Not proof--peace.
Sometimes I write things for your sake, but most often, I write them for my own. What follows is my desperate attempt to try and shake to the surface some workable definition of faith, in hopes that it generates faith in my own heart. My perpetual prayer has been that of the father in pain: “I believe! Lord, help my unbelief.” I believe today, but tomorrow I may not, because I didn’t yesterday. But I did the day before. Faith is like that. As I’ll say it in the following blog post, faith helps us in the gray areas of life.
In the cold and cruel reality of human suffering, though, faith isn’t always warm. It’s not always a comfort, especially if it depends on me. If I’m doing the ‘faith-ing,’ well, I have little confidence in it, because it comes from me, and I have little confidence in myself. Sometimes faith feels like being quiet loudly. Like sitting in church pews with your childhood friend, trying not to giggle that the choir special that week is, “He Touched Me.” Your cover is blown, and you’re not keeping it together.
On your worst days, it’s like the whisper-screams of a nightmare, when, in your terror, your voice is just stolen from you. Still, we have to try and scream, right? We have to laugh, right? We’ve got to do something. Anyway, here’s the blog post...
I’m not a fan of the phrase, ‘a leap of faith.’ Any treatment of faith as this shot-in-the-dark, this fool’s errand, this lost cause--I’m having none of it.
What is faith, then?
The book of Hebrews tells us that it’s substance and evidence: It’s the real-stuff of things we hoped for, the living proof of an unseen reality. I, myself, have trouble believing that faith has a kind of residue that can be measured or seen, but it does. On my good days, I can see it. I can see what faith has produced in my life.
I’m kind of a cynic. I tend to buck convention, I definitely oppose all authority, I tend to go against the grain, and I ask a lot of questions of my private world. I’m a real stickler, and folks don’t like that about me. Analyze everything, and believe none of it! Right?
How’s that working out for me? Well, it’s been a hard road, but I’m smarter for it, I guess.
All that I know today, I’ve learned by bashing my head against a wall. My approach is like a bull in a china-shop. I’ve cultivated my inner-critic, and along with it, my inner-‘screw-you’ bent. No one’s going to tell me how to live my life! Of course, this is the height of hubris, and this approach has caused most--if not all--the trouble in my life. Finally, I have a tendency to agree with the absurdists who would have us believe this is all chaotic and random, that it lacks a higher purpose, but, I completely contradict that belief when I act out of a separate, co-equal belief in my heart: That of the fatalist. Faith, for me, mediates between the voice saying this is all random, and I have no control, and the voice saying this is all planned out, and I have no control. Faith affords me some semblance of personal agency to navigate gray areas.
But faith doesn’t provide me with any answers. It’s like this: I was holding my cousin’s daughter on Sunday, thinking about all of this stuff. She doesn’t yet know how to speak her mother’s name. She doesn’t know how to express what she needs. No one has taught her how to say, “I am hungry.” And, even if they did, she’s only just now vocalizing anything at all. Her vocabulary is limited to ‘ya-ya-ya-ya-ya.’ And while it’s the sweetest little sound I’ve ever heard, it’s not exactly informative.
But she cries out in simple faith and her mother comes, and, through some trial and error, she’s perceived as wanting food. That’s the work of her life right now. She’s meant to cry, and grow, and sleep, and cry some more. Some might say she has no real control. She can only cry out.
And this is her faith. Her faith is her life.
There’s a real thing she’s believing in, even if she can’t acknowledge it and she doesn’t know how to express it. ‘Mama’ is her faith-life. And mama is the very real product of her ‘faith-ing,’ too. There’s a kind of pay-off to it all when mama brings the bottle. And though her little memory is only days into its rapid development, she’s learned all the rules she needs to know for survival: I cry, then mama.
But what if mama never comes? The baby would stop crying, eventually, and be resigned to either the belief that this is all meaningless or the belief that this is all meant-to-be, neither of which are exactly true. Of course she’s not able to vocalize these beliefs, only internalize them, and let them influence her actions on a subconscious level. In fact, there’s a growing weight of evidence to suggest that neglected babies grow up to develop overwhelming issues in adulthood, with a kind of psychopathy that believes all is nothing or a kind of narcissism that believes it’s all about me.
She doesn’t realize it but, while she’ll grow out of this work of hers (the crying business), she’ll never find a more important job than to cry aloud in eager expectation of mama’s appearance. That’s all we can ever do. In a world that feels chaotic and random, but from a selfish and self-preserving, conflicted heart, that’s all we can ever do. All we can do is live in the gray, crying out.
Sure, we grow up and grow on to new work: Grasping the crayon, coloring within the lines, writing our names, memorizing our colors and letters and shapes, attending grade school, learning addition and subtraction, learning not to begin sentences with a conjunction, getting our real estate license. Because we’re meaning-seeking creatures, we try to make sense of all of it. All good work.
But at some point, we’re no longer enamored with the work, or we reach a point of crisis, and we return to the first work we’ve ever known. We cry aloud.
We cry aloud. Even all us adults, at one point or another. Only the one we’re crying to and what we’re crying for has changed. This is not the posture of a blind fool. Rather, this is the great work of life, and every adult is engaged in it, whether he or she knows it or not. If you aren’t a psychopath or a narcissist, totally given in to one view of your reality or another, then you’ve got to have faith. You’ve got to have a faith-life. It’s what keeps us afloat in the middle, our heads above water.
We don’t have the language to express our need, nor do we know where its fulfillment will come from, even as adults. We only shout into the darkness, expecting an answer. The ones who shout loudest garner sideways glances and are handled with kid-gloves in society: They are our lunatics, our maniacs, our raving mad-men, our addicts, the institutionalized, and the imprisoned. They’re honest enough to acknowledge that none of us really knows what’s going on, we’re all just crying out for answers.
The bible is not a book of answers, like so many teachers and preachers assert. For any one ‘answer’ the bible gives, I can share six different interpretations or more, each of which is perfectly plausible. Rather, the bible lends human language to our cries. Through these human stories of faith, of life in the gray, our own faith is increased. We learn that’s it’s not all random, neither is it all about us. We learn how to operate in a middle-view, in a place of divine contradictions, or, as theologians often put it, in the already and the not-yet all at once. We learn new ways to cry aloud and we adopt new expectations of the void.
What emerges from the darkness--we call that ‘God.’ God is kind of a meaningless word in English. We shout into the unknown, and the vaguest picture of what is known emerges. Paul said it, not me, he said that for now we see as through a mirror dimly. Like looking through a fogged mirror. That’s how we see God. There are no answers, only one who answers, and, in his presence we find peace. Don’t go searching any big book for him. As Moses said, the word is not far from you; he’s on your very lips, and in your heart.
Don’t get me and Moses wrong; read the bible. Learn it. Just don’t expect relief in the form of mere information. Faith is not a teacher of mere information, and the product of faith is not raw data. No, faith is more substantive than facts, figures, or features. Faith has a person, is a person. We see him dimly, but he is seen. We know him in soft edges, muted colors, a rough outline, but he is known.
The bible is not the Word of God. Christ is the Word of God. Christ is the first word spoken, the word by which all things came into being, and apart from him, not one thing has been made that has been made. The bible is the word of God which points us to the Word of God. This distinction is the difference between trusting in Christ, in the grayish middles of life, or trusting in your own interpretation of information that you’ve read, facts and figures, from a dusty old book written in a weird language.
Your only responsibility to Christ is to cry out. Cry aloud. Cry with all that is in you. What appears from the unknown is your Answer, and in his presence there is peace. Not proof--no, not proof of anything--just peace.