A Faithless Certainty

It’s been a few weeks, but I think this will be worth the wait:

“I fear I am losing my faith,” my friend said to me, unprompted.

I paused long enough for him to continue, knowing there was more than just the question of unstable religion rolling around inside.

“Was my childhood just a cult? Was I indoctrinated into a lie? Is it all made up?”

Solid questions—no doubt—and ones I had carried on my own slumped shoulders, but there was more.

“I feel the panic inside me all the time. What am I supposed to do with that?”

Now we were closer, not all the way, mind you, but closer. When we strip back the mechanisms we’ve used to hide the fear, when the fear shows its full strength, it seems the fear is the biggest, truest thing—the deepest part of us fighting for its long-last light of day.

But the panic is not the end. It’s the beginning.

What You’ve Lost

If you are paying attention to the deeper rhythms, you will see that we live in a time of extreme measures. Not PPE or quarantine or protests. These are manifestations of the measures, but not the thing itself. The extreme measures are seen in the subtext of the Facebook posts, the panic in the eyes at the thought of kids going to school/not going to school/going half to school. The search for a villain in a world full of half-compromised people. Wondering whether which half of the compromise we comprise.

We say we are, “holding on to our faith; it’s all we have left!” when the threat of further government mandates rise. We are holding onto our rights, our centrality, our essential morality, and pushing away from those who would question any of the above. But what we are holding on it is our fear, and the tattered garments we’ve sewn together to keep its cellulite from showing.

To my friend, I said, “You haven’t lost your faith; you’ve lost your certainty. Now—perhaps—faith can finally begin.”

Can faith begin? For those of us who were raised into a culture that claimed the exclusive right to the eternal real estate, the one true god, the moral high ground, the political power, the right to liberty, and the liberty to rule… with all our certainties and rights bound around us from birth like corsets and straight-jackets, is there a faith with an elastic waistband to be found? One that can hold the bloat of my failed good intentions, and shrink down to meet the skin and bones of my frailty? Is there a faith that can do stretch up and down, side-to-side, all in a day's time? In an hour? In a moment?

How Did You Get Here?

As many of you know, I’ve been leading a ZOOM Bible study on Thursday nights on the topic of Jesus Begins, looking at the first 4 chapters of the book of Luke. We’ve been stripping away the westernized assumptions of the text (with all their promises of certainty and white centrality) and liberating it back to its original readers, allowing them to teach us a world we can hardly imagine.

Along the way, we’ve had to hold more loosely to the certainty of our evangelical upbringings. Most on the call were either born into evangelicalism or converted to it by one of the late 20th century’s create para-church conversion machines. To question the confidence of something that has reigned so culturally supreme in our lifetimes has been no small endeavor, but it has been a worthy one. Allowing us to imagine that Jesus has more to say than handing out golden tickets to those who die having prayed the correct prayer.

At the end of one of these, a dear friend who I am just now reconnecting with after 20 years, asked, “How did you get here?”

Here meaning this place of feeling so free to face the text without the required pretense.

Here meaning allowing God to flow outside of the Protestant boundaries.

Here meaning loving Jesus without the entourage of distorted doctrines that delivered Him to me.

The answer I gave then is too long for this essay, but I will answer it the short way: “I got here by being afraid.”

At some point—and really, a few dozen points—I had to either abandon Jesus altogether or abandon the entourage of mistaken beliefs that accompanied Him. I had to either let go of certainty and face the silence of unknowing or grasp the next certainty: atheism. Fundamentalism, the kind that so many of us were religiously raised in, is the most reliable source of atheism. It trains us that we are only safe in rigid beliefs that cannot be questioned. The militance of “only-science” atheism is a natural move when things like 7-day creation and the moral high ground of the Religious Right can no longer gel with reality.

The most reliable thing in my life has been Jesus. I was too afraid to lose Him. And equally fearful that everything about Him was a lie. My fear was a function of something more profound: my fragile hope that a good God could be found. A near-20-year search ensued… and ensues. At some point in this search, I knew that I could not trade one false certainty for another. If faith was to be found, it would be found in the emptiness, the silence, and the insecure truth that what holds us fast cannot be seen, managed, or leveraged for my own comfort or sense of security.

Abandoning a faithless certainty was—other than my choosing to follow Jesus—the most critical decision I’ve ever made. And also, like following Jesus, it is one I am making still.

Held in Motion

Fear and the religious systems that hide it are built to hold you in place. It sets a place in your past or in your fantasies as ideal and keeps you there, continually inflaming the imperfections of the moment. Nothing of “today” stands a chance against the place the fear holds you. Everything falls short. What people are calling “faith” today—a cavalier attitude about a global pandemic—is simply a faithless certainty covering up the fear, holding people in a past before COVID-19. A world that no longer exists.

Faith, on the other hand, holds you in motion. It compels you through the fear and into the next place. The next place is unknown, uncertain, and undefined. It is not an escape from the present, but a new present, the gift of a new moment, the hope of glory slipping in. Faith holds us safe not because “we know where we’re going”; of course, we do not. (Letting go of that lie took some time.) Faith holds us safe because where we go, He goes with us and has been there before. Faith holds us in the flow of Love, which cannot sit still, but must run through us… like a wind over the sea, like water rushing up from the deepest wells.

Will you lose your certainty with me?

Can faith begin?

Let’s go.

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