Lots of people like to put the saying 'Faith, Hope and Love' onto fancy little wall decorations.
I understand hope, and I know love. Faith I'm a little unsure about.
Faith in what? What even is faith anyway? Is faith the same as belief? I don't fucking know. This is not a post full of answers, this is a post about a question: what do I believe?
A little backstory...
I was raised in a thoroughly Christian household by a drug-dealer-turned-around father and a raised-Christian-under-the-worst-of-circumstances mother. Every Sunday, we went to church. Every morning we read the bible. Every evening we said our prayers. But I never felt any of it. As much as I wanted to, I never felt a thing.
Inspirational music, heart-wrenching testimonies, and fantastic, too-good-to-be-true stories are the hallmarks of Christianity. All this stuff, it's supposed to make you feel things deep inside. But I feel nothing.
Not the right things, anyway. All growing up, the other kids at church treated my family different...like we weren't as good as they were because we were poor. Later on, when dad made more money, they just treated me differently because I was ugly and socially awkward. So I felt alone in church, I felt angry in church, I felt sad in church.
After I had started cutting myself, I went to my 'youth pastor' to ask for help because I wanted to kill myself. He made me tell my parents, promising me that he'd help me get better. Instead, he treated me like shit and did nothing to help me. So I felt hatred in church.
Now, I am old enough to choose my own churches. But I still feel alone. Like I'm so horribly different from everyone there that I don't have the right to be in a church. Sometimes it's so bad that I can't make it through the service and I have to leave.
I read my bible sometimes, I go to church sometimes, I drop my hard-earned money into the plate, I sing the songs, I pray as hard as I can to feel something but I CAN'T.
I believe in God. I do. I just don't see any other explanation for the world around me and how it works. I pray sometimes...and I think God hears me. I THINK. But I want know how to do this whole 'Christian' thing. At least, I think I do.
It says in the bible that God can harden your heart against feeling things...is that what happened? Have I missed my chance? Am I going to hell now?
Yepp. I'm fucking confused as shit. The basic question I'm trying to pose here is, how do I believe in this? How do I 'have faith'? And HOW THE HELL DO I FEEL SOMETHING ABOUT IT?
Anyway. Now that I feel like shit and have a hundred questions to sort through in my head, I'm gonna go smoke.
Hang on,
Ness
I wrote you a huge comment and lost it... that’s so discouraging…I'll try again…
ReplyDeleteI’m with you there, on the “feelings” thing. It’s one thing to believe the creeds and to the deeds, but it would be really really helpful to have fantastic, ecstatic feelings of God’s presence and so forth.
But about your basic questions: Have I missed my chance? Am I going to hell now? How do I feel something? –I don’t have an answer, but I have some thoughts and experiences to share.
Here’s a weird thing. I’m writing a paper about “spiritual desolation,” and it’s been oddly comforting. You see, all these guys that we admire so much, who wrote amazing books about faith and who are held up as examples, went through horrible, horrible, devastating periods of deadness, lethargy, apathy, or even doubt, disbelief, and despair. I guess it’s encouraging because if they could get through their major lack of feelings, or drowning in bad feelings, I should be able to get through my deadness and doubt and despair.
Take John Bunyan, for example (yup, the Pilgrim’s Progress guy). In his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, he tells about how he thought he was damned – for one tiny little sinful thought, for crying out loud! For TWELVE YEARS the poor fellow was tormented in his mind, sure he was going to hell, writhing in despair, certain he was cut off from God forever. It was some serious anguish.
Then there’s Tolstoy, the Russian novelist. He tells about how in the midst of a good season in his life, when everything was going preachy: he was writing what he wanted to, getting really good at it, getting famous, he had a great wife and kids and sort of ideal life – bam, he was hit with a terrible panic and doubt and spiritual despair. It was really awful.
And then there’s Job. And the writers of Ecclesiastes. And on and on.
And not all of them even “got through it” and died all sunshiney and happy. Some of them did. But the point is that they kept on believing, holding on to the creeds, and wrote stuff that is super helpful to our faith now. And if they can get through that and still be “fathers of the church” and all that, I can get through this deadness.
If I can just get through life without being committed to a psych ward and without denying Christ, that will be victory enough.
(of course, I’d love to write a whole bunch of famous books and be a superstar teacher and finish my house and grow the most beautiful garden and visit everywhere in the world and feed the hungry and help the poor…..)
but seriously. I can’t feel anything. I pray into the darkness and don’t FEEL like there’s anyone there. I think about Heaven and have no sense of its reality. But I chose to believe it all that. What can I do but choose?
C. S. Lewis said that when we couldn’t feel anything, it was good to go through the motions anyway. It’s not hypocritical, he said, to go to church and sing the songs and say the words when we don’t feel like it –we’re commanded to do so! He thought the feelings would follow (he was an optimist). But it’s important to do it anyway.
Because we can’t control our feelings. Seriously, can we ever control our emotions when we’re angry or blissful or deadened or sad? But we can control what we DO. And that’s obedience. And I’m hopeful that the feelings will come. I’m holding on.
Thank you so much for this.
ReplyDeleteAnd wow, how providential is this? I'm doing research for a conference paper, and I come across this quote from Søren Kierkegaard's "Journals":
ReplyDelete"To the Christian love is the works of love. To say that love is a feeling or anything of the kind is really an un-Christian conception of love. That is the aesthetic definition and therefore fits the erotic and everything of that nature. But to the Christian love is the works of love. Christ's love was not an inner feeling, a full heart and what not, it was the work of love which was his life."