1together:  Blogthoughts on church, life, and emerging culture…

Last night I spoke at my church’s youth service on the subject of doubt. It is a bit of an awkward topic because, well, admitting that we might not feel, might not believe, this faith, which many of us have professed as long as we can remember, is not generally discussed at church. Yet, the feelings associated with these inner doubts – guilt, shame, pride, fear, inadequacy – run the gamut and must be addressed.

When I was twelve-years-old, maybe thirteen, I signed up for an inner-tubing excursion down the Green River, during a week at family camp. None of my friends from church came, except for a few girls I thought were pretty (so I decided to keep my shirt on…oh, tough age). The day of the big outing we all hopped into a bus and drove about thirty minutes, unloaded the tubes and hopped in the river. Never having done this before, I was quietly nervous and pretended to be polite by letting everyone else jump in the river ahead of me. I watched as they stepped into the calmness of the shallows and floated away, making this foreign thing seem so simple, and rather fashionable. I wanted to be a part of what was going on, regardless of the fear and apprehension I masked under my smile. I waded in, holding my inner-tube on my back, grinning at my female friends who were waiting for me, sat down, and let the river take me.

Not two minutes in, I realized there was going to be a problem. Instead of drifting toward the open waters at the middle of the river, my tube began heading toward a fallen tree jutting about twenty feet off the bank. I was moving fast and there was not way to stop it. Before I knew it, I hit the log and was sucked beneath it. My tube was ripped away from me and I found myself hanging onto the log with every ounce of strength my pre-pubescent arms could muster. I could hear the force of the water rushing past me like the sound of a bathtub filling while you’re lying in it as the water rises. I did not know what I was going to do, so I held on, struggled to pull myself out, and thought that maybe I would die that day.

I look back to that day and have a few good thoughts, but mostly remember that nobody rushed to my rescue, or even knew that I was dying under the water while they floated by. And it wasn’t just that day. I remember the other kids at the camp, how they didn’t talk to me, how alone I felt, how they all raised their hands during the evening services and cussed and talked about fooling around with girls everywhere else.

A lot of us look at the church and think we are the only ones stuck under a log, that we are alone in our struggles as the world, and the church, pass us by. I mean, if giving up Christianity means that I lose my community, a certain amount of family respect, and the support of friends, why would I want to give it up, right? As Evangelicals, this is what we ask of anyone converting from another religion, so why should we hold onto family ties as a reason not to leave the faith. And so we struggle alone.

I struggle everyday to make sense of the world. I wonder why I’m here as an insignificant speck on this planet, and don’t dare saying such thoughts out loud in church because I’m a guy who is supposed to have answers, right? I have been a Christian my whole life. I am supposed to feel significant, but most of the time I feel like a failure. I hate this. I hate how I don’t have answers to the hard questions

But the inner struggle goes beyond feeling, or not feeling, significant. I have grown up believing in everything from Noah’s Ark, Creationism, and the incarnate birth, but who is to say these things are actually real? Who is to say that Hebrew oral tradition was meant to pass down factual evidence rather than cultural virtues, which is at the core of every other oral tradition since our kind defeated the Neanderthals, right?

I look at stories of our culturally developed military and am dismayed at cases of women in the occupied corners of the world being raped and mistreated by our soldiers. But what about the Romans? They had such low respect for women and other marginalized groups. Who is to say that Mary didn’t make up the whole angel story to cover up the fact that she was brutally raped by a Roman soldier on her way home? And at the core of all these doubts: How do I really know that what I believe is true if I can’t feel it?

I need to believe in something I can hang onto; otherwise, what is the point of hanging onto this life, this charade. If these doubts are true, or could be true, why try? Why walk through my days, or lie in bed at night, and feel so incredibly and unconsolably alone? Why sacrifice personal happiness for eternal jubilation. And what the hell does that mean anyway? Everything I have ever heard about heaven sounds weird to me. I mean, why would I want to go on an Alaskan cruise when I could have the Caribbean party boat experience? Worshipping for eternity sounds as appealing to me as the senior discount at Denny’s, and I really don’t connect to the pitiful tales of weeping and laying down some silly crown. I’m not really into wearing crowns, so what does that matter to me?

