Maybe I could offer myself as a religious experiment. I've stepped away from church life now for about a year and have found my faith floundering not for the first time. My experience of family is being battered afresh a few years after I was essentially exiled from my family via a divorce with one of my children seriously unwell and in hospital for months now. I hang on to a form of prayer that basically rejects that God is:
- in any sense particularly male (ouch for the Father metaphor)
- one who acts "supernaturally" in our world in response to our prayers (another big ouch)
- particularly clear in the Bible or in the world about quite what God's "being faithful" actually means.
What does it mean to say that he never abandons believers? Could it be something about humans exercising faith in a communally brokered religious environment, and chalking that up humbly to the great Other? The point I'm trying to get to I think is this: that you are not really "allowed" to not believe when part of a faith community where faith is the literal and absolute core of what joins the members together in the first place. It is enacted collectively and individually in worship, teaching, acts of service and imagining a better faith-filled world. But step out of that faith-community and the mind mechanics do function differently.
Part of me tries to reassure myself: I cannot let my whole spiritual part of my identity disintegrate simply because I find some atheist arguments more compelling - these proponents will unlikely ever extend that same sense of connectedness and concern with me than a religiously convicted soul. A deep spiritual life is indeed worth more than gold, much, much more. Maybe as much as family even, my holy grail that my independence seems to shun (that said, the two operate on entirely different playing fields, so I apologise for the allusion). I also have heard myself more than once utter that I would remain within the Christian tradition probably until I bid farewell to this Earth. I still think that is true - we need form. We can't write the book of life ourselves.
I'd like now to get to a fundamental paradox I have found about faith in God. Faith, a firm awareness of a divine, loving, guiding presence, is I am certain a very good thing. It helps my mental health, encourages empathy, acts of kindness, keeps me tracking more healthily on my heart issues (greed, pride, lust, and more). I never let go of Luther's alleged definition of faith. Faith is prayer. Just now, I asserted just as firmly, that I no longer sense that a personal God would intervene supernaturally in response to our prayers. Now, that is a very different thing to say than saying that prayers are pointless or do not participate in a hugely transformative movement in the world, binding millions of people in a fundamental mission of "good", even if a great deal of it is a rather self-centered version of that good. The paradox gains extra clarity when we shift from petitionary prayer to thanksgiving prayer.
Studies are unequivocal on the relationship to gratitude and happiness. If our personal happiness or even our species' happiness is important to us, then gratitude seems to be locked into the deal. So from this standpoint, we need to be teaching ourselves and demonstrating our gratitude to others, completely without respect to any religious context. Thankful humans, but thanking who?
Sliding back into my faith slippers, I say thank you God, as I caught myself saying on a jog this evening, for putting this incredible person into my life, my partner T. She is a...."godsend"! I can't imagine any other human being quite able to handle my irksomeness. And as I allow that thanks to spread through my being - a somewhat larger and more spacious idea than my mind, and probably also including my body - my affective appreciation for her also grows. The instance of prayer is an articulation of recognition that I am indeed a fortunate person and that things could be much worse.
And yet it could very well be that there is no independently self-reflecting perfect being running the show. So for people - regardless of their spiritual roots - like me wanting to remain alive spiritually but very unsure of the real-world realities of a literal person, considerable work seems needed to make sense within the community of oneself and within relationships within my other relationships.
Maybe it's time to recognise a hypotheses of God, like Philip Goff's limited God. Let's have a look at his position soon, right here on Faith & Scripture.
Take care.
