Notes on a Time at Sea

1.

Faith is a very strange thing, at least in my experience.  People report experiencing "the loss of faith," which I take to mean that they had this thing called faith (however they understood that concept) at one point in time, but then at some later point in time no longer had it.  Under that definition, I have never experienced any loss of faith.  There has always been this thing, this presence, this sense of something that is far beyond me, and far beyond the collective us.  That has never waivered, never gone away.

What has changed, and changed fairly radically, is understanding of that presence.  There have been periods of my life where I have believed to understand that presence in rather clear and explicit terms.  And there have been other times where, despite the continued and sustained presence of the presence, I feel like I have no idea what it is, or what it means. 

For folks who believe that the proper orientation to this inchoate thing we call "faith" is understanding, these two phases can be easily understood as seeing clearly versus seeing through a mirror darkly, and St. Paul says.  The latter is not necessarily wrong, but the former is clearly right.  Others, more mystically oriented, tend to emphasize the latter as a place of purification, a time of shedding the easy, comforting illusions of certainty that come with the former.  And I can definitely cop to embracing easy, comforting illusions from time to time.

In any case, I am for sure in that phase where I have no idea what much of this faith stuff means.  And, while I will confess to it being a little scary, I am mostly at peace with that.  It is what it is.

2.

The great monotheistic faiths are all really religions of the desert.  The Jewish people, in a sense, are formed in the deserts of Sinai.  Jesus goes on at least one and probably several occasions to the desert prior to engaging in the work of His ministry.  Muhammad retreats to a cave in the deserts north of Mecca to receive the Quran.  

I have no experience of the desert.  I've never lived in the desert, and never been to the desert.  So, on that level, there is a hole in my ability to relate to these texts.  But I think that there is a equivalent that is very much in my experience, and that is the ocean.  While the desert has no water, the ocean has no water that we can drink, so it is in a sense as dry as the desert.  But, more to the point, the ocean is fundamentally alien to our existence.  It is not designed for us, and we must accept that and adapt to it, as opposed to the other way around.  But, and this I think is the great abstract lesson of scuba diving, such adaptation is possible.  One of the things that I always experience when scuba diving is the effortless way that the creatures of the ocean exist in a space and in a context in which I have to expend so much energy and effort to inhabit for a very brief period of time.  But this work allows you to see that stunningly beautiful world, by far (for me) the most beautiful part of the natural world.

I am too much of a Girardian not to see any system that postulates the existence of multiple discrete "gods" as nothing but the divinization of human psychological impulses.  My pet theory is that the monotheistic faiths come from the desert because the starkness and alien-ness of the desert strips away those sorts of humanistic projections, clearing space for an encounter with the Absolute.  There are other monotheistic formulations that come from other locations (Greek philosophical traditions and Hinduism come to mind), so it is not the case that the desert is somehow necessary to coming to this understanding.  And, again, for me it is the ocean where I can see the Absolute most clearly.  Maybe the desert and the ocean are a crucible.

I have recently finished reading David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God.  I am a fan of Hart's previous works, but this one is without question his best.  To summarize it in the shortest possible way, in The Experience of God Hart argues that there is a common conclusion among not only the monotheistic faiths, but also Greek philosophical tradition and the south and east Asian traditions, that there is an Absolute that sustains all existence, gives rise to human consciousness in some sense, and orients us toward the transcendent reality from which we ultimately derive.  Having now read the book, I find that Hart's arguments fully and completely persuasive.   But, and maybe more to the point, I find these propositions to be completely consistent with my subjective experience of being alive.

There is something beyond me, beyond all of us.  I have always believed this to be the case, and I still do.

3.

The rest of it, though?  That's a lot more complex.

I am troubled, right now, by two things.  One is deeply personal, and the other is more structural.

