Okay, a warning, part one: every once in a while (not too often, don’t worry), I’m going to go off on a rant about religion and faith. The reason for this is fairly simple: I have been a practicing Christian for most of my life, and this is a part of my life and experience that is very important to me. Warning, part two: I’m not your usual Christian. I am a radical. Don’t expect sugary platitudes or ‘rules for living’ or any of the crap that most of my ‘brethren’ seem to be addicted to. I don’t have my car radio tuned to the gospel station (I prefer Classical or Hard Rock), and while I have read a huge portion of the Bible, I don’t quote it chapter and verse unless I absolutely have to. I have come to my spiritual knowledge and principles through study and deep thought. I do not accept any principle from any one strictly on the basis of accepted authority. If any part of the foregoing information offends you – get lost. Nothing I have to say will interest you. I don’t need your comments or flames and I will simply delete anything snarky or offensive you have to say. If, on the other hand, you are okay with my attitudes so far, read on. I’ll get around to offending you shortly.
Nearly every Christian can repeat Paul’s famous last line in I Cor 13: “These three remain – faith, hope and love – but the greatest of these is love.” The word ‘love’ is translated ‘charity’ in the KJV, but that’s mostly to point out the difference in the Greek: agape as opposed to phileo. All well and good. Past that point, most everyone gets it wrong. Indeed, Paul was writing about faith, hope and love – but what does that mean? A great many Christians seem to think that ‘desperate belief, wishful thinking and warm feelings’ can be just as easily inserted in the passage. They will urgently deny this, of course, but they’re not at all clear about what should be put in their place. The average understanding of the average Christian is woefully incompatible with the reality of the Kingdom as Christ preached it, and even mostly incompatible with Paul’s understanding of it. The problem comes, not because Paul was unclear (though he sometimes is), but because we as Christians don’t get clear of our natural, human assumptions of how the world is supposed to work. Warning: I’m about to get offensive.
When we are very small, the world is a big, scary place with darkness, strange noises and all sorts of adults and other creatures inhabiting it – not all of whom are nice, or even harmless. Danger is everywhere the farther we get from our parents – and in the worst cases, even our parents can sometimes threaten us or harm us. In an attempt to stave off the fear and panic, we invent for ourselves – or learn from our parents, who are no smarter than we are, seemingly – a whole slew of beliefs, superstitions (difficult to tell the difference, sometimes), magical spells and customs, and a whole false history to make us feel more important, more special, than we really are. The older we get, the more those hastily created bulwarks get filled in, strengthened and smoothed until we finally accept them not only as good explanations but as the actual truth of things. Anyone coming along and pointing out how false and hollow those cherished assumptions and customs are, are immediately mistrusted, hated, driven out, beaten – hung on a cross. We do it every day.
Let’s be clear about this – most people don’t understand what ‘faith, hope and love’ actually means. Amorphous belief is not faith. Desperately wishing on a star is not hope. Warm feelings about someone you like (and who likes you back) is not love. What you are experiencing is actually superstition, false history and self-importance. All of these run clean counter to the Kingdom. They are, in fact, types of rebellion – all punishable by death. Let’s break it down.
What is love? Well, first off, it’s not a feeling. What you feel for a person who likes you back is actually a form of self-love. You like me, you help me, you make me feel good – so I love you. What is the opposite of love? It’s not hatred. Hatred is another form of self-love; you oppose me, you neglect or hurt me – I hate you, because I’m more important than anyone else. The opposite of love is actually fear. Remember “perfect love casts out all fear”? That’s what it means. Love is the antidote to fear. It gets us out of our self-centered little worlds and makes us venture out to where others are and help them to the best of our abilities. Without fear. Love is not a feeling, it’s an action. It’s not something you feel – it’s something you do.
What is faith? It’s not a set of customs or rituals that a person uses to change an outcome, that’s magic. Magic is the attempt to control one’s own destiny through either bribing or cajoling a ‘higher power’ (and therefore controlling that higher power) into doing what you want or perhaps skirting the issue of a greater-than-me altogether and attempting to harness and use ‘mystical forces’ or ‘the will of the Universe’ to do your bidding. Faith is not belief in some amorphous concept like ‘things just naturally get better’, or ‘nothing happens without a reason’. Hogwash. That’s not faith, that’s superstition, again. Face facts: most things in your life happen randomly – who you meet, who you marry, what job you train to do – certainly where and when you were born, and to whom. Freedom of choice means you get to decide if this person you met is a good match for you, whether this job is the right one for you, et cetera. When you invoke ‘higher meaning’ in these things, you just muddy the water, make it tougher to change if you need to, and give yourself a false sense of fatalism (or destiny, if you prefer – another illusion). Faith is actually trust – in action. You get up every morning in faith that the sun will rise – statistically a good bet. You have faith that your spouse still cares for you – not always a good bet, and the reason that betrayal hurts the way it does. We have faith in buildings standing up, in governments staying in power, in children and pets always loving us. We don’t even think about questioning these things, usually, and build our lives as if these things will never let us down. When they do, the devastation is total. Many people have been injured so often, from so many different directions, that they end up without faith of any kind – they trust nothing and no-one. Faith in God is exactly this – trust, so total and complete that he can ask you to do anything, even (or maybe especially) something that sounds crazy, uncomfortable, even dangerous – and you do it without question or hesitation. You just know he won’t let you down. Simple? Hardly.
What is hope? Someone asked me this at one point, and I didn’t have an answer for him. Is it an extension of faith? Is it a belief in a pretty-pretty afterlife? Is it a forlorn wish that tomorrow has just got to be better than today? I have begun to see hope as a kind of compass, pointing us to the True North. Hope gives us a direction towards which we steer our lives. It’s the opposite of fatalism – an understanding that the past is not what we think it was, and that the future is unwritten – we must simply sail towards it. But more than that, it’s a deep knowledge that the great Weaver of time, space and spirit will bring all things to his conclusion in his own fashion. And that we are allowed to add our own little flourishes to the Great Tapestry, that in fact, that is what we are meant to do. If we have a Purpose, it is just that – to love God and others through our actions, to have faith that whatever he asks us to do is not only possible, but right, and to understand that we are not put here to selfishly guard our little toys, but to step forward and write, paint, sing our unique perspectives into being, thereby enriching everyone around us, not just (or even primarily) ourselves. Therefore, all your most closely-held and cherished assumptions and assertions about the universe and God are just plain wrong.
Offended yet?
pax et ama
bcd