There's a place in Psalm 25 that goes like this:
8 Good and upright is the LORD;
therefore he instructs sinners in his ways.
9 He guides the humble in what is right
and teaches them his way.
10 All the ways of the LORD are loving and faithful
for those who keep the demands of his covenant.
11 For the sake of your name, O LORD,
forgive my iniquity, though it is great.
12 Who, then, is the man that fears the LORD?
He will instruct him in the way chosen for him.
13 He will spend his days in prosperity,
and his descendants will inherit the land.
14 The LORD confides in those who fear him;
he makes his covenant known to them.
15 My eyes are ever on the LORD,
for only he will release my feet from the snare.
Over the past few years, I have dearly wanted assurance that if there is a God, he will guide me and teach me the way he wants me to be. Not as in, "there Tom, you've got the Bible. That's more than enough. Believe it Or Else." Rather, I've hoped for the sort of friend and teacher who sees and understands my problems and challenges, shows it, gently helps me work through them, and makes sure I understand what I need to. It would also be nice if he didn't get upset with me every other moment. It seems to me like that's what (who) I need if "my feet" are to be "released" "from the snare".
Reading this Psalm, I'm encouraged that maybe this is true. But there do appear to be some contingencies: it's "the humble" who get guided, "those who fear him" who get confided in, and "those who keep the demands of his covenant" who receive the LORD's love and faithfulness.
"The demands of his covenant" are framed differently among Christians these days than in the psalmist's time, but 1 John 3:23 seems to give a decent summary of what the Christian God asks:
23 And this is his commandment: We must believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another, just as he commanded us.
So then I've found I have some problems on my hands. For one I'm not the humblest of individuals. No, I tend to think like I'm pretty hot stuff actually. A paragon of insight, intelligence and nobilitude. Still, despite this character flaw, I do regularly seek God in humility, so that part's not what gets me.
There is a nagging gadfly voice that pipes up, the same one that likes to announce that "all you need is the Bible" line above. It points out that I don't believe there's a God, therefore I don't believe in Jesus, therefore I'm disobeying God's command, out of keeping with his covenant and had better get myself back in line Or Else. Plus, it claims, James 1:7 says God will happily give needed wisdom to everyone who asks except doubters like me, so if I want wisdom, I'd better make myself Believe and not doubt Or Else.
"Hey!" I say, "But I have conscientious objections! I'm 'doubting' because of a good faith effort toward honesty. And how, aside from willful ignorance, do I just decide to 'believe' something? Maybe despite first appearances these passages somehow mean something more reasonable?" And the gadfly replies, "You're whining; stop. Your 'reasonable' is not God's reasonable. If God commands something, you're accountable to do it. God's said what he's said. Just Believe the Truth." These sorts of conversations generally leave me anxious, insecure and a little angry.
That's been typical of my spiritual dry spell. I've already shared the above with some of you months ago. What does it have to do with the recent spiritual rains, this little Spring?
The thing is, this Spring, I've been seeing and thanked God for sprouts of humility, the fear of God, a mindset of faith and a life of love: just what I need.
But I'm not gonna elaborate til Part III.
Let me know if you have any thoughts about the gadfly voice. What do you think it is? Where do you think it comes from? Is it familiar to you? How would you deal with it?
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Monday, May 23, 2011
A Spiritual Spring: Part I
In mid-to-late 2007 I experienced a season of spiritual feasting. It was a feast of hearing from God and perceiving him work in my life. This festival spanned a world-between-worlds time of mine, a prolonged airport trip if you will, the phase when I was transitioning from college to the working world; from Ann Arbor, to a 5-month layover in St Joseph MI, to sunny Salt Lake City. Among the things I believed God said to me in that time, that I have treasured up, was Isaiah 30:15:
This is what the Sovereign LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says:
“In repentance and rest is your salvation,
in quietness and trust is your strength,
but you would have none of it."
This is what the Sovereign LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says:
“In repentance and rest is your salvation,
in quietness and trust is your strength,
but you would have none of it."
