Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you
to give the reason for the hope that you have.
1 Peter 3:15
When I was little a lot of my experience in being reared in the Christian faith revolved around testimonies. Because I was too young to look up the word for myself, I absorbed, early on, its meaning as defined by my then-fellow Baptists: The account of a person's "acceptence of Christ," preferably beginning with a tale of sin and dissipation, descending to the "rock bottom" moment, climaxing in "seeing the light" (usually accompanied by a specific date, a "spiritual birthday") and ending with a denoument of mended ways.
My family's attendance at a young, vibrant, hip new church of mostly adult converts meant that we heard a lot of testimonies. I clearly remember the joy that shone from their faces as they told of their salvation, and the new life they had found in Christ. Some of the stories were amazing. As I grew older, and the kids' training began in evangelism and "witnessing," I found myself scuffing my feet under the table in shame as we were asked to write out our own testimonies. Mine didn't fit the formula. I had always believed in Christ. I didn't have a spiritual birthday. When I was three or four I was old enough to grasp the concept of hell and had worriedly asked my mother how to avoid going there, and so "prayed the prayer" asking Jesus into my heart, but I remember not feeling much different afterward; I had always believed.
Without an exciting and convincing life of sin and change to offer as proof of God's existence, I hesitated to tell my testimony to anyone, whether in practice at youth group or Sunday school, or when my curious peers asked me questions. Mom told me it didn't matter that I didn't have a conversion experience, that it was a good thing that I had never done anything really wrong, and while I didn't wish that I had committed more iniquities, I didn't like my testimony. Already sensitive to the effect of story, and to how I measured in comparison to others, I hated that I didn't have anything interesting to say about my faith. I thought of any contribution I could make in the testimony arena as boring*.
It was a problem peculiar to people my age, the second-generation evangelicals: children raised in the church. As I progressed through college, I participated in, and witnessed, many crises of faith that stemmed from always having had faith, and having nothing to compare it to. There was no "before" and "after" for us, no dark of unbelief obliterated by the light of belief. There was only the belief, and it didn't keep us from suffering, and it didn't save us from wretchedness, or from meanness within ourselves and within each other, and the cruelty of the world was confusing, and our happy childhood butterfly faith ill-equipped to weather storm gales. Without an anchor point in time, without the moment of reversal, without transformation, we didn't know if what we believed was real. Having never suffocated, we didn't know whether or not we were really breathing.
Without experiential knowledge of contrast -- because, as Ursula K. LeGuin points out in true Taoist fashion, "light is the left hand of darkness, and darkness the right hand of light"; because we know fullness by the experience of hunger, and rest by the experience of exhaustion, and health by the experience of illness; because as human beings we need the binary oppositions targeted by deconstruction -- we did not know peace, having never known turbulence; we did not know love, having never known hate; we did not know hope or joy, having never known despair; we did not know faith, having never known doubt; we did not know salvation, having never known damnation; we did not know being found, having never been lost. Because we'd never died, we couldn't live; and many of us foundered.
I watched a number of good people leave the faith to seek what was really out there, and perhaps by losing it to find it again. I watched most of the people who did not leave cling to the faith as to a casket, refusing to let go, refusing to look inside, refusing to ask questions for fear the whole thing would collapse into decay. I understood the first group better than the second, but I did not fit into either camp. Held to my faith by the mysticism that had been a part of me from before my earliest memories, by that certain knowing running like lava in the marrow of my bones, for which I never asked and for which I took, and take, no credit, I started asking questions. I learned to be angry with God without fear of reprisal. Utterly repudiating the CandyLand approach to belief , particularly as I watched my little sister's body digest itself until she was a bare simulacrum of a living girl, I nonetheless believed.
But the answers I'd been fed my whole life weren't enough. They didn't explain suffering. They didn't explain how to live with horror. I wanted what was true, what was real, and if the way to that knowledge lay through rage, and tears, and blood, and pain, that's what I would choose. I could not abandon my faith, but I would not accept it like a spoonful of sugar. I would not pretend to ignore the dark, as some of my casket-clinging friends admonished me to do. In fighting my way through doubt and questions and fury, with the prophet Jeremiah as my standard, I wrote that while others of my faith skipped in the fields eventually to lay their daisy chains at God's feet, I would approach Him grimy with dirt and sweat and blood-scabbed scars from my climb through the wasteland:
you will stand there with your paper wings
while I stretch weary muscular arms
developed by grasping at weeds;
you will answer the Master’s questions
with scraps of limericks in your hands,
while I fall exhausted upon scarred knees
with head bowed and back bent,
and silently present Him with the keenness
of an anguish-tempered sword. (2002)
I died many times over in those years of my early twenties. I loved God, and hated Him. I trusted Him and feared Him. I clung to Him and pushed Him away. And eventually the turbulence subsided, and I reached stiller waters, having always, however I felt about God, believed in Him. In my naivete I thought I had found all the conclusions I needed, even though most of those conclusions were an acknowledgment of uncertainty; I thought I had asked all the foundational questions, and settled down to a meadow-life of what I thought were well-earned flowers.
