Rationality

The single greatest thing keeping me from being a Christian is the fact that I don't believe my rational side can participate, and I don't want to be the kind of believer who is purely emotional.

I re-read C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle this week. Every time I read this book, it changes me. This time, the part that hit home was the part about the dwarves who "wouldn't be taken in again." There they are in a beautiful world surrounded by wonderful things to eat and fabulous joys, but all they can see is the stable they used to be locked inside. All they can taste is trough water. They aren't shut out of the real Narnia, but they can't ever enjoy it because they never realize that they are part of it.

It's time to face the facts: I am probably like the dwarves in this story. I am so afraid of falling on my face again that I choose not to run.

When I went to college, I went with the idea that I was going to kill myself. I cut all ties with people back home. I didn't even call my mother. I made up my mind that I was not going to make any new friends. I had a mission.

But of course, that isn't how things went down. I made friends. Even now, I feel like there are two stories happening here. The first is like this: I went away and was determined not to be the loser without any friends any more, so I did everything in my power (hung out in the dorm lounge, provided homemade cookies to all the guys on my floor, walked around offering candy to people and introducing myself) to make friends. At the same time, in the back of my mind, I had this big plan for how to leave the world without hurting anybody. Even now, it is such a broken thought process that I have trouble explaining it. I have difficulty telling which was the real me.

So when one of my friends told me that all I had to do was give it all to God, I lept on the plan. I went to counseling, and I threw my necklace in the lake, and I went to Vespers and church and chapel and Bible study. I became Super Christian. I drew up encouraging note cards and left them in people's POs. I chatted with people who were lonely and sad. I helped set up the sancuary at the church I was going to.

And you know what? The next year, a friend I had been praying for asked me how I knew that God was real, and I had no answer. This prompted a complete turn around on my part. I stopped going to church; I stopped going to chapel; I quit talking to God.

I have since come to believe that faith (and life, but for the purposes of this blog, faith) is sort of like a pendulum. There are two poles: Complete belief and complete doubt. Somewhere in the middle is the ideal of faith. Our lives are spent swinging between the two poles. This is normal and neccessary because without experiencing extremes, we can never balance ourselves out. This is not an excuse to live in the extremes, of course, but it is a way to recognize them as natural parts of our growth and move past them.

I understand that God saved me from more than just my sin. He saved me from making the biggest mistake of my life. Sometimes, I have trouble choosing a path, though, and end up like the dwarves of Narnia. I feel as though I am trapped by my doubt. At the same time, complete emotional belief is not the faith I want. If that is what is required, then I fear that I will never know true salvation. I cannot fall head over heels into a system without room for questions again.

Belief

Two of my favorite songs have very similar lines in them. The first is by Switchfoot, and I can't remember the title, but it's off the New Way to be Human album. The line says this: "Oh, I'm a believer; help me believe." The second is by Andrew Peterson, and I also can't remember the title of this one off the top of my head, but it's off the Clear to Venus album. The line from that one says this: "Hope is hard to hold to. Lord, I believe, only help my unbelief."

I feel that these two lines do a good job of summarizing my belief in God. I believe, but I don't. I need help believing. After reading Anne Lamott's Blue Shoe this week, I feel much like the story she uses to illustrate our need for a tangible God. She tells the story of someone who tells their daughter not to be afraid because God will take care of her. The daughter replies, "I need someone with skin on."

I don't want to be Thomas, but there are times when only a physical presence is good enough to comfort us. At these times, I find it very difficult to believe in God.

So why do I continue to do so? I've said that I never really liked God, and now I'm saying that I am a believer with a lot of unbelief. What's holding me to this religion?

This is a very interesting question. I suppose the truth is that I've felt His "presence" one too many times to completely write Him off. For instance, once when I was still in high school, I was weeping in bed about something. I was praying at the same time, and finally, I decided that I'd had enough. I said, "God, you promised you'd send angels to comfort us. Well, where are your angels now?" Instantly, a light went on inside my head, and I stopped crying. To this day, I can't remember what I was crying about, and if I try to think about it, all I can remember is the light and calm that filled me. I don't think it was real physical light, but it was there behind my eyes nonetheless. Almost immediately, I went to sleep.

Sometimes, when I'm between dreaming and completely awake, I hear music. I hear thousands on thousands of voices filling in harmonies that I've never heard before. Sometimes, they're singing "Hallelujah" and others, just "ah," but it is the most beautiful music I've ever heard. If I were a composer, I would be a rich woman. There are so many voices and more parts than I've ever heard before, which gives the harmony a rich texture, but the voices are so light that I can just feel the joy in them.

