her and has the faith that some man will interpret them as she means them. We are both on a meandering journey, and our paths are about to cross.

This was my hope and prayer three weeks before I met Victoria in the lounge of the Marriott, St.Louis.

 

 

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Down the Spiritual Ladder

Until I was about thirty-eight I thought that faith was about ascending a spiritual ladder like going to college and graduate school. I wouldn’t have called it that, but in retrospect that is what I thought it was. My life was changed when I flunked out of a spiritual experience, a failure at a spiritual community. But that is not what this story is about.

More than a decade after my “spiritual failure” I was a leader in the Summer Institute, maybe my third or fourth such institute since I had come to Eastern Michigan University. National Writing Project Summer Invitational Institutes have been among the most rewarding experiences of my high school and college teaching careers. It had been my dream to lead such an institute, and my appointment as a professor of literacy education at EMU made it happen.

The first challenge in the Summer Institute is to establish a safe environment for the graduate students (who are also K-12 English teachers) to share their writing. One way is for the leaders, including me, to share their own writing during the Institute. Here is what I wrote about sharing in the institute:

More likely we (especially the males) are all hoping the writing does not get too personal, and the discussion stays on the cognitive level.  But writing may sweep over rational boundaries. In 1998 I felt compelled to write a poem about the troubled home run king, Roger Maris, and in the middle of reading it out loud, began inexplicably to bawl.  Beyond the humiliation of crying about a baseball player long dead, I was also a co-leader of the Institute, and had demonstrated my fragility to colleagues I had only known for perhaps two weeks.  If I learned anything from it, it was that such outbursts should not be dreaded, but in fact welcomed for their palliative effect. I came, I cried, I survived.

When teachers who had attended the Institute recalled that summer, the first thing they would remember is how I cried over Roger Maris. This is embarrassing on so many levels. First: I was in charge of the institute. Second: I was among only three males in a group of 15-20 teachers. Third I had succumbed while reading my story of Roger Maris, a boyhood hero, but one of the more hostile and ornery New York Yankees in 1961, the year he broke Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record. Fourth: From my point of view I had more inspiring teaching moments that summer.

On the other hand, what is more meaningful to a writer than to capture a vulnerable moment of his life?  I actually had a breakthrough to realize that I identified with one of the least popular Yankees.  I would have preferred to write about Mickey Mantle, a beloved  Hall-of-Fame, beloved outfielder, but instead I identified with the sullen Roger Maris. My story revealed that I identified with the outcast, the misunderstood one.  Even now I realize that I was always more like Maris than Mantle.

Spiritual growth may come from a descent down the ladder of education, social status, or professional growth.  I saw that I could expose a fragile part of myself without losing my status as an educator. Many others shared their stories of vulnerability during that summer and learned that their group status remained intact and their writing still vivid and eloquent. They learned to do that, in part, from seeing their leader crumble and survive.

The way down is the way up the spiritual ladder. Really “the way up” is a myth.  There is no spiritual ladder. That is what I learned in the summer of 1998.

 

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Seven Stories (7): The Pearl

‘Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls.46 When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it. Matt 13:45-46

I believe in moments of grace, when we are given more than we can imagine deserving. We may have discovered such a pearl, like the merchant in Jesus’ parable.

It was almost by accident, but its value was obvious, and I reached for it resolutely.  And pretty soon I knew it was more than a pearl, but my key to the kingdom.  That’s how it was when I met Victoria almost five years ago.

I was a widower, but committed to another chance at marriage, because the single life was not for me. I had tried out  OurTime and Match.com for three months, meeting some congenial women, many multiple dates, one that had touched me emotionally. I was an ardent reader of the roster of Match candidates in my 25-mile radius and had even started a Match correspondence with a woman in Texas.

At a professional conference in St. Louis I sat in the bar of the downtown Marriott and scanned the local listings for Match. But why? I was only in town for two more days and St. Louis was 500 miles from home. I think I was reading the Match listings as I would the daily newspaper. Who’s new? What hope?

