Toward Losing Your Faith

Titles and openings often tell you what the rest of the work is going to be about, if you are really paying attention, and the title/subtitle of our blog creates a bit of tension in me. Trying not to lose our faith is a troublesome concept for this generation, because all I want to do is lose my faith, discard it, leave it behind, and critique it into oblivion. I want to dismantle my conceptions of God and the Church and then walk away, hands up in the air (in frustration not in worship), at the disconnected pieces that no longer have any intellectual glue to hold them together. My faith is like this plant we have had for over five years. This plant grows and grows and grows; we have cut it back at least three times. We leave it out of the sun and yet it grows, we prune it and it comes back more, except this last time we finally cut it way back down to the bottom, totally laying down the challenge to this plant to continue growing. Two days later we saw the first leaf shoot out in a defiant will to live. On the third day, we awoke to find the leaf gone...our cats ate it.

Everything in life is a metaphor, and I am tempted to leave this post now like I am so many sermons, with just the image and idea and no application or "how to" advice. Metaphors are destroyed when they are forced to mean only one thing, just like our faith is and just like our God is. This is why I want to lose my faith and my articulation of a God that was only made in my or my teacher's image. I am perpetually pruning my faith and every once in a while I chop it all down leaving nothing and waiting for that divinely defiant revelation of God to burst forth. Easily the words "I don't belive in God anymore" can come to my lips, and more and more we are understanding that not as a dualistic annihilation of God, but as a metaphor: The God I once knew is gone, the God I once believed in just got complicated, the God I once held on to has eluded my grasp, the God I once created in my image is now creating me in the divine image instead.

Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount to seek first the kingdom of God, and God's righteousness, and all these "other" things will be given to you as well. As a child I sang the song with these words and thought that if I sought God then I would gain wealth and riches or a healthy and happy life, but that is not what Jesus means. Jesus means seek first God's kingdom, not your own kingdom built with God's help. Seek first God's righteousness (God's way of living in right relationship with your neighbor) and not your own moralistic code of conduct, and then all these other things (these anxieties about life and its necessities) will be given to you as well. But how do we know what God's kingdom is if it is not our own understanding of God's kingdom. How do we seek after the thing that we might not recognize once we find it? This is our theological crisis.

God calls Moses to lead the people Israel out of Egyptian captivity, and Moses wants to know who this God is, so that he can tell the people who they are following. God replies, tell them, I am who I am, I am sent you. That is like saying, Is is Is (which is a metaphor!) and letting the existential crisis flow. Even though we are "Post-Modern" we still like to believe in that which we can conceive; we still think, therefore we are. But God and faith transcend cartesian/Modern philosophy and make the radical claim that who God is, and who we are created to be, are both beyond our conceptions of who God is and who we are created to be. This makes me constantly lose my faith.

I awoke this morning, and literally said out loud, "I don't believe in God anymore." And that sucked. Until I was making coffee and God said to me, "No, it is not that you don't believe in me, you no longer believe in the version of me you thought was going to make your life easier." That version wasn't working out too well at the moment. And that sucked. Everytime I lose my version of God I have the opportunity to experience faith at it most "faith-full," that is the kind of faith that welcomes a God I do not know or understand into my life. This is a hospitable faith, a welcoming-the-stranger-into-your-home kind of faith. For I am welcoming the unknown God as the unknown God into my life. That way God gets to be who God gets to be and not God gets to be who God is to me.

There is no doubt that it is enjoyable to enliven our spirits with a new understanding of who God is when we come across one. We feel that we are growing and bursting forth with new life. Such seasons are to be enjoyed and I believe come from God. Once we begin to understand our new understanding of God to well, however, then the metaphor stops generating new meaning and become stagnant, ultimately dying once we understand it completely. Then it is okay to lose our faith, to chop the plant down and challenge it to grow again.

P.S. When we were younger we used to tell our teachers that our dogs ate our homework, now I tell God, the cats ate my faith.