My moments of doubt renewed themselves, of course, and I still had my bad times. There was the time the seams of my self nearly unraveled completely, undone by my first real and personal experience of human cruelty and the fear of the unknown, early in the summer of 2006, resolved by a vision of Christ bending over me and holding my face in His hands as I wept, curled up on the porch steps in a downpour at midnight, brokenly saying every Bible verse I could think of into the dark. There was a long period of dryness immediately following, resolved by the work of Sufjan Stevens, most particularly Track 17 of The Avalanche in August of 2006, and "Come Thou Fount" on the second album of Songs for Christmas that December. The first was my experience of divine rescue, of divine tenderness; the second my experience of choosing faith when it wasn't felt. Good lessons, I thought. More battles won. More stones to commemorate another miraculous river crossing, bone dry.
I wasn't prepared for the breathless despair of unbelief.
It came to me in July of 2007. Nothing precipitated it. I was certain I wasn't long to be a Protestant, and that feeling was weird, and I was scared, but it wasn't horrible. I hadn't had a bad day at work. I wasn't feeling lonely. For no reason I could name, I just didn't believe anything. It was the end of a late work day, and I was planning on meeting my boss's wife at the only decent restaurant in the little train track town where I worked in Michigan, and of course everything ran late, so by the time I marched out to my car clinking my keys in agitated hands, I was irritated about being late, pissed off about having lost precious personal time to an all-consuming job, and desolate because I didn't believe in God. The knowing had evaporated like it had never been, and the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach took up most of my concentration.
The restaurant lay on the far side of the tracks that bisected the town, and as I turned onto the street that would take me across them, I noted with annoyance the unusually heavy traffic, backing up so that I wasn't, as I ordinarily was, first to the tracks...and then I noticed the descending candy-striped arms of the railroad crossing guards, the flashing red lights, the warning bell clanging, and the approaching kettle-call of the oncoming train.
"Great," I said.
And boy was that train long. And slow. As it crawled north, I looked as far to the south as I could, between the unadorned matchbox lines of the depressed-looking houses, looking for the last car. But it didn't come. Minutes came and went, and rather than grow irate about something I was fundamentally powerless to change, I devoted my attention to my reasonless crisis of faith. I ran through my favorite Bible verses. I catalogued my surest, clearest memories of God's presence. I told myself, "I do believe...I do." I ran through the Apostle's Creed. I stretched my spirit for any twinge, any flutter, that would identify the presence of God, the realness of God.
Nothing.
I started drumming my palm against the steering wheel in a rhythm and tempo I couldn't identify. I chewed my lip. I faced the fact that maybe, just maybe, I wasn't a Christian after all. Maybe there was nothing out there, nothing more than what I could see in front of me, nothing...
No. I was stubborn, dammit, I had chosen my faith in the face of worse circumstances than this long ago and I was going to keep being stubborn. But I just didn't feel...anything. And it didn't even feel all that bad. I wasn't in despair. I didn't want to jump out of the car and throw myself under the wheels of the train. I thought, I could live like this, if I have to. Lots of other people do. But I didn't want to have to. I wanted to believe.
"I believe in God..." I said aloud to myself, looking south once more to see freight car after endless freight car heave itself into view through the farthest gap between houses. Beyond that last house were trees shrouding the train from view, but it kept on coming, an eternity of freight cars pinning me in place, too hemmed in by traffic to turn around. I fixed my eyes on that gap as I muttered to myself, "I believe in God...I believe in God..." And then, "I believe in God," I said, louder, straightening in impatience and falling into sarcasm, "like I believe there's an end to this train."
And the last car passed through the gap between the houses.
I stared with my mouth open for a long moment, frozen, looking at the clear empty air over that distant part of the tracks. Then I fell back against the seat, laughing weakly. "Okay," I said to God, glancing up at the sky, feeling the sardonic amusement curling the corner of my mouth, "I get it."
