The opposite of faith

(here's a hint: it's NOT doubt)

This is a follow-up to last week’s post:

Dear Nadia, Why ME?

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Dear Nadia,

I’m 76 and have been hospitalized for 4 weeks with meningitis. It has been a humbling experience. I’m finding myself wondering why me and if God is with me.

-M.S.

Part 2 -

Dear M.S.,

I was wondering how you are, and if you might want to talk some more about how, in this time of extended hospitalization, you are struggling to know if God is with you.

I’m not sure at what point it was decided that having faith looks like an unwavering and changeless belief in God no matter what kind of shit-storm we are in the midst of; I’m also not sure we were created to be quite that boring.

I’ve mentioned it before, but the opposite of faith isn’t doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty. Once we know everything we stop actively being engaged in the questions.

So, if, in these past weeks of illness, you have struggled to feel like God is close, please know this - feeling God’s absence is a form of faith. As is doubt.

Also, you are in great company. I promise you this, M.S. We stand on the shoulders of giants of doubt. Generations of the faithful are eternally voicing doubt and shaking fists at our God. To be a person of faith is to have quite the lending library of doubters and complainers on which to draw and feel less alone in our own laments.

So if you feel a distance right now when it comes to God, it might be that the distance you feel isn’t between you and God, it’s between you and the ideas you have had of God up until this moment, and that’s different. And more interesting. And actually hopeful. Because sometimes “growing in faith” looks like reconsidering all of it. Our old ideas that might have worked for us in the past sometimes need an update, and that too, is a form of faith.

I wrote about this a bit in my first memoir, Pastrix.

It was Good Friday and I was in the middle of a hospital chaplain internship in which I was standing in so many rooms each day face-to-face with human traumas:

I was stunned that Good Friday by this familiar but foreign story of Jesus’ last hours, and I realized that in Jesus, God had come to dwell with us and share our human story. Even the parts of our human story that are the most painful. God was not sitting in heaven looking down at Jesus’ life and death and cruelly allowing his son to suffer. God was not looking down on the cross. God was hanging from the cross. God had entered our pain and loss and death so deeply and took all of it into God’s own self so that we might know who God really is. Maybe the Good Friday story is about how God would rather die than be in our sin-accounting business anymore.

The passion reading ended, and suddenly I was aware that God isn’t feeling smug about the whole thing. God is not distant at the cross and God is not distant in the grief of the newly motherless at the hospital; but instead, God is there in the messy mascara-streaked middle of it, feeling as shitty as the rest of us. There simply is no knowable answer to the question of why there is suffering. But there is meaning. And for me that meaning ended up being related to Jesus—Emmanuel—which means “God with us.”

We want to go to God for answers, but sometimes what we get is God’s presence.

-Pastrix; The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint