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November 2, 2005
Hello everyone,
You know, as I look across my spiritual journey from complete agnostic and borderline atheist to professing believer, I sometimes feel as if some of the wind has gone out of my sails. Things that I once viewed with strong conviction and animated passion no longer move me; it seems that by necessity, such things keep being pruned and pared away until I am left with only the most skeletal framework of faith. This can be a hidden boon in that (1) I tend to listen more carefully and with a more open mind to others—what room do dogmatic pronouncements have in the life of someone who is acutely aware of his own uncertainty and his many glaring limitations?—and (2) I do not become overly burdened with the corporate creeds that often come bound together in the same bundle as faith, that, as clarifying and helpful as they can at times be, can serve to detract and obscure as well. In this state of mind, it is not uncommon for me to hear another speak of faith with an eagerness and earnest certainty and to feel as if the two of us are coming from totally opposite ends of the globe. Even more, I have little stomach for the political activism that is often appended to the faith and in general find myself increasingly at odds with the things I hear coming from the faith community. Not surprisingly, such internal responses find me searching for answers, puzzling over particulars, and in general wondering if I am losing my mind to say nothing of my faith. I wonder sometimes if I am the only one seeing clearly, if I am the only one not seeing clearly, or if some combination of the two is at play dependent on the topic at hand. To this end, several conversations have recently been insightful.
Not long ago I made the acquaintance of an individual who is affiliated with a faith organization that is outside the mainstream of traditional Christianity: that is, outside the doctrines and beliefs upheld by Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant believers. I have been indoctrinated to view this particular faith affiliation with distrust and suspicion, so it is hardly surprising that my visceral reaction betrayed my social programming. The true irony is that she has never spoken of her faith with me at all and I have spoken of mine only in the most cursory of fashions; my reactions, it seems, were based almost entirely on an inherited prejudice and I found this disturbing. Yet I also wanted to find out if there was any rational basis to this reaction, however minute. Recalling that Jesus made much of knowing a tree by its fruits, I first asked myself if there was anything in this woman’s behavior that would warrant the supposed “shrewd as a serpent” forewarnings. My list was so short as to be entirely non-existent: a few human foibles an overzealous moralist might find objectionable but in general nothing a person could fault without resorting to prudery. By rate of contrast, the inventory of positives was quite expansive: she had many truly commendable characteristics, not the least of which was a certain warmth of personality I so often feel I am lacking.
It soon became clear to me that my only real objections involved the apparent mismatch of doctrinal beliefs, a rather shallow basis to warrant such immediate and strong reactions, particularly when half the time I’m not even certain what I believe or even if I believe all the things I profess to believe. (I tend to fare better when defining my beliefs in the negative—“Whatever I believe, it is surely not this!”—whatever “this” happens to be at the moment.) It struck me that a far better approach was not to deny the differences, but to learn from and incorporate those positive elements I found modeled in her behavior and adopt a stance of agnosticism regarding the rest. Or, as a friend recently shared with me from her journal (paraphrased from memory), “Don’t judge others, but don’t follow them into error either”; while we should not condemn others, we should avoid allowing them to influence us into participating in behavior that contradicts our own moral principles. I am again reminded of a passage we first looked at in Samurai and Mustard Seeds: Fealty’s Link to Faith from the PDF article addressed primarily to educators entitled Promoting Tolerance: How to Make a Change:
Tolerance, in and of itself, is not a virtue. . . . Tolerance is neutral. Tolerance derives its value from what it is the person tolerates, and the manner in which that tolerance or intolerance is expressed. This involves character. . . . Proper tolerance is the outgrowth of character qualities such as kindness, patience, courtesy, humility, love, self-control, and courage. Even intolerance (especially intolerance!) should be expressed through these qualities. If you don’t understand that tolerance must be based on character, you’ll think you’re being tolerant when you’re actually only expressing indifference (“whatever”), or apathy (“who cares?”), or even recklessness (“why not?”). Improperly taught, “tolerance education” can lead to disarming you of your proper convictions.