Not only was I thoroughly schooled in the self-donned cleverness of my superior intellect, but I almost had trouble driving because my mind was too taken up with all the factors that had to fall exactly into alignment to execute that cosmic zinger. What time the train left from its source. Its exact velocity. Its acceleration and negative acceleration as it made stops. The length of those stops. The cars added and unhitched. My lateness at work. The cases that had been begun months, some years, before, whose elements progressed exactly as they did to the point where they made me late that day. How many cars exactly needed to be in place to put me in view of that last gap, what time each of those people in front of me had to leave from wherever they left from, how fast they drove to reach their place in line, how quickly the final car was able to zip across the tracks before the train and so avoid bumping me back another car length. My train of thought, its exact flow, my anxiety and the transformation of anxiety into smart-assedness, the exact instant I opened my mouth. The chess pieces for that particular checkmate had been laid in place many hours before I knew I had a crisis. And those chess pieces were practically infinite. Every phone call that day, every phone call the day before, everything that had built into that one day, that had built toward that one moment, pacing me as I moved about my life.
I couldn't argue with that.
It wasn't my last moment of doubt. But that was a moment I couldn't deny by calling myself crazy or overly emotional. That moment was a fact, however I feel about it.
It doesn't follow the prescription, my story. It's not a tale of sin and redemption. It's a tale of irony. A little anecdote of knowing suddenly how completely understood I really am. So if anyone asks me why I believe -- if it ever comes up in conversation, with strangers or acquaintances or the dearest of close friends -- my answer doesn't have much to do with a "before" and "after." It doesn't quote pertinent verses that map out a road to belief. It doesn't tug on the heartstrings, has no deep theological reverberations. It only contains a staggering glimpse of impossible statistics and a little dark humor.
I believe in God because of a train. That's the clearest and most honest answer I can give. It's not the only reason. All of the emotions, the visions, the constant sense of the oneness of time, the mind-blowing moments of eternity, the inexplicable strength of love between people, a young lifetime of endless provisions and blessings -- those are present, too, and bear their own witness. But if you really want to know why I believe, and why I can still believe, there's a rusty caboose rattling at the butt-end of some train that can tell you exactly what it took to get where it was in the moment I tried to out-sarcasm God.
And I'm rather partial to the many layers of symbolism in that.
___________________________
* Of course, in typical fashion, I was throwing out the baby with the bath water in sloshing out the boring and forgetting about the weird. Maybe it's boring to say, "I've always believed in God," but not so much, "I've always felt God. I've always known God. Ever since I was a child, looking at dewdrops on a spider's web or the light coming through the leaves or the smell of ferns and pine needles, I knew those things were from God, I knew God was present in those things, and I've always been transported by them. I don't remember a time when I didn't know about eternity." I'm only just learning to say those things now, even to other believers. But still, if I'm looking for pure narrative effect...that'll work.
10 comments:
I knew it.
I've always maintained that sarcasm is, in fact, a spiritual gift.
I used to love the great tales of wickedness that some were able to put in their conversion stories. Often the degraded life was given ninety percent of the time, and ninety-nine percent of the artistic effort in the telling. Oh, I was amazed how bad some people could be. To a teenage kid, it seemed that they had been redeemed from lives of glory and excitement into a drab half-life that seemed too much like boring old age.
In fact my brother, our cousin, and I sometimes would try to imitate the glorious "before Christ" life and speech of Nicky Cruz.
There is a big market for those from-gangster-to-God stories. If your BC days are bad enough you never really need to get a job. You can live quite well just exciting the kids with how glorious wickedness really is.
Since those days I've discovered that one of the amazingly cool things about God is that he composes a new story (or poem) in everyone's life; no two are really the same at all. While all of our stories are different, some are more different than others.
Yours is in that last category. Very different from a Nicky Cruz story, and really much more thrilling. What a cool God we have! What other religion can boast a god with such a sense of humor!?!
I posit that the very fact that Paul left sarcasm out of all the epistolary lists was itself an exercise of that spiritual gift.
Interesting about the market of the glories of sin. You don't hear too many "testimonies" about an exciting and glorious life after conversion.
I, too, have both struggled and been thankful for having grown up believing. I learned to pray as soon as I learned to talk. I don't remember how old I was when I first accepted Jesus, but certainly, my age was single digits. I was baptized at 8. Like anyone, I have sinned, but there is no dark past, no sexual sin or drug habit or wild lifestyle from which the Lord delivered me. There was no distinct moment that I could point to and say, "aha! There! That is when I came to believe." My mother had that moment when I was a newborn infant, and because of that, I was raised in the church, and my faith was ushered into my open, childlike mind with ease. I am in awe of people who choose to believe as adults; their faith strikes me as much more miraculous than my own.
