Dear Nadia, Why do you believe?

Dear Nadia, Why, after your own journey, do you still find yourself believing in a personal God and in the resurrection of Jesus? I’d like to believe these things, but I struggle to find them intellectually tenable. Thanks!

Joseph

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Short answer:

Dear Joseph,

None of this is intellectually tenable. So that struggle you find yourself in? You can take a break from that. Also I find the word “personal” to be kind of bullshit too. Like I can find my “Personal Lord and Savior” in my contacts somewhere between my “Personal Assistant” and my “Personal Trainer”. This, my friend, is not something you need to buy in to in order to have faith.

You need not muster up any feelings of “closeness to God”, and you need not intellectually assent to theological propositions. Maybe faith isn’t about the intellect or even “feelings”. Maybe it's about a deep knowing. And I suspect that if you can quiet down all those church-y messages you received, you might, in the moments between your breaths, in the moments between your doubts, be just barely still enough to know that God is.

Love,

Nadia

Long answer:

Dear Joseph

As a schoolgirl I was taught to believe that certain formulas were reliable; 1 + 1 will always equal 2. This was provable and beyond questioning. 

And then I’d go to church where we were taught to believe all this Christian stuff in the same way we believed in math.  When argued correctly, we could use human reason to prove the absolute truth of the Christian faith. All the stories in the Bible and, more importantly, all the doctrine the church made up were also reliable, provable and beyond questioning.  So having faith meant approaching the Bible and the doctrine and teachings of Christianity with as much certitude and unwavering confidence as I would simple math.   And one would never dream of doubting arithmetic.  I mean, if mathematics was the sort of thing where sometimes 1 + 1 = 2, if mathematics was the sort of thing where you know,  2,000 years ago 1+1 = 2 but with the changes in culture it just simply no longer does…well, then all of Mathematics would be up for grabs. 

By the time I left the conservative church I was raised in, I no longer believed that only Church of Christ members were “going to heaven”, or that women were spiritually inferior to men, or that God created this wild diversity of humanity but was only “pleased” with the small subset that happened to be devout Christian heterosexuals who went to church and never used swear words. This also meant that I did not believe in that whole “God loves us very much but will send us into a lake of burning fire to be tortured for eternity if we are gay or allow women to pray out loud when men are present or if we have sex before we are married.”

But when I walked away from THAT I was also walking away from the only world I had ever known: worship, hymns, retreats, camps, potlucks, devotionals, prayer, plus also: grape juice & crackers each Sunday.

It took me years to realize that the symbol system and stories and music and language and practices of Christianity formed me in ways that I could not escape by simply no longer going to church, Joseph.  But they formed me in ways that transcended the strident certainty of the Church of Christ. So I would pray without realizing I was doing it, and would be moved to tears by hearing a hymn in a movie score without wanting to be, and when my roommate would find the wallet she thought she’d lost I’d say “call the neighbors” without realizing she didn't know the Bible like I did and wouldn’t get the joke. My life had been inflected by faith from the time I was growing in my mother’s belly and to have only negative feelings about Christianity was to also have some negative feelings about my own being.

So, Joseph, I left the church of my childhood for reasons of self-preservation, but I returned to the faith of my childhood for reasons of self-love because there were little pieces of me back in there that I eventually could see and love and well . . . I wanted them back.  Leaving Christianity felt like a way to save myself but eventually, reclaiming some aspects of Christianity felt like a way to love myself.

Not sure if that all makes sense, Joseph and I do not know your story. But I can hear your desire to try and figure this all out, so if I had any advice for you it would be to know that you do not have to strive for something that is already woven inside of you. Whatever is there, whatever knowing, whatever love for lost things and loaves and fishes, whatever prayer your grandmother taught you that you kind of want to also teach your own children, whatever comfort in the mystery, that is faith, my friend. And it is enough.

So yeah, I believe in God and even the resurrection. But not in the way I believe in math.

I believe because, as The Hold Steady song goes,

She crashed into the Easter mass with her hair done up in broken glass
She was limping left on broken heels
And she said, "Father, can I tell your congregation how a resurrection really feels?

And I believe because it is in me to do so.

And I believe because I have borrowed the faith of others.

And I believe because of how bonkers all the Bible stories are not despite how bonkers all the Bible stories are.

And “I believe, help my unbelief”.

And I believe because:

Jesus sought me when a stranger

wandering from the fold of God.

And I believe because yesterday I saw this flower:

And I believe because I have experienced it all to be true and am unconcerned whether or not it is fact.

So, thanks for asking. And I hope your faith finds you and that you welcome whatever shape it takes and that you refrain from thinking it isn’t enough.

Be gentle with yourself, Joseph.

Love, Nadia

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