Not long ago, I was speaking with a classmate, who, while raised around the Baptist church, makes no profession of faith of any sort and indeed has adopted a predominantly secular worldview. Without mentioning the woman described above at all, we spoke of this particular faith affiliation and I shared my thoughts regarding it. He smiled, stating he had visited their church before and that he would describe them in a single word: “love.” I admitted that this was precisely what troubled me, for love is obviously a virtue and reduces many professed sets of beliefs to clanging cymbals clashing in the wind. Yet his answer—immediate, spontaneous, and pregnant with meaning—drew me up short: “Yeah, sometimes one is looking for more than love . . . for any number of reasons.” Among the myriad ways one could take his words, he appeared to be alluding to the fact—and I think I can say this in sober judgment—that while the affiliation in question is very embracing and inclusive of others in truly positive ways, it also lacks a certain substance because it doesn’t really stand for anything. All are welcome, but no one is really committed to much of anything. Love can carry a person a very long way, but is it really love when it lacks substance? That lack of substance is the only warrant I could find for feeling a certain sense of distrust, an impression that falls into the category of: “I may not know what I believe, but I do not believe this.” So then, as we noted above, I concluded I should learn from this example to open my arms wider while realizing that if I lose my grounding, my arms will be as empty as they are wide even when they close in embrace.
My classmate and I spoke for moments longer, our conversation traveling to various professors we have both had. One professor in particular champions controversial Princeton professor Dr. Peter Singer, known for his pioneering work in the area of animal rights and (to many people) his disturbing views on human life. We spoke of how this professor is also known for her strong views on feminism, a perspective my peer was not faulting, though he did call into question the degree of emphasis she affords the matter. In other words, he does not deny that there are still problems with sexual discrimination, he simply fails to see it as being the predominate problem in the world: for him, it is one problem of many and a more balanced view would acknowledge as much. More interesting to me, however, was the moral conviction with which he spoke out against other issues and causes that she advocates. I was drawn up short, for I feel like more and more I too stand for next to nothing and here is an individual who makes no profession of faith of any sort who is clearly possessed of strong and truly commendable moral convictions—and he is willing to take a public stand for them, arguing intelligently and passionately for their implementation. It was clear that for him this was no political propagandizing; further, the fact he was not affiliated with any faith organization, I hate to say, made his voice ring more credible to my ears.
A few days later, I was sitting in the restaurant with a Christian friend and we were describing our mutual seasons of discontent as of late. In the course of the conversation, it became obvious how deeply entrenched we were in the Christian faith to a degree that even when we rebelliously wish to throw off its yoke, we find ourselves miserable; no matter how we twist and turn about, it is still active and alive in the background guiding our decisions and convicting us when we stray. For that matter, it could be argued that my classmate mentioned above is still operating from principles instilled in him from his childhood when the Baptist church played a greater or lesser role in his life. And, on the same note, it has often been said that Sigmund Freud and other atheists of note were still operating within the confines of a post-Christian culture; that their theories were essentially secularized versions of Christian dogma. I thought the same thing when we read the chapter on Christianity from Michael Molloy’s Experiencing the World’s Religions for another religious studies course I am taking this semester. Molloy talks about the widely-documented secularization of much of Europe—“cultural Christianity,” as he describes it—in which Christian churches are places in which Europeans are frequently “married and buried” and little else (420). That Christianity has profoundly shaped the Western world, few deny. A deeper question is why are we increasingly seeing fit to reject it? Could it be that whatever is good and true about the Christian faith, surely this is not it? Could it be because we have strayed very far from the teachings of a certain Jewish rabbi and we know it?
I am both heartened and bothered by my own ambivalence these days: heartened because I think I am actually searching for something deeper than we typically see manifest, bothered because I fear I am rejecting too much of value in the process and too readily emptying myself of former convictions that have served to instill in me genuine virtue. With such an admission as our backdrop, let us examine yet another recent interaction: this time in the form of a question from a subscriber and fellow seeker who has many of her own reservations about Christianity, to say nothing of fundamentalism. She writes: “[S]omeday, in your newsletter, I’d appreciate it if you’d address the subject of ‘perfection’ . . . as in ‘Be ye perfect . . . .’” (Matthew 5:48). She suspects the word does not mean “100% correct” as we might conceive of it today, but rather that it has a deeper, richer meaning. Her question is the first time in a long time that someone has asked me to explicate a (potentially difficult) Biblical passage. I was surprised that a ready answer was there; I was even more surprised that the within my reply was something that I too needed to hear.
I have long understood the word “perfect” in Matthew 5:48—“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect”—to carry a connotation much like the word “integrity.” Behind the concept of integrity is found the idea of integer (whole) or integration (collection of elements united together into a seamless whole): that is, integrity—in the sense of “lacking nothing, whole, complete”—in a word: perfect. In the blog entry Completely Different Creatures, we discuss the following in answer to a question raised in the comments section:
In mathematics, when we speak of “whole numbers” we call them integers. Integer comes from Latin and it means “whole, complete”; integritas is one of its forms from which we get the word integrity. Thus, built into the very definition of integrity is the notion of wholeness, completeness, totality. Sometimes, in the formal usage of the word, all that we mean when we employ the term is that something is whole or that it remains undivided and undamaged. For example, we speak of “the territorial integrity of a country,” or suggest that “the structural integrity of the bridge was compromised.” But as we are seeking to define it here, we mean a person who has integrity and such a person, we should note from the very beginning, is going to be “solid” and “dependable,” thus we might say he possesses “moral soundness,” unlike the structurally unsound bridge in danger of collapse. In its ideal, a man of integrity is a man who possesses virtue on every level: a man who possesses virtue on the whole of the moral spectrum. When we say that this man has integrity, we do not mean that his individual actions are moral (though of course they are): we mean something deeper. We mean that his very character is given to morality; we mean “that is just who he is” in the most complimentary of ways. Thus, integrity is best defined as “sound moral character.” You can also get a sense of how others have defined the term, both in standard as well as specialized contexts by clicking here. (Completely Different Creatures)
Because God is perfect in every sense—He lacks no good thing—by His power, we too are to be perfect: we are not to be lacking in goodness or virtue because we are being filled up with His mercy and grace where our own imperfections leave us lacking.
The online John Gill’s Exposition of the Bible looks at Matthew 5:48 in some depth as well, contrasting the passage with the very similar one in Luke 6:36 in which the author writes “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.” If we review the preceding verses in Matthew, we will see that Jesus is teaching that one is not only to show love and kindness to his friends, but also to those who would—and do—use and abuse him. He suggests that this pattern is modeled by God the Father when, without partiality, He sends His rain on both the just and the unjust. Gill indicates that it is not that we “may, or can, or ought to be as perfect in love . . . as God is,” for it is impossible that we should ever have that degree of love ourselves. He continues: “the ‘as’ here, is not a note of equality, but of likeness: such, who profess God to be their Father, ought to imitate Him, particularly in their love to men.” And of course, Gill notes that this “love to men” is modeled by a God whose “tender mercies” are shown “in a providential way to all men, good and bad, just and unjust.” He suggests that an imperfect love, by rate of contrast, is one in which we love only our friends and do not love as God loves. And how does God love? “[S]incerely, and without dissimulation”—that is, God acts with a totality of intent, with no negative feelings secretly harbored behind a dashing smile. Thus, Gill concludes by stating: “To be ‘perfect,’ is to be sincere and upright: in this sense is the word often used, and answers to the Hebrew word Mymt, which signifies the same: see Deuteronomy 18:13 which is the passage Christ seems to refer to here; and the sense is, be ye sincere and upright in your love to all men, as your heavenly Father is hearty and sincere in His affections to them.”
As helpful as Gill might be in getting at the intended meaning of our passage, there is also the painful awareness that we all fall far short of this standard. I suspect it was just such a sober recognition that prompted the question in the first place; I further suspect it was having an immobilizing influence on my fellow seeker’s devotional life. For if we are commanded to be perfect, how can we possibly hope to approach God? In a passage long remembered from Prayer, Richard J. Foster speaks to that very sense of unworthiness in our ability to approach God. The Regent Business Review has an online excerpt from the first chapter entitled Richard Foster on Praying Simply, and it again reminded me of these words in particular that spoke powerfully to me when I first read them some years ago. We will cite the pertinent portion of the passage in full making for a fairly extended quotation; one can read even more from Regent if one is so inclined:
I used to think that I needed to get all my motives straightened out before I could pray, really pray. I would be in some prayer group, for example, and I would examine what I had just prayed and think to myself, “How utterly foolish and self-centered; I can’t pray this way!” And so I would determine never to pray again until motives were pure. You understand, I did not want to be a hypocrite. I knew that God is holy and righteous. I knew that prayer is no magic incantation. I knew that I must not use God for my own ends. But the practical effect of all this internal soul-searching was to completely paralyze my ability to pray.
The truth of the matter is, we all come to prayer with a tangled mass of motives—altruistic and selfish, merciful and hateful, loving and bitter. Frankly, this side of eternity we will never unravel the good from the bad, the pure from the impure. But what I have come to see is that God is big enough to receive us with all our mixture. We do not have to be bright, or pure, or filled with faith, or anything. That is what grace means, and not only are we saved by grace, we live by it as well. And we pray by it.
Jesus reminds us that prayer is a little like children coming to their parents. Our children come to us with the craziest requests at times! Often we are grieved by the meanness and selfishness in their requests, but we would be all the more grieved if they never came to us even with their meanness and selfishness. We are simply glad that they do come—mixed motives and all.
This is precisely how it is with prayer. We will never have pure enough motives, or be good enough, or know enough in order to pray rightly. We simply must set all these things aside and begin praying. In fact, it is in the very act of prayer itself—the intimate, ongoing interaction with God—that these matters are cared for in due time.
The strange thing is that as I forwarded Foster’s words along to my friend, they seemed to be coming from miles away as though written to followers of another faith entire. I was reminded of days gone by in which my convictions were stronger and my faith felt more certain; days in which God seemed far more real and a great deal closer. I recalled days in which an utter simplicity of faith characterized my life and peace was the prevailing presence. How is it that I had once again lost sight of it all, my child-like trust again crucified on the cares and complexities of a life lived apart from the Divine center? I realized that the peace and joy had left my life largely because I had ceased believing: really, truly, fully believing to a point where I was surrendering my life and my all to God and allowing Him to work things out as they will. In a word, I had become apostate; I had stopped believing.
We often hear in Ju Jitsu that “Black-belt problems are solved with white-belt techniques”; following a similar logic, it seems that when our faith takes a beating, we search for lofty answers rather than humbly returning to the basics. As I read Foster’s words again for the first time in years, I realized that somewhere along the way in my dislike of and desire to distance myself from the many ugly things that claim the name of Christ, the very soul of my faith had been seeping slowly away. Perhaps that explains the strange attraction I felt when we read the Tao Te Ching recently in my religions class. Whether a given passage is addressed to the sage, the ruler, or merely to the common reader, the work as a whole is all about surrendering to the Tao—the cosmic force of the universe—and letting it buoy oneself up and carry one along in the current of life. Perhaps inside of me somewhere there was a deep longing of that sense of surrender as one is carried up and over the troublesome waves. Sea-sickness can still occur, of course, as the waves now rise and now fall and now rise again, but compared to the sheer and futile struggle of thrashing wildly about and being plunged repeatedly beneath the foam, being buoyed to the surface where great gulps of air are to be found is vastly to be desired. Soon enough, the storm will pass as all storms do.
Yet just as chapter 35 in Victor H. Mair’s translation of the Tao Te Ching indicates (chapter 70 in most versions): “My words are / very easy to understand, / very easy to practice. / But no one understands them, / and no one is able to practice them.” The idea is that is very easy to surrender to the Tao but very hard to explain with words; the idea is that it is very easy to surrender oneself to the Tao but most people complicate the whole process and thus stumble over its utter simplicity. The same could be said for the child-like faith it takes to empower us in our relationship with God. So often, we hear without hearing, see without seeing. But the answer will not be found in striving, but rather in seeking with a simple faith and trust like unto a child’s. As Peter Kreeft writes in The Heart’s Quest for Heaven (Part II):
We must become little children, for only a little child is strong enough to open the greatest gate, the gate of the Kingdom of heaven. That gate is the heart, and who can open your heart like a child? The child in us is called by three names: faith (trust, openness), hope (idealism, wonder), and love (adoration, yea-saying). These are all terribly vulnerable things, quickly laughed at by a cynical, sophisticated world.
Perhaps a part of my problem—perhaps a problem we all share collectively—is that I have become old before my time, a jaded child of Eden. So often, I am weary to the depth of my bones; courting cultivation, I have become far too worldly-wise for my own good. Seeking refinement, I have forgotten the stark simplicity of childhood; I have sought the stars and the heavens by my pursuit of knowledge on earth. But as C.S. Lewis reminds us in Mere Christianity: “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.” What makes us think that all our striving is going to get us anywhere when the things we most long for are contentment, peace, and a sense of fulfillment and meaning? Do we say we do not long for these things so much as we long for this or that specific thing or person? Do we say, for example, that if only this girl or this guy or this job or this car or this house could be ours, we would then be happy? Do you not see that if we say these things and believe them we deceive ourselves, for surely we can see that the deeper longing is the happiness we suppose this person or thing will bring and that the latter is simply the means we imagine will lead to the former? Do we long for knowledge as I do? That is not a bad thing, you know. But if I aim only at knowledge, I will soon lose sight of heaven and earth alike. If, however, in child-like faith I reach out and link my hand in God’s, He will soon show me the sun, moon, stars, and all the other wonders of His vast galaxies; I will have Godly contentment and the good thing called knowledge too. Ne’er was there a finer match made in heaven.
God bless,
Eric
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