The personal first.  In January of this year, my mother passed away after a lengthy battle with cancer.  I'm doing OK, all-in-all, but my reaction to her death has not been what I expected.  Christianity has a lot of things to say about death, and what death means.  Specifically, to simplify things radically, death is not the end.

I assumed that, when the time came, that these principles would be a source of comfort, a hedge against despair.  Now that the time has come, I am not finding myself on the brink of despair, but neither am I finding these principles a source of comfort.  In fact, I am finding them ringing very hollow right now.  When I have those moments when I miss my mother, it's because I have something that I want to talk to her about, or that I want to share with her.  The slogan "death is just a change of address," even if true, doesn't address any of this problem, because whatever that address is it's not here.  All of this structure and rhetoric that Christianity is providing seems like it is talking to a different person with a different set of philosophical and affective concerns than mine.  On one level that's OK--I don't have some absolute right to have my needs met by anyone or any organization.  But it is, to be honest, kinda spiritually disappointing, for lack of a better term.  This was the place and the time where I expected this faith that I have invested so much time and thought in to be there for me, and it hasn't delivered.  At least not right now.

The other piece is a broader concern.  Of late, I am troubled by the question of whether Christianity is making the world a better place, and concerned that the answer is "no."  And I mean this question in a very precise way.  If the concern was "well, Christianity if done right, or even done OK, is a net positive for everyone, but the folks that do it badly are a net negative," then this would be a non-problem.  Any tool or system if used poorly is capable of bad outcomes; I accept that with no conceptual difficulties.  And I am not even focused on the fact that certain versions of Christianity are affirmatively bad and produce affirmatively bad effects on the world, or at least I think so.  No, what bothers me is the nagging concern that Christianity done right, Christianity done well, might be at best irrelevant to whether those people are also making the world a better place.

I heard a sermon recently where it was asserted that "the goal of Christianity is not to make you good people."  I understand the intellectual construct that brought him to assert that principle.  But, at the same token, shouldn't it be?  This gestures toward a world-denying, or at least indifference to the world, that I always knew was there but never really grappled with in a serious way before.  In a way it's the classic Marxist criticism of religion, or at least of Christianity--a way to take your focus off of your circumstances with the promise of higher rewards.  That line of criticism never resonated with me before, but now it is.

There is also the fact that you see a bunch of people who I think would be better people but for following Christianity.  It's easy to be dismissive, but there are definitely people who feel like they have to be what I would describe and bigoted and prejudiced toward certain groups of people because Christianity requires it.  That's sad, and that's a problem, and it's a problem that doesn't just magically go away by proposing alternative versions of Christianity that don't require those things, especially where said alternative versions are departures from the traditional understandings.  I feel for anyone who finds themselves torn between doing what they suspect is right and what they think is pleasing to God--that's a horrible position to be in.  

When I had these thoughts, my initial impulse was "surely this can't be right."  But then I asked myself the question, "what is the Christian ethical tradition, really?"  And it certainly exists, in a myriad number of forms and permutations, but so much of it boils down to divine command ethics.  The problem with divine command ethics is that God's purported commands don't have to be in line with what is good for the people down here.  My profound skepticism of divine command ethics is long-held--I go into it here, sort of.  Absent that, the most coherent and consistent ethical vision in the Christian space that I know of is the medieval Scholastic version.  Which is great, but is really just commentary on the tradition coming from Aristotle and the Stoics, raising the question of "why not just cut out the middle-man?"

4.

I have no answers to these concerns, nor do I have a desire right now to immediately seek such answers.  I am content to sit with them for a while.  Perhaps they will dissipate--sometimes they have in the past.  Perhaps they will not, and lead to some new direction.  

It feels a bit like being at sea.  You are bobbing up and down, and that can definitely be scary if you are not used to it and don't understand it.  But if you go with it, if you let the rhythm carry you along and keep an eye out for where it might be taking you, there is a tranquility to be had in being in the water.  It's mostly scary only if you let it be scary.  And I am choosing not to let it be scary.