Then I sent out three invitations for Saturday night, as I would have if I were home. Why? In retrospect it made no sense to start dating one night before leaving town. Still I received two responses the next day, one regretting she already had plans and one saying, ok let’s have dinner.

I made reservations at Copia, a restaurant in walking distance, and then spent that Saturday in Conference sessions. I returned to my room and had time enough to get ready for dinner at 6 pm.  I remember my date, known to me as “Vi,” said she would wait in the bar, wearing a distinctive hat.

When I got off the elevator I saw her, standing in the bar crowd, wearing that stylish hat. Recalling that moment I can’t help but associate her with Iris Gaines played by Glenn Close in The Natural, bathed in some heavenly radiance the first time Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) sees her. It wasn’t quite the drama of the movie, but it was more than the usual first Match date where two people wave at each other and you realize this is your date for the evening.

It was a cold, windy November evening when we hurried down the street to the restaurant, getting the premium two-person window seat. I remember Vi could not keep that hat on in the wind, but it had served its function–to identify her.

I remember we occupied that table for three and a half hours.  I remember the food was great, but “Vi” was better. She talked twice as much as I did, but she was easy to interrupt, quick to listen. And we got quickly into serious issues like our family and religious backgrounds. And I remember that less than ten minutes into our conversation, she said, “It’s nice to be wanted,” and her voice broke.  I was hooked.

I remember half way into our conversation, we were talking about who Jesus was in reference to the first chapter of John’s Gospel. That does not sound like first date conversation, but it tells you everything about what was important to us. I remember saying Christianity was not about the answers, but the questions, and she remembers registering that in the positive column of her first-date assessment.  We both talked freely about our deceased spouses, and that proved to be a hallmark of our future relationship. We wanted to remember and honor them.

I remember her shapely legs as I watched her go to the rest room at the end of dinner. As we left the restaurant, I remember Vi saying we should pray about how we might pursue this relationship. She was signaling she wanted to continue the relationship long distance, but I had heard this line in the past as a stop sign for the gentile Christian dating relationship.  I was a little panicky when I assured her I would be in Lawrence, Kansas visiting my sister for the Christmas holidays. Vi reassured me that she considered that a convenient opportunity to meet again.

Back at her car, she offered to drive me around to the entrance to my hotel.  At some point I said, “I’m not sure I know your name,” although she remembers telling it to me in the beginning. It was “Victoria.”

I remembered the awkwardness of ending about fifteen first dates on Match. I had learned one thing for sure. Not to miss making a good first impression.  “I’d like to kiss you,” I said before exiting the car. The most glorious smile burst on Victoria. So I did.

That was it. I knew some “amazing grace” had happened. I had found a “pearl of great value.” It was a climactic moment for Match.com, but, most of all,  for Victoria and me.

Sleepless in St. Louis

You are incredible:

A few moments

Doubting the mechanism match.com

Then believing in me

The untested product

spilling out into your life.

You sat  down skeptical,

But suddenly vulnerable.

I wanted to leap across the table

Hold you, thank you

For trusting a reckless stranger

Who reached for the dating slot machine

Coming up quadruple apples.

Is there a script for first dates?

Where the couple circle around

Confident and qualified

Securing the high ground?

We trashed that script

With shameless grief and joy

Held in one hand.

Where did you get the courage?

A careful principled woman

Venturing out on a chill November night

Gambling or believing,

Taking the risk

On the out-of-town stranger.

You are incredible.

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Seven Stories (6): The Worst Year- Fall, 1985-Summer, 86

Perspective will transform the worst of experiences. The school year 1985-86 recalls three fateful decisions: two with grim determination and one with the innocence of a fresh start. First Kathy and I  decided to move to Cape Cod to join a family religious community, already a strong influence on our lives. Second we came to a marriage pit and decided to dig our way out. Third I applied to a summer institute for writing teachers, re-shaping the rest of my teaching career.

