[todaysdate]
By Martin Elfert
Do you have a question about life, love, or faith? Submit it online, fill out the form below or email it to [email protected].
Hey Rev!
I’m not sure what I believe.
– Gail
Dear Gail:
One of the cool things about the increasing popularity of yoga and of mindfulness is it has helped to bring the word “practice” back into our spiritual vocabulary. As a consequence, I encounter an increasing number of Christians who are willing to speak of their corporate and personal prayer lives, of their charitable giving, of the acts of service in which they engage, and so on as their practices. That’s liberating in both senses of the word “practice”: practice as what we do with our time; and practice as how we learn about something and get better at it. Let’s spend a little time with each.
First, practice as what we do with our time. Understanding faith through this lens invites us to ask, “What if?” What if church is not primarily about intellectually assenting to a set of ideas? What if church, rather, is about how we schedule our days and spend our money, about how we respond to the glorious brokenness of this world, about how we nurture the gifts that God has given us? What if church is about how we live?
That isn’t to say that beliefs are of no consequence: I believe that, some 2,000 years ago, God became a human being and shared in the joys and hurts of life, I believe that God experienced death, I believe that God proved to be bigger than death. These beliefs are part of my practice and they profoundly shape the way that I live. But it is to say that belief, and that doctrine in particular, is but a fraction of the way that we respond to God. And it is to allow the possibility that getting human beings to believe in doctrine might not actually be God’s biggest priority.
Second, practice as how we learn about something and get better at it. Nobody sits down at the piano for the first time and expects to be an immediate virtuoso; we accept that our future holds a whole lot of halting renditions of “I’m a Little Teapot.” Nobody puts on a pair of skis for the first time and heads straight for the black diamond run (well, maybe some folks do, but we generally see them on crutches later on that day). Why should faith be different? Why should it be immediately effortless?
It is normal, when you first encounter the strange and wondrous poem that we call the Nicene Creed, to be perplexed. It is normal to have passages in scripture that leave you confused or angry. It is normal to find the idea of the Trinity paradoxical. It is normal not to always be sure what people mean when they speak of prayer or grace or salvation or God. It is normal, Gail, to sometimes not to be sure what you believe.
Spending a certain amount of time lost, a certain amount of time hanging out in what the Bible call the wilderness, is a big part of the way that we figure out who we are and a big part of the way that we figure out who God is. And you know what, Gail – and forgive me if this sounds like bad news – that sense of lostness never entirely ends. Rather, over the years, your lostness, your unsureness about what you believe, will come in and out like the tide. There will be times when you will know exactly who you are and whose you are. And there will be times when the wilderness around you will be dark and thick.
As you keep on practicing, you may find that you become more at peace with being a little lost, with being a little uncertain, with being less than 100% sure where you are standing on the map. You may find that you have learned to hold mystery a little more lightly. Indeed, you may find that a time comes when you are surprised to understand your doubt not as the enemy of your faith but, rather, as part of your faith.
So practice. Practice in both senses of that word, practice in the full sense of that word. Even as you aren’t sure what you believe, practice with openness to the possibility that, for human beings, getting lost is part of the way that we get found.
