This is not part of the Resurrection Appearance series. The next, 4th, Reflection in that series will be posted on Wednesday or Thursday.
Like anything that arises from our hearts, our intuition, our search for meaning and beauty, and, most of all, our search for love, I believe that we come to faith in markedly different ways. And the faith that we find may be different than the faith of others, even those of the same religion. No two people come to faith in quite the same way. And so I think that what we can do, perhaps the best that we can do, when someone asks us about faith is to share a bit about our own coming to faith story.
In a way it is not unlike the people in Alcoholics Anonymous who come to a meeting and share their stories. Through sharing our stories we learn that we are not so very different after all, but, at the same time, ironically, that each story is itself unique.
What follows my story. I don't write it assuming that it will fit you. It may not fit you at all. Mostly my journey to faith was taken in my mind, which was why it took so long. So I offer you an outline of one man's journey to faith. Mine is a journey that lasted for a half of a century.
I had gargantuan struggles when trying to think my way to faith. I was convinced that faith would be found in the next book, or in the next guru at whose feet I studied. And I often confused him or her with my ultimate goal, only to realize that I was in love with the mind of my mentor and was putting my very soul in the hands of a person and not in the hands of God.
So then I tried more education, because surely, I thought, I would find faith somewhere in the world's knowledge packaged neatly into courses and seminars. It mattered not to me if the courses were in political science, political theory, constitutional law, philosophy, biblical studies or theology. Whatever the course I would look for the faith or lack of it of the teachers and the writers of the texts to see how others handled that great mystery that continued to elude me called faith.
But in my pride in my hard work that resulted in straight As through my graduate programs, and the kudos that came with them, I confused my own success with faith. I got to thinking that maybe, just maybe, faith could be found within me. But my better angels told me that I was not really the "Other" that Rudolf Otto spoke about, and so with more graduate study than anyone needs, I still had no faith.
So I read deeper into all those German theologians I so much admire, particularly Barth, but also over a dozen more. And I found faith everywhere, even in places where they had denied it, like in Bultmann, hiding out in a German seminary, teaching what even he thought was not faith; but even he, as I read between the lines he wrote, had the faith I was looking for. But still I didn't. Only in Barth and, most of all, in Schweitzer, did I feel the sense of wonder and love that I believed faith would evoke in us. So much of the rest was sterile dissection of theology until it lost all its form and any identifiable substance.
But I was beginning to get a glimpse of what my faith could look like. It was just out of my grasp, I thought, because none of these great German theologians explained where their faith came from. They just assumed they had it and you had it and both of you knew it. And so I often blamed them for not showing me the way to faith. Yet, I was feeling like faith, finally, was possible, since these giants of theology who did so much thinking about what they wrote, still clearly had faith.
So it was on to Schleiermacher where the idea of the need for piety took form in me. That was finally something that I could understand, and even practice in my own not quite orthodox way. Piety was not faith, but it was a way of living that faithful people I admired had.
From there it was on to Kierkegaard, and his words flew off the page as I read. Here was an existentialist, yet a Christian, who understood what I had never been told, but always knew intuitively. Yet I feared what I read because there was no way for me through sheer force of will to do what he said was necessary to have faith.
He said that we must make a leap of faith. This existentialist understood what was needed, a leap, a blind jumping into the meaning of life, an opening of one's heart to let in the unknown, a trust beyond the existential, a trust opening self to mystery. Mystery. The mystery of the Other, the kind and prescient Rudolf Otto again reminding me from the grave.
And this Christian existentialist, this Kierkegaard, reminded me not only of Otto, but of dear St. Anselm. Anselm, speaking not this time about The Ontological Proof of the Existence of God, which is no proof at all, but about theology and its relationship to faith.
Anselm was speaking to me through the centuries telling me again something I had already heard him say but had dismissed as irrelevant. This time I remembered. This time it had meaning for me. This was something far simpler than his ontological non-proof. He said simply that theology is "faith seeking understanding."
That opened my eyes as never before to the futility of what I had been doing. It let me see that all those years I had it wrong because I was seeking faith in learning, in trying to understand. I thought that if I only could understand then I would have faith.
But Anselm said that was backwards. First have faith and then seek understanding. It started to come together for me, but since I could not will it to be, I felt lost. I continued to refuse to allow my heart to tell me what my mind still doubted.
Ultimately, none of these, the greatest continental thinkers of their day, got me there. But there was one from Britain, one who came to faith after years of his own struggle, one who first gained fame and notoriety for his profound understanding of English Literature, not theology, a simple man with a complicated mind who could make the complex sound clear and simple to folks like me.
And this man was willing to admit his own struggle in his journey of faith as he went from atheist to believer. He spoke of it openly and happily. So C. S. "Jack" Lewis prepared my heart to open a bit more and I read every scrap of paper he ever wrote about faith. Lewis, of course, did not give me faith. He said that no man could do that, echoing Kierkegaard.
But now, finally, my heart was open enough to allow for something else to come in other than what I generated in my mind. And then my prayers began in earnest because I was pushing 50 and worried that the one thing I had always wanted was slipping out of my grasp.
So I told God exactly that. I told him that I had journeyed long and tried hard to find faith, but I needed a rewiring, a change of attitude, a way to get beyond my mind and out of the books long enough to be receptive to the moving of the Holy Spirit.
I told him that he was the God that I wanted to love and honor; and I also spoke my need directly to Jesus, this God made flesh that I wanted to believe and follow. For two years my prayers were sent out or up or where ever they go. And nothing happened.
But I kept praying for the thing that eluded me for half a century because I had worn out all of the paths I knew to take. During this time of persistent prayer I did not lose heart, but instead persevered. I was at the end of my spiritual rope, and prayer was what was left. So I clung to prayer.
The search for faith, a half a century in the making, came to an end one day when I woke up and realized that I had it. Yes, it was that simple. Sorry. I wish I could make it more dramatic. There were no angels singing, or church bells ringing, no booming voice speaking to me out of a cloud, no seraph flying at me with a sacred coal to burn my lips, nothing like that. Just the cognition. The gap, the chasm, between my mind and my heart had closed.
Had my faith been there all along? Had it crept up on me and infused me slowly, so slowly I could not even feel it happening? I don't know. I never will know. I just knew I had it. And I knew that after the years, the decades, of searching for it, God simply gave it to me.
One thing I learned is that faith does not come from within. The freedom that we find in faith, the love that faith can bring into our lives does not come from us. Rather it comes from the willingness to be open to the Other, to allow the Other to come in and dwell within us.
Faith comes with the willingness to surrender ourselves to a power and a love far greater than ourselves, a power so great and a love so complete that we will never capture but a hint of that power and love with mere words.
Ultimately, I finally came to believe that just as Christ surrendered his life for the love of us, it was now time for me to surrender to his love so that I could be truly free. I found spiritual love and peace in my surrender to God.
God bless,
Monte
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