Talking to Strangers as Confession

I saw this guy sitting in Union Square every Friday and Saturday during the holiday season, and I couldn't help but wonder why. Each time I saw him, I felt this overwhelming compulsion to go over to him, sit down, and ask his how many people actually sat down and had a conversation. If they did, what kinds of things did they say? Deepest, darkest secrets and sins? that they were having a bad hair day? that the most ordinary things caused them to have an anxiety attack? And what kinds of people were they? Tourists or New Yorkers or lonely people or crazy people or people tired of shopping? If they told him things, how did he listen? Was he silent except for nodding his head? Did he practice "reflective listening" that told them he had heard accurately what they said? Did he attempt to fix or solve their problems, offering advice? And moreover, who was he? Was he a pastor too? Was he somebody selling religion or a fortune teller or a homeless person or sociologist doing an experiment or an actor in a film?

Maybe it was Jesus. That's what I told myself, both joking and serious at the same time. He was a manifestation of God's holy humor, a God who decides to send Jesus into the flesh again in modern day (a la Dostoevsky), as a homeless man in a holiday market holding up a homemade sign that says "Here to Listen." Only the irony is that no one stops to speak to him.

Confession is good for the soul, goes the old saying--only we rarely engage in this spiritual practice with any kind of depth, if at all. We rarely speak our sins to a listening ear. Instead, we will pause for a moment of silence during worship (but only a moment because we can't handle too much silence) before we move triumphantly and thankfully onto absolution. Or worse yet, we prefer to make our confession anonymously to strangers, like the man in Union Square: a modern-priest or messiah ready to hear our confession, and then we never have to see him again. We will send our confessions beautifully written on postcards with images and art to a stranger (see the book PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives by Frank Warren). We will expose our lives to strangers on the internet via blogs or YouTube. We will confess to a church website, but not an actual church of flesh-and-blood people (see the New York Times article on Life Church, an Oklahoma Covenant church which set up a section of their website for anonymous confessions - http://www.lifechurch.tv/Default.aspx?p=635y). In essence, when we confess to strangers or anonymously, we confess into a black hole or vacuum. It's a confession without legs, with no faith community for accountability or support or healing. I suspect that absolution doesn't always come immediately or at least we have to circle our way there; and it matters that you have someone tangible to walk with on the way.

Most New Yorkers love to talk to strangers; you almost have to when you are forced to sit so close to each other in a restaurant or wait in line for hours at that damn DMV on 34th Street. When you talk to strangers, you get to choose what to reveal about yourself. It has the appearance of openness and vulnerability about who you are, and sometimes even your secrets and sins. But it is only an inadequate substitute for confession, and I think that we secretly long for the real thing. At its best, confession names truth, about ourselves and consequences of our choices, actions, and priorities. That naming has power because it pushes us towards the path of forgiveness and reconciliation--sometimes with God, and sometimes with those we have hurt or against whom we have sinned. The hardest kind of confession--the hardest kind of sin to speak to a listening ear--is when we must look the person whom we have hurt in the face and it is their ear that hears our confession. And that can't happen on the internet or on a postcard; it only happens with flesh-and-blood listeners.

I never did stop and talk to the man in Union Square who faithfully sat each weekend near the subway entrance for 4 weeks. Part of me liked the mystery of not knowing, and another part of me (I confess) didn't want to be seen as talking to him for fear of what people might think. I was afraid they would think that I was one of those crazy or lonely or sinful people who had no one else to talk to but a stranger. So whether or not it was Jesus in New York for a visit, I'll never know. What I did discover is that even a modern-day "Jesus" needs someone to listen; once, when I walked by, I saw him holding his sign and talking on a cell phone.

What then Must We Do? An Essay

It is true that too often we jump to action without thinking or listening. Asking, "What next?" or "What do you want me to do?" is an eventual necessity, but also often used as a preemptive strike when in the midst of controvery in order to simply move on. Before asking the question we must listen, study, analyze, and attempt to understand whatver we seek to take action on, but if we halt there and we only analyze and critique we remain "humpty-dumpty" people--able to take apart and understand, but no ability to put back together again in new and helpful ways. Contemplating, "What then must we do?" moves us beyond deconstruction into reconstruction, and integrity demands that if we know what we must do, then we must incarnate it in our lives.