Like you, I was a young adult when one day, I simply stopped believing in God. Sarah, it was HORRIBLE. I have never felt more scared and alone and confused in my life. I think I was 20 or 21. I remember that I was home from college for the summer. I was standing in my parents' home, trying to pray. And I didn't feel like I was really talking to anyone. I didn't really believe that God existed. There was a sudden and inexplicable absence of faith. My faith didn't return right away. I said to myself, "I believe in God." I went through the motions even though I didn't really feel it yet. But I wanted to believe, so I started seeking again for the first time in a long time (I had become really complacent before this). I remember telling my mom that I didn't feel anything when I prayed. She told me to just keep praying. I remember one night at church; I was kneeling in prayer and I couldn't find any words but I just cried and cried and cried. By the end of that prayer, I had it again -- that unshakeable knowledge of God. I tell you what: I haven't taken it for granted since. :)
In the end, that’s the trick, isn’t it? Faith is a choice, like love and hope are choices. I think many people view faith as a spontaneous, mystical response, a sudden feeling welling up of its own volition within the soul; and sometimes that’s true; but at some point every believer believes because he chooses to. And yes, sometimes I think I’m crazy for believing; yes, sometimes I think I’m stupid for believing; yes, sometimes the choice to continue in the faith is my most difficult, my most challenging, my most impossible task.
I’ve been asked before why I would bother to keep believing when I have doubted so strongly. But doubt is never proof that something isn’t true; in fact, I tend to view doubt as a springboard to deeper belief. It’s only in questioning that we ever get any kind of answer (and often the answer, like all Jesus’ answers to anyone’s question in the Gospel of John, seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with the question) – in other words, it’s only in asking that we receive, only in seeking that we find, only in knocking that we gain entrance.
I know that the book of James says that “he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind…double-minded…unstable in all he does.” And I wish I knew the Greek. Because I don’t think that doubt is necessarily the opposite of faith. In the Gospel of Mark (I think) the father of the demon-possessed boy says to Jesus, “I do believe…help thou my unbelief!” In this instance we see faith and doubt coexisting, side-by-side in the same person...and Jesus heals his son.
Doubt is problematic when a person lets it cripple his choice, because even a little faith can accomplish great things (mustard seeds? yeah, they're pretty small). Believing doesn't mean we never doubt, just as loving doesn't mean we always love. The best marriages I've witnessed have had their severely hard times, when the feelings of love weren't there; but they persevered because they understood that feelings are cyclical, and that love is a choice, not a feeling. It's the same with hope. It's the same with faith.
Interesting, isn't it, how the word "faithful" is interchangeable in connotation with "loyal," and with "steadfast," all of which imply a need for faithfulness, for loyalty, for steadfastness? To be full of faith is to stick it out, in other words. To keep the faith is to persevere through times when faith seems senseless. Simply put, to be faithful is to be bullheaded, stubborn and determined in belief.
Which God helps us to do, since faithfulness is a fruit of the Spirit.
What I really mean to say is that faith is not easy, but it is also not merely an experience of the feeling of belief, and that serious doubt need not destroy faith, because faith is a choice.
There's so much more...one of these days I'm going to write up a huge treatise on my views of faith and love and salvation. But that's for another day.
I like your use of the word "bullheaded." It does take a certain stubbornness to persevere in faith, even while the Holy Spirit is preserving us in that same faith.
Your comments remind me of Jesus, hanging out with his friends in Caesarea Philippi. An appointment was coming up soon, which only Jesus knew about, in about a week, in Jerusalem. That was a few days walk to the south. To keep the appointment, they had to get going. There would be stops along the way that would take up time. Jesus never travelled fast.
He knew he must keep the appointment, but he doesn't seem to have been very eager. His friends urged him not to go. It was far too dangerous.
But in the end he "set his face like flint" (Is 50:7, compare Luke 9:51) toward Jerusalem. That phrase, and all the context from Is 50 and Luke 9, show that this decision was not easy. It was painfully difficult. It was excruciating. But he set his face in one direction and would not turn aside.
Even the one who was perfect in obedience did not obey easily. He struggled. He was voilently tempted. Even the creator of the earth and the skies had to screw up his courage before he could do it. But like you say, he was bullheaded in faithfulness.
So he forced his feet to take him to the Temple in time to rile up the the churchy folk before the Passover, so that they would kill him and he would become their Passover Lamb.
I’ve been thinking, lately, what kind of love that took.
See, from my very young adolescence, I had absorbed the idea that God’s love for me is obligatory – something He has to do, because He’s God, and that’s His nature. But I thought that secretly, given His druthers, God would just as soon not love me. I was evil, after all – weak, sinful, human. What’s loveable about that?