Heaven is an interesting thing, and I am really kind of secretly struggling with the whole issue right now. When I was a kid there was a lady in our church who had had a “vision” of the golden city – I think I’ll call her “Sonia.” Sonia never hesitated to jump at the chance of sharing her angelic apparition with people she saw at church, especially visitors. Oh, as a pastor’s kid who prematurely figured out that numbers at church meant decent meals at home, I was so embarrassed by her strange, sobbing account. Mostly what I remember is that we all stood in robes shouting at Jesus, praises I think, at the top of our lungs without stopping, at which point she would demonstrate. The whole thing sounded weird to me and I wanted nothing to do with that Heaven. And then there were the youth conferences…

Youth speakers, as long as I can remember, seemed to evangelize church kids at these conferences we would go to with the tact of a used car salesman. It seemed like Heaven was one of those high-pressure time-share sales vacations! So many promises, lots of strong-arming. Their stories of Heaven sometimes included space travel or flying around with jet packs. The account seemed more like something out of the Hannah-Barbara playbook and less from the Bible. This sort of youthy faux-cool worked to convert some, but I don’t know where they are at today. But what if Heaven isn’t real?

Heaven: Don't miss it for the world!

If Heaven isn’t real, then what is the point of suffering? What is the point of “righteous living” and staying back home when my friends go out to party? I don’t know. And that not knowing, that doubt, scares the crap out of me sometimes. If I ever stopped believing, what would my life look like? I mean, after my family and friends adjusted to the new me, and I was no longer living a lie, who would I be? I would still be me, would still probably like Star Trek and editing videos, and am pretty sure my sense of humor would be intact. So…? Faith requires a step into the unknown, the absurd; and I have lost the appetite to chase after things I cannot see, cannot feel.

For this reason, I cannot let what people at church might think affect the decisions I make for my life: what I choose to believe, what I do with my life, and a myriad of other things associated. In the same way, the momentum of my early life in faith is not enough to prop me up when I’m tanking, on empty, ready to crash and burn. Hanging on to past experiences is not enough, and envisioning some mystical land plated with pure gold is just plain weird, not when I am concerned about my life today, right now. All of that almost feels like some sort of spiritualized escapism. I need something I can feel today, not a fairy tale of a better place where all our woes and worries will be gone. I wish it was just Heaven that felt so distant. At least then I wouldn’t feel like every other aspect of the faith was so…disjointed from the rest of my life.

When I think of all the time that I feel a good Christian should be spending in prayer and reading the Bible, it makes me feel really inadequate. I mean, prayer is good for some, but I don’t really connect that way. I feel like a heathen for thinking it, but I feel more at peace when I go for a walk or drive alone in the car at night, where my thoughts can wander freely. But does Jesus really answer me when I pray to him, or are those just my thoughts, something I contrived to comfort myself when I’m feeling down? The “burning in my bosom” that I felt a long time ago was just that – a long time ago – and I don’t feel it today. I’m not sure if I ever really felt it at all.

What if we were just set up to believe that some really good guy was more than even he claimed to be? I can see it happening more easily than I can sometimes see dude getting crucified, coming back to life. It’s almost more believable that he was an alien with special powers too complex to be understood by our less evolved brains. At least that makes sense!

During those long drives alone in my car at night, when I am left with the stillness of my own thoughts, the doubts come in, and like a good evangelical Christian I feel the urge to push them back, to ignore the unanswerable marks against my faith. But, it is in this dark night that the soul has free reign to connect, for once, with the true rhythm of the journey of faith. It is this “dark night of the soul,” first written of by Carmelite monk St. John of the Cross in the sixteenth century, that defines so much of our security in our own spiritual identity.

The Evangelical tradition has lost this core struggle, preferring to hang on to the feelings of the past over the pain of the present. But it is in this pain that God is revealed. The dark night of the soul has different degrees, but generally comes in as the excitement, the newness, of the faith begins to meet the reality of life. We are promised freedom from struggle, from want, from the past, but these very things creep their way in as we come down from the “high” of holiness.