Doubt, however, causes us to be double-minded when it comes to our options. Even the simplest of issues can be fought over with different philosophies and ethics brought to the table. Forging ahead half-heartedly or suspiciously is sometimes acceptable because we want to be active in pursuing something, even if it means meanandering toward our goal rather than walking the straight line. Good intentions, however, will only take us so far without a solid strategy for the long-term. Hope, perhaps, is better than good intentions, for hope at its most virtuous is always active and participating in that for which it longs. It seems to me that this then is the crux of the issue for the generation who so desperately wants the world to be a better place and has not bought into the morality of absolute moral tolerance (think of the outrage over Enron, Catholic pedophilia, military spending and torture, etc.), but is leary of signing on the dotted line of a particular community's doctrine and cosmology no matter how much good they are doing. Just as we are becoming increasingly aware of the multi-layered aspect of our identity, so too our faith and beliefs pull from a variety of sources, which is at once the seed-bed of doubt and the bedrock of a full and deep faith.

Kindly, we are not left without resources and ways forward. Left to our own devices, we might throw our hands up in the air, and walk away, but even the ability to do so is a position of privilege. More and more of us, however, are finding that our faith compells us to act in compassionate ways and to work for justice. No longer can these two be separate for compassion without justice is ultimately narcissistic and justice without compassion does not incarnate the love of God and proclaim the good news of God with us. On the one hand compassion is helping hurting people, on the other, justice is working to stop that which is hurting people in the first place. Probably, what I am describing is an ideal, but I think we can no longer be satisfied with simply, for example, feeding hungry people, without also asking why it is there are hungry people to feed. Quickly, one thinks of Archbishop Romero, who is quoted as saying, "If I feed the poor, they call me a saint; if I ask why there are poor, they call me a communist." Regardless of what theological, political, or philosophical outlook one brings to an issue, confronting the problem behind the symptom we are treating is overwhelming and easily leads one to despair. Staying the course on an issue one feels called to engage will require self-care, the ability to say yes to the things you can do and no to the things you cannot, integrity, honesty, a good community who wants to bring out the best in you, and a belief in some power and resource beyond this world (which for me as a Christian is the Triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.) There should also be an intentionality about celebrating even the small successes so that much of the emotional and spiritual drain of the struggle is replenished.

Ultimately, as we have just come through Christmas we must realize that Jesus nor our faith remain in the manger. Very quickly the gospel of Luke proclaims that this birth will have world-wide ramifications. "What then must we do?" is the question raised over and over by the hearers of the Baptist's message in Luke 3 and exemplifying this word is Jesus' first teaching in the synagogue in Luke 4, which is all about compassion and justice. Yearly, we hear the story of Jesus' birth, but so quickly do we forget its follow-up. And so with zeal we must follow up our season of gifts to our beloved close ones with gifts that reach even the unknown global neighbor.

What If I Have Nothing to Say?

We've been in New York for about 2 1/2 years, and I suppose that part of my anxiety about beginning a blog now is that I'll have nothing to say. What if everything funny or cool or scary or unique has already happened? What if we've missed the most interesting part of our time here? What if we have no new stories to tell? What if I've gotten dumber since graduate school and all ability to theologically reflect is gone? So, why now? Why start a blog now? Isn't that the question that begs to be answered?

I think that I'm finally starting to feel settled here in the city and in the church. It's starting to feel less temporary and more permanent. I have lost my romantic idealism about living in New York City and being a pastor. I'm beginning to find friends and a community outside the church. The truth is, we've been in limbo for so long when it comes to revitalizing the church: will it grow, or not? is this a sign of health, or not? are we really called to be pastors, or not? should we give up, or not? I've said more than a few times that I feel like God is giving us all kinds of signs--I just don't know how to read or interpret them. I guess I've finally stopped looking for signs about the future, and am just living in the present moment. Which means I might be ready to reflect on the reality of my vocation in this particular place.

It's a scary thing, as common as blogging is. It means being vulnerable about your ideas, your politics, your ability to write, the quality of your reflections, your pain and failures, the fact that maybe no one will read it or care (or they will). I've spent that last 2 years feeling as though nothing I did or said really mattered, and now I'm scared that it actually will. Maybe this is the sign I've been looking for.