At the time, I was mostly just interested in the nice part of the verse—the first part. Still, I went ahead and recorded the less nice part as an afterthought because it just seemed indecent (and suspicious) to cut the verse midsentence.
While all this was going on, I was in the process of working through my spiritual misgivings and reasons for persistence in following Jesus. Here in Salt Lake City, the place God made ready for me, I dove deeper into spiritual skepticism. I dove believing (usually) there was a good reason for diving, asking God to swim down with me. But in these waters, the bright spiritual feasting I had known before dried up. My reasons for skepticism did not go away. As happens with water, the skepticisms gradually soaked through my skin. Like happens with silt, I stirred up new ones. Trying to live for a God whose existence seemed highly unlikely was becoming more strained.
It seems that what grows in the garden of Christian spirituality is designed to drink full-fledged belief, and much of the garden starts wilting without that water. Cactus gardens can have a special sort of beauty, but exclusive cactus gardeners miss out on a lot too. And even cacti shrivel and die at some point in a bad enough drought.
When I review my journal from this past November and December, I notice I was doing a lot of calling out to God, feeling stale in my relationship with God, crippled in my Christian belief, and mediocre in service to others. I noticed in others things that I was thirsty for. For example, I saw my friend Sarah Martindell pouring out her life for others in the Peace Corps in Namibia, and wondered if a disagreeably large portion of the fruit of my life would pass as a fog of abstractions and worthless self-importance. Later, her reading a sermon she’d delivered describing her recent adventure seeking to know Jesus (figure out what he was/is as well as personally interact with him in the now) and finding what she sought (and more) also made me feel like maybe I was spiritually missing out; maybe there’s more to knowing him than I knew or had or expected. Likewise, reading my Cousin Chelsea Douce’s blog, I saw a groundedness in a faith of peace and love that looked very worth having. Or getting.
I believe this longing and felt need is in itself a blessing. To be authentically humble and ready to grow is part of the good life. To have the longing fulfilled, though, is even better.
All this is tied to the diving expedition. The currents in my skepticism have been shifting in 2011. One of my big prayers for the year is to come to a secure, well-founded conviction of God’s existence and faith in Jesus. We’ll see what God’s timeframe is on that one, but there’s been progress of sorts.
In recent months, the difficulty of explaining away the evidence for Jesus’ miracles and resurrection has been more prominent to me. It’s not as if I hadn’t heard the arguments in question years ago. It’s also not as if I don’t have ideas on just how one might go about that explaining away if one had to. Nor is it as if my difficulties with Christian belief seem smaller than my difficulties with unbelief. It’s mostly just that, paying more attention to all the particulars of the records of what went down with Jesus, it has appeared more clearly to me that (like, in my view, Christian belief) unbelief concerning Jesus requires some substantial faith beyond just taking the obvious to heart. The facts need to do some very surprising things behind the curtain, and to choose not to trust the gospel accounts amounts to betting (maybe even betting your life) that those surprising things happen.
This may make me an agnostic of sorts from a factual standpoint: I don’t know whether Jesus rose from the dead! It’s crazy and weird if he did, and crazy and weird if he didn’t! Both highly unlikely options. Sometimes we can just leave things sit that way. Sometimes that’s the better choice over forcing a resolution. But sometimes when we don’t know the truth, it’s appropriate to choose to trust one story or another. If some old geezer says “ it’s gonna flood and yer all gonna die! ” and he has this ark he’s been working on the past few decades, one must decide whether to assume the guy is prophetic or deluded. To shrug and carry on as usual is implicitly to assume something along the lines of the later, whether or not you mean to. As you probably know, I’m invested in trusting the Christian account of things. I was before, but recently it’s been more like trusting in the face of my blatant ignorance and less like trusting in the face of a clearly stronger case for the other side, helping what looks to be a schizophrenic Noah gather his wood.
I would not be surprised if I keep swinging back and forth on this one, as I continue to reevaluate the state of my ignorance and biases, my choices and leads. It’s already happened to some degree. I don’t think I know how to stop the pendulum in good faith. What I do believe is that I should trust God to guide, secure, deepen and purify my faith, come what may.
