Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
Hebrews 11:1-3
I think the word ‘faith’ is one that I overuse.
This is possibly because it can be a rather generous, non-specific word with which to describe personal, private belief. I use it in this way more as a badge of introspective spirituality rather than a declaration of religious conviction.
Because conviction, certainty and clarity of belief have simply never come easy to me. The words of Hebrews above easily rang out as evidence of my failure- my lack of faith. Others seem to have no such spiritual weakness. They are like St Paul. I am like St Thomas.
Today however, an analogy came to me.
I was thinking about another noble human characteristic- courage. Most of my generation have never had their measure of courage tested by war or extreme adversity- but we are all stirred by stories of those who have.
The spitfire pilots of the Battle of Britain who took to the skies against overwhelming odds. The men steeling themselves to climb a wooden ladder to almost certain death as the whistle blew to start an attack in the Somme.
And if these images are a little too martial for your tastes, then we might also mention the man who stood before a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square armed with nothing more than a flower, or those who push themselves beyond the outer limits of human endurance in the high Himalayas, or the polar icecaps.
Some of these people seem to be over blessed with courage. Or perhaps under concerned with fear.
And this courage can be like a force of nature- it can be transformative, inspirational and raise for us an ideal that we can all aspire to. Or at least admire from afar.
At the same time though, this kind of courage can be blind, foolish and self seeking. It can be abused by others (and ourselves) and is easily allied to causes far less noble. In this way, perhaps courage can be dangerous.
And it can also be deceptive- because courage is an entirely subjective experience. Who knows what measure of fear was overcome by the people who achieved such admirable feats in the face of adversity? Were they naive and uninformed? Dulled by some kind of narcotic? Driven by deeper demons?
Or was their courage merely a front- a means to force down the fear, and despite all their lack of confidence and self belief- to press ahead anyhow?
Does this work for you as an analogy of how faith might also be an active force in our lives?
In his book ‘How (not) to speak of God’ (which I loved) Pete Rollins talks about (a)theism. Contained in all our ideas about God is also the fact that what we know is incomplete, imperfect and error strewn. He would contend that the only honest way to approach God is to start from the point of (a)theism- where our theories about God are confronted with our unknowing.
I too have come to believe that belief in God is an amalgam of all these things-
Our faith and our doubt
Our knowledge and our uncertainties
Our crowning confidence and crippling fears about the future
Our theology and the place where theories fail
Our transcendent experiences of the divine and our plunges into Godless darkness
Times of declarative joyful certainty, and nights of lonely doubt
Times when the fragrance of the presence of God hangs in the air, and times when all is meaningless and barren
Times just to hold on to the hem of hope
And after it all, there is still
God.
this fragile tent 