It was a decision partly shaped by Kathy’s ill-health and instability in her job. It also promised a Christian way of life we aspired to.  We wanted to become residential members of the Community of Jesus on Cape Cod. We were already non-resident members, visiting the Community for weekend retreats and even spending a Spring Vacation living in residence. We had received valuable spiritual counseling and were blessed by the holiness of their worship.

Once we announced our intentions of “testing a call” to live in the Community, our local pastor asked to meet with us over lunch. He earnestly advised us to reconsider, because of the Community’s reputation for strict discipline and paternalistic control of its members. We were not dissuaded, and we rented our home out in the fall of 1985 and rented a house in Brewster near the Community. We believed we were guided by the Holy Spirit, who would override the concerns of other counsellors.

The results were disastrous. While I was commuting to my teaching job 20 miles north of the Cape, Kathy was getting some pretty stern counseling, counseling that almost compelled her to take her life driving one morning on the Cape.  She told me she hated herself beyond redemption.

Our marriage was coming apart to the extent that we lived in different corners of the large house we rented. I was advised to urge Kathy to accept the counseling of the Community, so she could see what she truly needed. The fabric of our lives was shredding.  At the lowest point of our marriage when we were considering separation, we got news my uncle was in the hospital and not expected to survive his bout with cancer.

Driving to Connecticut to be with my uncle and aunt and my parents, we made our second decision. We began to sort out grief, alienation, despair and regret. We decided we should try again to make our marriage work.   I hit bottom in a hospital chapel coming to the reality of my uncle’s death. I wept with grief, mixed with relief. My tattered life was surviving, as my uncle’s was ending.  At the end of the weekend Kathy stayed with my mother and aunt, and I spent the week before my uncle’s funeral on the Cape, still commuting to Brockton to teach.

To make a long story short, we separated from the Community in December, 1985 and moved back to our home in Randolph in the Spring of 1986.  Many of our friends had successfully migrated to the Community, so it seemed like we were failures, dropouts. But we soon met a dozen or so refugees of the Community who had followed the same path we had, and we began to regroup from what then seemed like escape from a cult.

How had God failed me?  Our decision to join the Community was sacrificial, upsetting our lives; it seemed directed toward a deeper holiness, something we both wanted. Yet our decision to leave the Community was based on our need to survive as a couple and recover a personal orientation, rather than the corporate path of the Community. So which choice was really driven by the Spirit, to come or to go?

What came to me in the spring of 1986 as my faith had gurgled into the drain: I was climbing a spiritual ladder, the Community was the next rung. I wanted to raise myself before God and impress my spiritual leaders.  My career in secular education had not elevated me spiritually. I had chosen a job without spiritual credentials, no ladder toward heaven.  All I felt was bitterness toward the Community, toward God, toward my wife, toward myself.  I sold my faith for “a mess of pottage” (Genesis 25:29-34).

In the summer of 1986 I made a consequential third choice without anticipating it. I was looking for summer employment and came across publicity for the Boston Writing Project Summer Invitational Institute: three weeks – $500. I had nothing better to do, so I applied, was accepted and attended.

“That has made all the difference” (Robert Frost).  I was affiliated with the National Writing Project for the rest of my teaching career.  It pushed me to doctoral study in 1987, a sabbatical in 1988, a college teaching job in Michigan in 1993, and the role of Director of the Eastern Michigan Writing Project in 2000 till my retirement in 2018.

This is what became the worst year of my life. Perspective changed the worst  into the pivotal one.

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The Light of Life

What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (John 1:4, 5)

There is a Christmas story that is tender and nostalgic, and there is one that is affirmative and contemporary. John’s story is the latter. What difference does the birth of Jesus have on December 25, 2022? It is a light that shone in the darkness, a light that still shines in the darkness. We have this light as much as the first light that came from the voice of the Creator.  The darkness has not overcome it.

We had three days of disappointing Advent, two in the Lambert International Terminal hearing our flight delayed, then cancelled, with promises that another flight would take us to San Diego in time to board the Norwegian Jewel, our cruise ship. That flight was cancelled within five minutes of boarding time.