Enough for now. You’ll have to wait for a future installment to read the rest of the story.
While all this was going on, I was in the process of working through my spiritual misgivings and reasons for persistence in following Jesus. Here in Salt Lake City, the place God made ready for me, I dove deeper into spiritual skepticism. I dove believing (usually) there was a good reason for diving, asking God to swim down with me. But in these waters, the bright spiritual feasting I had known before dried up. My reasons for skepticism did not go away. As happens with water, the skepticisms gradually soaked through my skin. Like happens with silt, I stirred up new ones. Trying to live for a God whose existence seemed highly unlikely was becoming more strained.
It seems that what grows in the garden of Christian spirituality is designed to drink full-fledged belief, and much of the garden starts wilting without that water. Cactus gardens can have a special sort of beauty, but exclusive cactus gardeners miss out on a lot too. And even cacti shrivel and die at some point in a bad enough drought.
When I review my journal from this past November and December, I notice I was doing a lot of calling out to God, feeling stale in my relationship with God, crippled in my Christian belief, and mediocre in service to others. I noticed in others things that I was thirsty for. For example, I saw my friend Sarah Martindell pouring out her life for others in the Peace Corps in Namibia, and wondered if a disagreeably large portion of the fruit of my life would pass as a fog of abstractions and worthless self-importance. Later, her reading a sermon she’d delivered describing her recent adventure seeking to know Jesus (figure out what he was/is as well as personally interact with him in the now) and finding what she sought (and more) also made me feel like maybe I was spiritually missing out; maybe there’s more to knowing him than I knew or had or expected. Likewise, reading my Cousin Chelsea Douce’s blog, I saw a groundedness in a faith of peace and love that looked very worth having. Or getting.
I believe this longing and felt need is in itself a blessing. To be authentically humble and ready to grow is part of the good life. To have the longing fulfilled, though, is even better.
All this is tied to the diving expedition. The currents in my skepticism have been shifting in 2011. One of my big prayers for the year is to come to a secure, well-founded conviction of God’s existence and faith in Jesus. We’ll see what God’s timeframe is on that one, but there’s been progress of sorts.
In recent months, the difficulty of explaining away the evidence for Jesus’ miracles and resurrection has been more prominent to me. It’s not as if I hadn’t heard the arguments in question years ago. It’s also not as if I don’t have ideas on just how one might go about that explaining away if one had to. Nor is it as if my difficulties with Christian belief seem smaller than my difficulties with unbelief. It’s mostly just that, paying more attention to all the particulars of the records of what went down with Jesus, it has appeared more clearly to me that (like, in my view, Christian belief) unbelief concerning Jesus requires some substantial faith beyond just taking the obvious to heart. The facts need to do some very surprising things behind the curtain, and to choose not to trust the gospel accounts amounts to betting (maybe even betting your life) that those surprising things happen.
This may make me an agnostic of sorts from a factual standpoint: I don’t know whether Jesus rose from the dead! It’s crazy and weird if he did, and crazy and weird if he didn’t! Both highly unlikely options. Sometimes we can just leave things sit that way. Sometimes that’s the better choice over forcing a resolution. But sometimes when we don’t know the truth, it’s appropriate to choose to trust one story or another. If some old geezer says “ it’s gonna flood and yer all gonna die! ” and he has this ark he’s been working on the past few decades, one must decide whether to assume the guy is prophetic or deluded. To shrug and carry on as usual is implicitly to assume something along the lines of the later, whether or not you mean to. As you probably know, I’m invested in trusting the Christian account of things. I was before, but recently it’s been more like trusting in the face of my blatant ignorance and less like trusting in the face of a clearly stronger case for the other side, helping what looks to be a schizophrenic Noah gather his wood.
I would not be surprised if I keep swinging back and forth on this one, as I continue to reevaluate the state of my ignorance and biases, my choices and leads. It’s already happened to some degree. I don’t think I know how to stop the pendulum in good faith. What I do believe is that I should trust God to guide, secure, deepen and purify my faith, come what may.
Enough for now. You’ll have to wait for a future installment to read the rest of the story.
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