“We too often forget that faith is a matter of questioning and struggle before it becomes one of certitude and peace. You have to doubt and reject everything else in order to believe firmly in Christ, and after you have begun to believe, your faith itself must be tested and purified. Christianity is not merely a set of forgone conclusions.” - Thomas Merton
As soon as the boy was old enough to know, it was given to him. He was told to hold to it tightly, to keep it with him always. He had it with him when he got scared in the night; it helped him be brave and fall back asleep. When a bully at school shoved him around, he squeezed it tight in his fist and it comforted him. He had it with him when he played kickball with neighborhood kids in the summertime and during the snowball fights with his sister during the winter. One day, one hard day, one day when he maybe should have held it tightly, his grip loosened. At his sister’s funeral, he just kept it in his pocket, not held in his hand for comfort or clenched in his fist when he cried angry tears, bitter tears. After being so important to him as a child, it became something that was simply around.
When he got his first kiss, it was in his backpack in his car. When he had his first beer, it was on the dresser at home. When he had his heart broken by this beautiful girl, it was in his sock drawer beside his cuff links and passport. By the time he left for college, it had been packed away with the old things that matter and yet don’t anymore: the baby blanket, teddy bear, his children’s books. For many that grow up in Christian homes, we likewise experience the same challenge of coming to grips with the faith we have been raised with and deciding the role it will play in our lives. It is part of the fabric of who we are and yet at some point, decisions have to be made about the way we will live our lives.
What will we do with what we have been raised with? Will we fold towels the same way our mother does; drink our coffee like Dad always did? Will we be part of the same social clubs, the same political party, or even the same faith of those who have informed our understanding of the world?
For a time, there was an easy road for many of us who grew up in Christian homes, simply choosing to continue with the tradition that we were born into. We could continue answering life’s questions as we always had when life was comfortable and the path ahead was known. At some point though, our grip on this understanding loosened. When the road ahead suddenly was not easy, when what we experienced shook us to core of who we were, it was then that the depth of our understanding and our willingness to act was called into question. It often came when there was a breaking of our comfortable lives of living and breathing with another person; of our trust in those that informed our lives; of our understanding when life’s question shook us to the core. It is during these times that we must choose to unclench our fists and look at what is it we believe. Rather than just letting go of our faith, we should choose to know its ins and outs, small cracks and divots. There must be a pursuit of knowing beyond what has been taught, a decision made as to whether our faith will inform the life that we choose to live.
It is through questioning that we discover what we hold to be true: how it is we see the world and what is we believe. Examined or unexamined, our beliefs about the world are present when we sit in awe at the beauty of nature, when we laugh with friends and smile at the store cashier, when we cry at the hardship of loss of a friend or experience regret when we introduce more hardship into the world. At the core of who we are, we hold to statements about life: the world as we know it and what we hope it to be that are the foundation of faith. Given to us by our families, those that we have trusted, those that we revere, those that we loathe, it is in those times when a testing of those statements and those people, when questions are asked and our knowing deepens.
And yet for many people that grow up in Christian homes, the faith of our upbringing is simply put away with the things of our childhood when we leave for college or start hanging out with a different group of friends. At some point, the easy answers stop working and Christianity is just let go of. Many will return to it when they have children because it will make their kids wait longer to have sex, keep them away from drugs, and surround them with a good group of friends. The answers will sustain them long enough to avoid a lot of bad decisions and then get on with their lives.
For Christianity to be more than something that makes people respectable for a time, it must be engaged with. One must choose to go beyond holding tightly to answers for comfort or braveness, for respectability or self-advancement. Thomas Merton, a writer and Trappist monk, once said, “I think a man is known better by his questions than by his answers. To make known one’s questions, is no doubt, to come out in the open oneself.” True ownership of faith must go beyond holding a set of transmitted beliefs because it is said to be valuable; it is asking of questions and pursuing of truth. It is at this point that a true knowing comes, a consciousness of our beliefs and how they inform the way we will continue to live life. The danger is not in the examination and the questioning, as often we were often told. It is in the slow letting go of what has been held to be true simply because the road traveled becomes hard, because trust is broken, because our understanding comes up short. Few can avoid experiencing the brokenness of the world and the challenge to faith that comes with that but a choice can be made to how we will respond. Will we simply let go, try to hold tighter, or choose to live as people with questions but also hope?
Hope is a dangerous thing. It dares us to care about the lives that we live, to say that the choices we make have significance, to believe that somehow all of this is happening under the watch of One who is said to care for us. It is hope that should be held to tightly: not the answers, not the brokenness, not even the questions, but a hope, small as it may be, that can sustain in the times of great brokenness and yet also bring joy in the times of great happiness. It is to be shared with others so in times of despair, we can restore one another, and in times of happiness, we may experience the fullness of the life that can be lived here and now. May we be a people that are known not by our answers, or our great questions, but by our hope.
*Both Merton quotes were recently in an article titled “The Problem with Mystery,” online at the Burnside Writers Collective.