Finally we were given two tickets that would board us on a flight from Chicago on Christmas Eve, that would arrive within an hour of the gates closing on the ship. Victoria drove us through the dark morning of Christmas Eve to reach Chicago within three hours of our flight departure time.

We stood on the winding lines of  a desperate crowd in Midway Airport for about an hour and a half, while the departure time for  our flight kept withdrawing toward a landing time  impossible to reach our ship before it locked us out.  We finally succumbed and dragged our bags to the Parking Shuttle Bus, loaded up the car, and made our way back three hundred miles in utter defeat. It was one of the darkest Christmas Eves of my life.

We arrived home within a few hours of the Christmas Eve service, so we live-streamed it,  and Pastor Dave preached on Luke Chapter Two with its shepherds and angels and how Mary “treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.”  I have always felt I don’t treasure and ponder this story. One who has treasured and pondered it is Rachel Held Evans, who wrote before she died in 2019,

God shrinking down to the size of a zygote, implanted in the soft lining of a woman’s womb. God growing fingers and toes. God kicking and hiccupping in utero. God inching down the birth canal and entering this world covered in blood, perhaps into the steady, waiting arms of a midwife. God crying out in hunger. God reaching for his mother’s breasts. God totally relaxed, eyes closed, his chubby little arms raised over his head in a posture of complete trust. God resting in his mother’s lap. . . https://cac.org/daily-meditations/marys-wholehearted-call-2022-12-23/

Mary may not have phrased it this way, but the sense of what was happening to her comes from this meditation.  When I ponder this part of of the story, I can only think, “The wonders of his love, the wonders of his love, the wonders, wonders of his love.”

This morning Pastor Dave preached on the John 1 Christmas story, the one that says nothing more than “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” That’s it; the rest is history, implies John.  But he added this in v. 4-5 What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

We see the darkness closing in every day, in the January 6 insurrection, in the slaughter of children in Uvalde, Tx, in the invasion of Ukraine, in the deadly shooting of a teacher and a student in University City, MO, even in the bitter disappointment of missing a boat and a Christmas with our Ohio family.

Yet we see light in the world, the light of a Congresswoman willing to stand for democracy against her own party, the light of a Congress taking its first initiative on the age of purchasers of semi-automatic weapons, the light of the courageous President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the light of courage of St. Louis police to bring down the shooter within 14 minutes of their notification, the light of Christmas morning in Chesterfield MO knowing we could not fly to San Diego unless by the grace of God.  So we celebrate what remains without the grace to fly wherever we wished.

Because we have the light, if we are ready to see it in the face of disappointment or tragedy. At the end of every tragedy, whether in Shakespeare or the headlines, there is light, not overcome by darkness.  This morning I have been thinking of another flight, which we will only board by the grace of God, a flight to tour of the Holy Land in 2024, where, What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

Because the light is here as promised. But we have to look.

 

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Thanks for Our New Electronic Angel

Which from the street looks like four white-hot appendages growing out of a bell-shaped skirt, a few blinking intermittently like something at the airport and strung together with silvery reflecting ribbons, but up close looks like the inside of a six-foot tall LED network and you can clearly make out the outstretched robed arms and giant wings like an eagle just setting down on its perch and there are some dark red circles that resemble a sash and the sleeve cuffs of a robe. Like a compressed constellation.

And if it is a little electronic and spidery it does suggest how the night sky could produce these flashes of light, portraying an angel choir, just before it broke into neighborhood-alarming hymns of praise, “Glory to the new-born king,” which I would not simulate in this neighborhood more suited to “Silent Night.” Angels have been known to disturb the sleep of human beings, but their announcements always broke forth in the country, where there are no “Disturbing the peace” laws that would slap a fine on your humble abode.  So our electric vision sings silently.

Suddenly it seemed appropriate to spring for a $100 Electronic Angel after spending excessively to overhaul the landscaping in front of our house this fall, a wondrous improvement, but hardly visible in the night, where our dark house lies calmly on a street with intermittent Christmas decorations. We do not go in for the spectacular, our plantings stooped dark evergreens bordered by coppery, grayish boulders, but we wear winter fashion well.

