Tag: Faith

Faith, Intellectualism, and Doubt

On By SarahIn Community, Opinion, SpiritualityLeave a comment

On seeking with an open heart

Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

I have struggled with being a person of faith for as long as I can remember. I have always been a doubter. I remember when I was a child learning about the life of Jesus, I was full of questions about learning lessons about God from a book that was so old. I asked my mother one day “What if we learn some day that these are just stories, and that Jesus wasn’t a real person?” There wasn’t any real evidence to prove that he existed, so how could I possibly believe in this person as a deity?

My memory of that exchange is a little foggy, as I was only about seven years old at the time. But her response was something like it’s the stories that are important, and these stories about this person have lessons for us to learn from and to model ourselves after, and faith wasn’t about being sure. In a nutshell, my mom’s answer was that faith is not about knowing. Thus began my life in paradoxology.

I’m just as confused now as I was then at that answer, and I probably will be trying to figure it out for the rest of my life. The result of this confusion in the reality of the world now is that when I go to any kind of worship I feel like an impostor because I still don’t know with any certainty what this entity that I pray to really is. I am still full of doubt and questions, while I perceive those around me full of certainty and conviction of what they know about God.

Equally confusing are my atheist friends who hold their non-belief with such conviction that they judge people of faith as ignorant. They think that one cannot be an intellectual and a person of faith. In this context, too, I have felt like an imposter because I am on a spiritual path.

What do I believe? I just don’t know…and then I remember that faith isn’t about knowing with certainty. Faith is about not knowing, and intellectual curiosity is about being open to learn. Faith and intellectual curiosity are about seeking with an open heart. I hold both with equal weight, one informing the other in constant symbiosis.

Perhaps symbiosis is a helpful way to think about people who are seemingly different from us. Instead of dismissing and shutting people out because we assume we can’t relate to their beliefs, perhaps we can grow by always seeking to understand the other with an open heart.

Thanks

On By SarahIn Food & CookingLeave a comment

I am thankful for:

  • A spacious kitchen, properly outfitted with a gas stove and dishwasher
  • My wife’s superior cooking talents (I helped…fun in the kitchen)
    • Green bean casserole
    • Mashed potatoes
    • Cranberry apricot sauce
    • Herbacious gravy
    • Traditional turkey
    • Dinner Rolls
    • Pink bubbles
    • Beaujolais
    • Maple pecan pie with bourbon whipped cream
  • A satisfying twelve-year (yikes!) in prospect research that brought me back to my favorite city
  • Snow! On Thanksgiving morning. Our first snow since moving back to the Midwest
  • NPR and Third Coast Radio documentaries, especially The Ground We Lived On
  • Sam Cooke
  • Thanksgiving memories from my youth
  • The Wizard of Oz
  • Public libraries
  • My great good fortune and health
  • Family and friends
  • Forgiveness and unconditional love
  • The hard work of reconciliation, faith and hope

Christians and Integrity

On By SarahIn Opinion, Politics, SpiritualityLeave a comment

It really is gratifying to know that there are conservative Christians out there with integrity. It gives me hope that we can find common ground, that some of them are critical thinkers instead of brain-washed zombies (Oops! Did I say that out loud?).

This week, over 200 students and faculty at Brigham Young University protested Dick Cheney’s upcoming commencement speech at the school. Apparently, they are asserting that he is not a good role model for today’s youth because he lied about the WMDs in Iraq in order to support going to war.

I am increasingly heartened by the fact that more and more conservative Christians are starting to think. They are starting to realize that they have been used as a political football. There are many who are starting to realize that there are more important issues than the ones that divide the nation. There are many moral issues on which all of us can unite and agree.

David Kuo is the perfect example. In his book Tempting Faith, Kuo speaks out about the hypocrisy of the Bush Administration and its lack of commitment to end poverty in this country. He was a White House insider working with President Bush on “faith-based initiatives,” and reports in his book that Republicans were really only interested in working with Christians in order to out law abortion rights and civil rights for queers. Kuo’s priority is economic justice, and he articulated an experience of being ignored, lied to, and promises not being fulfilled.

I think that most intelligent and truly compassionate people at the end of the day can recognize that it is important that a family have food on the table, that a homeless man have a warm and safe bed and an opportunity to go to rehab, that an illiterate adult learn how to read, that senior citizens who live alone be visited, that large corporations be held accountable for the pollution they cause in the communities where they have factories, that we all take responsibility to leave a lighter foot print on the planet so that it will be here for our children tomorrow.

There are issues about which people will likely always disagree, those being about abortion and homosexuality. It is interesting that these very divisive issues are about very private and personal matters. I think that perhaps as Christians, whether progressive or conservative, if we focus on the issues that effect all of us in the same way, finding common moral ground will be easier and our priorities clearer.

This may be a total pipe dream. I run from conservative Christians. I don’t know how to talk to them. They scare me. Really. They freak me out. I admit, I’m rather intolerant, and maybe even prejudiced. But I am interested in finding common ground. I’m committed to learning about what informs conservative Christian politics and seeing where there may be intersections. It’s my faith, too, and perhaps part of my effort to reclaim it will involve an effort to understand more about Christians whose politics are so different from my own.