Sometimes I want to blow the lid off this blog. I want to be authentic about my life and where I am spiritually, yet I fear judgment; mostly from within, but somewhat from others.
I want to tell you that my faith in God has been an intimate part of my life for 30 years and yet sometimes I feel it slipping away into a pithy form of agnosticism. The faith I profess is 2,000 years old. The Creeds I quote are less than 1,700 years old. The rituals from the Mass some of them are less than 600 years old. All things have changed in those time era’s but not religion, not much at last. In the last few years alone I have changed drastically. I change…my mind, my heart, my jobs, my friends, and yes, some of my beliefs. But God I know is timeless.
I am wanton to share that most Christians offend me, somewhere along the way the American version of Christianity became a marriage of conservative politics and social causes ensconced in fundamentalist tenets. That is not my faith; nor the faith and life of Jesus. But I am also left empty by liberal politics that have all but abandoned their religious inspirations for protecting both the poor and the vulnerable. In truth, care of the poor, the abandoned, marginalized and the broken are the responsibility of those who claim to follow Jesus (there are over 400 verses citing God’s concern and mandate to care for the poor and oppressed in the entire Bible). But it seems Christians these days are known more for their hate than their love. I fear Jesus would not recognize his followers” if he were reading the papers and visiting the churches.
I am saddened and sickened by most of what constitutes Christianity these days, if I am to be honest. It seems my faith is fed more by what is outside of it bounds than what is within it.
I am not alone in my disillusionment. One of the NY Times’ bestsellers was a book by Frank Schaeffer (the son of one of the “fathers” of the rise of Conservative Christian political viewpoint), entitled Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in God. Then there is the rise of the religiously disillusioned, the “Nones” who according to the Pew Research Centers: “[are a group of] people who self-identify as atheists or agnostics” as well as those who have left the church of their youth while still holding to a deep faith in God, just not in organized religion.
Some days I feel like a “None” – I believe in and love God, deeply, but I find most organized religious expression to be pedantic at best, ruled and run by angry zealots who are milquetoast concerned more with doctrine and dogma than compassion, justice and mercy (the weightier matters of the Law according to Jesus, see Matthew 23:23).
I am rambling. But I am seeking clarity and honesty. I love Jesus. I mean I am really into Jesus and the words we have for him on record (I’m a Red Letter Believer you could say). You would not know it by stepping into most churches these days but Jesus spoke more about helping the poor, money, loving your enemies and forgiveness than about heaven or hell. And not once did Jesus ever condemn my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. Jesus never said “love the sinner but hate the sin” – a diatribe I have a hard time with because I am not so skilled at separating the “sin” from the “so-called sinner.”
The long and the short of it is I am seeing the cracks in the margins.
My faith is old, and dry. My prayers are empty and “feel” worthless. The God I professed years ago is no longer the God I turn to in times of trouble or joy.
The man I see in the mirror, although I know to be a child of God and made in God’s image, is cracked, faltering, burdened with an ever growing sense of obsolescence, uselessness, and invisibility.
Maybe what I am going into and through is a deeper, more authentic way of living; a birthing into the death of childish faith into the reality of the Real. Or maybe, I am simply spiritually lazy and perpetually defiant, needing to reject something in order to feel powerful about anything.
I still believe…but I don’t. I have faith, except when I don’t. I am one with a God I know longer believe in. I am in the light even more so when I am in this darkness.
I find comfort in the words of the German mystic Meister Eckhart when he said the following statement (that almost got him burned at the stake!): “If I had a God I could understand, I would no longer consider him God.”
soulpatch.net 