So my conception of God’s love was impersonal, dismissive, distant and cold – truly torturous for an Idealist girl who by nature craves warmth, connection, passion and affection. And while I have spent the past seven years in conscious battle against that ingrained belief (speaking of belief – belief can be stubborn, too, and usually the worst kind), I’ve only recently come to a new understanding of God’s love.
I realized one day not so very long ago that if I ache to lose a friend, if facing a beloved person’s permanent absence fills me with a grief so strong it seems to rip open my body cavity, even knowing fully their wounds, their faults and flaws, since God’s love is infinitely more powerful and perfect than my own, how much more than my own is His pain and His grief when someone turns from Him? And it’s not just the grief of a creator mourning the ruin of a carefully wrought creation; it’s the vulnerable, bottomless grief of a person mourning the loss of the companionship — of the presence — of someone he or she loves, revels in, delights in, and enjoys.
God didn’t just save me for my sake — it wasn’t a merely benevolent sacrifice, like digging a five dollar bill out of your pocket to hand to the person in front of you in the grocery store line who is just a little short of their total. No; as Psalm 23 declares, “He guideth me in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.” The realization floored me. God saved me because He could not bear to be without my company, my presence. After all, “this is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and gave his only son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins,” and “but God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” God “swept away [my] offenses like a cloud” before I even knew I needed or wanted sweeping — because He wants to be present with me.
I have never thought of God as vulnerable in this way. Which is silly, I think, because God’s vulnerability as the spurned lover is written all over the Old Testament — the depth of His passion for His people shows most particularly in Isaiah (my favorite book of the Old Testament, hands down). So often I’ve heard it said that God doesn’t need us. Which is absolutely true, in the sense that we cannot feed God, or clothe God, or shelter God; and if He must do without us, He certainly can; but He doesn’t want to do without us. Having created us, having loved us, He opened Himself, willingly, to the savage anguish of doing without us if that’s what we choose, because His joy in our beings is so much greater.
When I think of Jesus heading to Jerusalem with his face set like flint, when I think of the Father directing Jesus’ steps to Golgotha, it makes me shiver, now, to realize that, to God, death was less painful than losing us altogether. God would rather become mortal for the direct purpose of embracing mortality in time—God, who had never died, who was only Spirit, who lived outside of time—than face forever apart from us.
Sometimes it causes me to tremble…
That took some kind of love.
Sarah, “I do believe…help thou my unbelief!” is one of my most frequent prayers. :)
"it seems to rip open my body cavity. . ."
And you only partially knew those people, and only for a short while, and you were often content to be out of their presense.
But the Father, Son and Spirit had dwelt together in intimate love for eternity, never out of each other's presense, knowing each other more deeply than we can comprehend.
Imagine the terrible sacrifice, of the Son AND the Father AND the Spirit when that continual, eternal bond was broken: "My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me!?!"
It is unbearable to try to comprehend. Probably best for our sakes that we can not. But occasionally we should meditate on it and remember.
Sarah and Phil,
As to sarcasm:
Spiritual gift?
Absolutely!
Christlike?
Indubitably!
The Jesus that we see in John (Sarah, you pointed to it when you mentioned that his answers seemed to ignore the questions) is sarcastic.
How sarcastic was his reply to Nicodemus' puzzlement! I hope you don't mind if I paraphrase:
"You are supposed to instruct all of Israel, yet you don't even understand being born of the Spirit? Let me tell you, we explain what we know and tell you what we have seen, yet you people won't believe us. I've only told you about little earthly things that you should already understand, yet you won't believe; how much less can you understand and believe if I tell you the truly amazing knowledge that I have from heaven!?!"
I'm impressed with how Jesus contrasted "we" (prophets of God) with "you people" (those who kill the prophets). And here Jesus lumps Nicodemus into the latter category! Poor Nic surely didn't see himself in that light, but amazingly after such a rough beginning the two became friends. John shows Jesus repeating such sarcastic/offensive rhetoric throughout the book.
John never knew the "gentle Jesus meek and mild" that was preached so much in the 1800's and still holds sway in many minds.
John depicts a Jesus who was sarcastic, rude, and very often offensive. He spent years egging on his enemies to the point that they eventually killed him, just as he planned. He accused them of crimes they had not yet committed, seemingly to provoke them to actually commit them.
"Why are you trying to kill me?" The crowd didn't understand. "You are demon-possessed. Who is trying to kill you?" (Jn 7)
Soon they found that they had in fact been trying/planning to kill him, or had his words here put the thought into their heads?
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