Sometimes I feel like the church offers seekers more of a bait-and-switch scam than anything of true and lasting substance. I’m told that Jesus is going to be my best friend, but what I feel when life gets tough is that he is either a liar, or just an imaginary friend that was nice for a time but never meant to be with me forever. The dark night is a lonely place because so few are willing to admit that they struggle with doubt. But it is this struggle that defines the very core of our humanity. Placing eternity in the hearts of mortal men shouldn’t make sense.

In 2007, the private writings of Mother Theresa were made public. It soon came out that for almost fifty years Mother Theresa, who had devoted the entirety of her life to the poorest of the poor of Calcutta, went through almost fifty years of feeling that God had abandoned her, like her prayers were falling on deaf ears. It was not until the end of her life that breakthrough slowly began to occur. And this theme is common throughout Scripture.

I am certain that David questioned God on countless occasions, in fact we can read about it through the Psalms. Anointed as king at a young age only to be chased his whole life, considered a traitor, and suffering alone, cold, and hungry. Abraham and Sarah must have thought God a cruel jokester, promising them a child in their old age just to tease them. And how long did they go on before anything really happened? It’s easy for us to see things come together so quickly for them because it all happens with a couple turns of the page. Done! But my life is happening right now, and I can’t turn the page. I can’t even get to the end of the paragraph!

The dark night of the soul is not the handiwork of a merciless Creator who has nothing better than to play the role of an evil child burning ants with a magnifying glass for his sick pleasure. Nor is it contrived by some imaginary force projected from the human psyche, something that helps me get through a tough time, but not really meant for the rest of life. No. This wrestling with doubt is the best gift any believer in Christ can receive. Doubt is of the greatest of spiritual blessings. It purifies the soul, calls us to leave the carnality of religion, and embrace the essence of faith. And leaving behind the carnality of religion, the things I hang onto because I’m supposed to, or always have, is counter-cognitive.

When I was sucked under that log in the Green River, I connected with the terrifying fear that I might lose myself if things didn’t come together for me. Nobody else seemed to have trouble floating down the river, but there I was, caught up in a struggle to hang on and pull myself out. In the seconds I was submerged under the water, seconds which felt like an eternity to that dramatic thirteen-year-old mind you, I prayed to God for help. Somewhere in my head I heard this thing telling me that I needed to let go. “No thanks,” I thought to myself, but it persisted, and my continuing to hang on did not seem to be doing anything for me. So, I finally let go and in a matter of about two seconds I popped up on the other side of the log, without an inner-tube but able to breathe. So many of us are afraid to let go and embrace the chaos of those waters.

Letting go and embracing the dark nigh is anything but easy. It often involves a crisis of faith, a dipping into immorality, a struggle to believe in an archaic and seemingly-distant God. But, it defines our faith in a way we could never know. So many push away the doubts, preferring to skim the surface of Christianity rather than embracing the depths, because the depths have no easy answers, nothing to tell is this is why we struggle, or how things are going to work out. But for those who learn to let go of hanging on for the sake of others, or for the sake of past experiences and expectations, they discover a deeper, more genuine faith that cannot be shaken.

Sometimes I do hate being a Christian, because there are no easy answers. I so much want to feel God because I need something more than myself, but the goosebumps just don’t cut it for me anymore. I hate the faith in the same way an old woman hates her wrinkling and weakening body or how a male bee hates dying after he has sex for the first time in his life. I hate it in the way that it is a reality of nature that stands against the reality of my fallen, broken nature. I hate being a Christian because I hate being human, for we are nothing more than the sum of the pain and joy and sorrow and laughter of a few short and seemingly insignificant years.

I just as much hate Christianity as I hate watching the summer fade to autumn, day to night, or a loved one wither into old age. But this faith is as real to me as the trees, deeper than the stones that form the riverbed, for it is spoken in the mysteries of the universe that I still fail to fathom. It is. God is, and that is why I struggle. Eternity has been placed in the heart of this man, and it is a weight almost too great to carry, impossible to fathom, and just what he needs for hope today, strength tomorrow.