Starting when I was about 10, I knew I should be baptised. Everytime there was a baptismal in church, I would dread it and end up crying and embarrassed because I knew in my heart that this was the next step, and I wasn't taking it. When I was 12, I finally gave in. The day of my baptism, we got a phone call from the church. The power was out, so the water was extremely cold, and they were thinking about cancelling it. What did I think? And I knew that if I didn't do it then, I would go through another two years of chickening out and misery. I agreed to do it. Everybody prayed that the power would come back on. It didn't. I was baptised by candle-light in a vat of ice cold water. The power came on almost immediately after the service was over. Maybe this didn't mean anything, but to me, it meant that someone or something really was working hard to keep me from being baptised. I'll probably never know why, but I've never forgotten the experience.

And I guess the last thing that keeps me believing is that something always pulls me back. I've never wanted to take any of the major steps of faith, and something always demands that I do so anyway. If I don't, I always regret it. Not that I think I'm being punished or anything, it's just that the choices I make to avoid doing the thing I feel I'm supposed to do are usually bad ones. Somedays, just the fact that I'm alive to keep a blog is a definite miracle to me. I know I never would have made it if something bigger than myself wasn't sustaining me. Some people call this our animal survival instincts, but I don't think so. All I have to prove this are my feelings, which aren't much, but my feelings tell me that I didn't get where I am under my own power.

So all I have to keep me in the faith are a bunch of voodoo stories and emotional responses. Can I prove any of these things to be more than figments of my imagination? Nope. So how do I know that there's a God? I don't know. Nobody does. But I believe there is one. I believe that He exists and carries me through when I don't even realize He's doing it. I believe.

I Never Really Liked God

To introduce myself, I would like to start out with a disclaimer. This entry is it.

I never really liked God. I was afraid of him, sure, but I never really liked him. Not the way some people do. So, if you are looking for a place to visit in order to support your Happy Jesus Freakiness, this is not the blog for you. (Yes, I am aware that saying "Happy Jesus Freakiness" may, in fact, mean that I am going to hell.)

Additionally, I am not trying to be converted. I believe in God. I tried atheism, and it didn't work out for me. I can't deny the existence of a God, and I believe that, for me at least, this God is the God of Christianity. Perhaps this means that I am weak-minded, but I'm all about following the advice of Emerson, who says, "I will so trust that what is deep is holy that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me and the heart appoints." While I recognize that Emerson was not saying this to support Christianity, I believe it is good advice, nonetheless. I believe that the holiest place we humans have is in the depths of our hearts, and in the depths of my heart, there is an image (maybe imagined and unreal and unlikable, but still an image) of God.

Since re-believing (or whatever you call it when you renounce the religion of your youth only to return to it while still in your youth), I have had a very blunt relationship with God. If I think he's being an asshole, I tell him so. He usually tells me if he thinks I'm being one, too. I believe that God is loving, but I also believe that he responds to us in a way we'll understand. I'm not one to beat around the bush when it comes to my life, so neither is he. If he's really omnipotent, then there's no point in pretending that I don't think he's being an asshole because he'll know anyway. And this works for us. If it doesn't work for you, perhaps you should read another blog. (I feel I am beginning to sound like Lemony Snicket, but seriously, maybe you should read another blog.)

I don't go to church regularly because I don't like church. I feel like it's one big show for the masses. I've tried a gazillion churches, and I am currently most usually attending a small one that has probably bothered me the least out of all the churches I've been to. It's sort of Baptist; although, for a long time I thought it was non-denominational. Other people like church, and I support this decision on their part. I'm a tiny bit too cynical to sit there and feel like I'm connecting to God. This is probably because God and I tell each other we're assholes on a regular basis, and most of the people in any church I've ever been to would never even dream of saying the word "asshole" on a regular basis, much less saying it to God. Church just doesn't speak about the God I've come to know and appreciate. This is probably another reason that I may or may not be going to hell.

So basically, if you're really attached to your version of God or are really hung up on being properly spiritual, you're probably not going to like me very much. That's OK. I probably won't like you either. If, on the other hand, you like to hear the truth about someone else's existance, and like to wrestle with the idea of spirituality, what it means to us semi-sort-of-when-we-feel-like-it Christians of the 21st Century, and if/why we believe in it, then this is the blog you should read. Because I'm semi-sort-of-when-I-feel-like-it funny, and you may just like it.