Faith

Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession. It is on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all. Faith is not being sure where you're going, but going anyway. A journey without maps. Tillich said that doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.

- Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC

Christ vs. Christians

Gandhi said, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."

This, in essence, summarizes the issues that I have with Christians and the Church. They impose their doctrines and dogmas and move away from, and lose sight of, the heart of the matter. Their very name is taken from 'Christ' and yet they are nothing like him. They choose greed over charity, indifference over compassion, judgment over acceptance, and condemnation over forgiveness. Doesn't seem very Christ-like to me.

You see, Christ said, "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Mark 12:31). There was no asterisk attached to that comment, there were no "ifs" or "buts," either. And yet, so many Christians nowadays would rather accept it as "Love your neighbor as yourself if they think the same as you, look the same as you, believe the same things as you, etc." Which really confuses me, because I don't know how that commandment could have been any clearer. Love your neighbor as yourself. Period.

Christ also said to give food to the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, take in the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and in prison, for "whatever you [do] for the least of these, you [do] for [him]" (Matthew 25:40). In summary: be generous; be compassionate; be sympathetic. He also said to be merciful, to not judge, to keep prayers private, and to do good deeds out of earnest desire to do them - not to be seen and praised by others. And yet.

And yet so many Christians I know are simultaneously the biggest assholes I know. They're the worst because they parade their faith as a spectacle and hide behind it as an excuse for their actions. They seem to forget that Christ spent the majority of his time amongst the lowest of society, loving them, while rebuking the 'saints' of the day.

I have no issue with Christ. I have an issue with so many of his Christians.

Believe

"As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have stopped believing. Believe for the sake of the dead, for love, to keep your heart beating, believe. Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours."

- Mark Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War

Snippet

I am so damn sick of all these judgmental, hypocritical, haughty pricks that call themselves Christians. There's so much hate and condemnation, when the only thing they should be spreading is love. They act as if they have some sort of pedestal that they've earned, as if they're somehow better than their fellow man, when at the end of the day, we're all exactly the same.

A much longer, more eloquent post will be coming shortly, whenever I have time to sit down and write it all out (and when it's not one in the morning). But I just wanted to say, goddamn does that grind my gears.

Find Your Own Faith

When it comes to Christians, few are more aggravating than those who live as blind sheep, following some distant shepherd, trusting his or her every word, every creed, and never trying to learn things for themselves, never trying to find their own convictions. Humans were given minds with the mental capacities to consider, deduce, and decide things for themselves, and if only, if only they would actually use them. Your beliefs, your values, your praises and condemnations - all worthless if they are nothing but echos of another voice. I am not saying that you should disregard everything you have been taught, everything you have perhaps been brought up in, but please, for the love of God, at some point in your life, detach yourself from it all - and just think.

In the words of John Stuart Mill...

"He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess."

(From his On Liberty - whoever said that nineteenth century political philosophy was irrelevant to everyday life? ;) )

If it is faith that you need, or want, find it for yourself.

Time Heals

Whether it be a broken heart or a broken arm, time will heal. Or if it doesn't fully mend, then it brings a sort of natural novocaine. But either way, the pain eventually subsides.

Time heals. If it still hurts, be patient. This too shall pass, and will one day be nothing more than just a lost memory.

Remember

Always, always, always remember - you are someone's prayer.

Lent

Clearing the mind and body, while cleansing the spirit. Every day is another chance for something more.

Keep the faith.

Faith

When God told Abraham, who was a hundred at the time, that at the age of ninety his wife Sarah was finally going to have a baby, Abraham came close to knocking himself out - "fell on his face and laughed," as Genesis puts it (17:17). In another version of the story (18:18), Sarah is hiding behind the door eavesdropping, and here it's Sarah herself who nearly splits a gut - although when God asks her about it afterward, she denies it. "No, but you did laugh," God says, thus having the last word as well as the first. God doesn't seem to hold their outburst against them, however. On the contrary, he tells them the baby's going to be a boy and that he wants them to name him Isaac. Isaac in Hebrew means laughter.

Why did the two old crocks laugh? They laughed because they knew only a fool could believe that a woman with one foot in the grave was soon going to have her other foot in the maternity ward. They laughed because God expected them to believe it anyway. They laughed because God seemed to believe it. They laughed because they half-believed it themselves. They laughed because laughing felt better than crying. They laughed because if by some crazy chance it just happened to come true, they would really have something to laugh about, and in the meanwhile it helped keep them going.

Faith is "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen," says the Epistle to Hebrews (11:1). Faith is laughter at the promise of a child called laughter.

If someone had come up to Jesus when he was on the cross and asked Him if it hurt, He might have answered, like the old man in the old joke, "Only when I laugh." But He wouldn't have been joking. Faith dies, as it lives, laughing.

Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession. Faith is not being sure where you're going, but going anyway. A journey without maps. Tillich said that doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.

I have faith that my friend is my friend. It is possible that all his motives are ulterior. It is possible that what he is secretly drawn to is not me but my wife or my money. But there's something about the way he looks me in the eye, about the way we can talk to each other without pretense and be silent together without embarrassment, that makes me willing to put my life in his hands as I do each time I call him friend.

I can't prove the friendship of my friend. When I experience it, I don't need to prove it. When I don't experience it, no proof will do. If I tried to put his friendship to the test somehow, the test itself would queer the friendship I was testing. so it is with the Goodness of God.

The five so-called proofs for the existence of God will never prove to unfaith that God exists. They are merely five ways of describing the existence of the God you have faith in already.

Almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved. I can prove the law of gravity by dropping a shoe out the widow. I can prove that the world is round if I'm clever at that sort of thing - that the radio works, that light travels faster than sound. I cannot prove that life is better than death or love better than hate. I cannot prove the greatness of the great or the beauty of the beautiful. I cannot even prove my own free will; maybe my most heroic act, my truest love, my deepest thought, are all just subtler versions of what happens when the doctor taps my knee with his little rubber hammer and my foot jumps.

Faith can't prove a damned thing. Or a blessed thing either.


- Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC

Word

In Hebrew the term dabar means both "word" and "deed." Thus to say something is to do something. I love you. I hate you. I forgive you. I am afraid. Who knows what such words do but whatever it is, it can never be undone. Something that lay hidden in the heart is irrevocably released through speech into time, is given substance and tossed like a stone into the pool of history, where the concentric rings lap out endlessly.

Words are power, essentially the power of creation. By my words I both discover and create who I am. By my words I elicit a word from you. Through our converse we create each other.

When God said, "Let there be light," there was light where before there was only darkness. Then I say I love you, there is love where before there was only ambiguous silence. In a sense I do not love you first and then speak it, but only by speaking it give it reality.

-Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC