Journeys of Faith

The Christian apologists I depend on the most are Spong and Lewis (C.S., not T.W., although T.W. is way up there). There are oceans between their perspectives, but I believe Christology is that deep and varied if you give it a chance.

The question every Christian must answer is "do you believe?" and I never know how to answer that. I do not have child-like faith, but I didn't have it as a child, either. I was, and am, a very nervous and frightened child. That makes it very difficult to have a complete and blinding faith in anything or anyone.

There was a time when I chose to disavow all childhood instruction and memes and tribal fielty with regards to Christianity and start over, to rebuild my faith on my own terms as an adult. Begining from a position of no belief, I rebuilt the foundations of my faith, brick by brick to discover what I really felt and what I could really present as my own life.

In my journey to rebuild my faith, I included two atheists, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins. I didn't think I could make an honest conclusion without considering all sides of the issue, and for people without faith, these two are among the best. 

Dawkins' ideas about memes actually provided me the building blocks of my new faith. Combining Dawkin's theories about memes with Jung's theories about archetypes allowed me to hypothesize that maybe this is the language by which the divine communicates with us, and that's why these memes and archetypes repeat themselves in nearly every culture. It's a way to deliver these gigantic ideas to us in smaller, digestible pieces.

Faith is a journey, not a destination, and it's a journey we make every moment of our entire lives; even if we tell ourselves our minds and our hearts are settled on the subject, they never really are. Lewis is somebody you might think had a settled and firm faith, but if you read A Grief Observed, written after the death of his wife, Joy, you'll see that even Lewis had an evolving and changing faith and faced days when the well seemed dry and unrecoverable.

I start essays like this thinking by the end, I'll come up with some sort of constructed and complete point, but on this particular subject, I never do. Maybe there is no focused point in faith. Maybe there's not meant to be. Maybe we're not able to complete this mind journey while we're alive. Maybe that was the point all along.