Overnight the flashing white LED’s have awakened our yard and the gloomy end of our street, reminding us of a miraculous story in the lightly trafficked darkness.  Most of all the story is about light shining in the uncomprehending night after night for two thousand years and if the Electronic Angel gives it a tacky spin, it is ok with me if only it reminds me that heaven has come and keeps coming into our most darkening moments.  For the intrusive glow illuminating our dining room window with mute alleluia, thank you, Holy Light.

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Faith as Adventure

A verse I had memorized in my childhood came to mind: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding” [Proverbs 3:5]. For the first time, it dawned on me: there’s a difference between doubting God and doubting my understanding of God, just as there’s a difference between trusting God and trusting my understanding of God. Would I be able to doubt my understanding of God while simultaneously trusting God beyond my understanding? In a strange way, that question for the first time in my life allowed me to see God as a mystery distinct from my concepts of God. [1]  Brian D. McLaren, Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It (St. Martin’s Essentials: 2021), 92.

Victoria and I have been considering how differently we had been taught about “losing” our faith compared to what Richard Rohr and Brian McLaren have been portraying it in their series on faith and doubt [https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgxwLsKDGRQjrnCJXKDbdJkhRcTMQ].  Brought up in the Evangelical tradition we had been taught that a loss of faith was “backsliding” as if we were climbing an endless hill toward heaven, and the loss of faith was a slipping backwards, preventing our inexorable progress toward our destination.

Brian McLaren’s enlightenment about “lean not on your own understanding” (above) suggests that we may have the wrong idea about our very destination, about the God we are following. Doubt is not about losing our understanding about salvation, but potentially about a re-orientation to what salvation is, of who God is.  A better metaphor for our “pilgrim’s progress” might be a cycle of growth or a detour into a “dark night” which allows us to rejoin the journey toward a more realistic destination, a better understanding of God.

For me that course correction first occurred  halfway through my life, when I was convinced that God was leading me in unmistakeable ways, that I would always choose the will of God for my life if I was attentive. The details are not important, but Kathy (my late wife) and I had prayed for guidance about moving to a religious community and had taken the half-way step of renting our house while we moved in that direction. The transition did not work out, and we ended up leaving the community and returning to our home early.

I was shaken, because it seemed that we had been wrong about God’s guidance in a major way, and we could not figure where we had gone wrong. We had just flunked the spiritual guidance test. Of course I blamed God, and stopped going to church for six months, figuring: what was the point?  There was no way to guarantee we were on the path to salvation, so why bother? Kathy, in the meantime, decided to join the local Roman Catholic parish and seemed to recover more quickly than I.

What I learned, after deciding to attend a local Lutheran church, was that it was not a yellow brick road to salvation, but one of trial and error.  Faith was not a “pilgrim’s progress,” of overcoming obstructions on the inevitable path, but an adventure with detours that challenged my faith and my very understanding of God, as McLaren asserts in the above quotation.  The path might be a spiral of changes or a journey that even defied a clean metaphor to describe my progress toward God.  The point was there were no guarantees, except that God loved me and would hold me the entire way.

My faith did grow from this experience of loss, and it helped me through the transition of losing my wife to illness, living a year and a half in uncertainty, and meeting another woman, who is now my wife.  I never doubted that I would re-marry, because it had been one certainty in my life, but it involved retiring, moving to another city, and starting a new life at the age of seventy. None of this was overwhelming because I had embraced the idea that faith was an adventure, and nothing was certain about life’s journey.

So doubt was my instructor in the life of faith. At one point I was sure I was a backslider, but now I see my journey as fraught with detours, and that the detours are clarifying my “understanding” of God, as McLaren says. Doubt is not a threat to faith, but a moment for faith to grow. Even as I make my assertions about faith, I want to leave room for changes that uproot all that and plant me in other soil.  With faith, even our favorite metaphors are going to be challenged along the way. So whether “uprooting” or “detours on a journey” or “the dark night of the soul” the path of doubt can lead me back to faith and make my faith grow,.