2022-12-28 A Meditation on Courting Faith

“The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the Lord, over many waters. The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty. The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars; the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon. He makes Lebanon to skip like a calf, and Sirion like a young wild ox. The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire. The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness; the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. The voice of the Lord makes the deer give birth and strips the forests bare, and in his temple all cry, “Glory!”” (Ps 29:3–9 ESV)

Realizing at day’s end that what we have is our faith, and nothing more, we court our faith and speak kindly to our faith. We allow it to see us as we are, and to be our reassurance. We allow our passion to treat reverently and with great gusto simply those tenets that do reassure our souls.

For, it is a sufficient creed. It becomes living and tangible if we so accept the idea that it is already those things. When we accept that our faith is living, it then starts to live, with the by-product of living towards our well-being. We are well when faith is internalized, accepted for what it is: an idea that gestates and overflows, working its way into crack and crevice of the human heart, and reassuring us this day that it is legit, that it was good that we inquired as to its legitimacy, because God was eager there to meet us.

Yet we are sticklers, “I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would have me as a member!”. We only want our faith if it is couched in a better man or woman than ourselves. But if it is thus couched, then how can we say it applies to meager us? So we have a first conundrum, a paradox, of this religious endeavor.

Jesus shows us how all life is made over through gift and bequest, not through our own mild efforts alone. It is entirely plausible—once we’ve met Jesus—to believe that a better woman or man nonetheless loves us. Because we’ve seen that in basic friendship. We’ve known the horizon shared with a friend, where what we do with the afternoon is simply echoes and calls in a cavernous place arid and dry except where we friendly souls abide. Where we abide there is a companionship difficult to put on paper, because it is sincere and total. It is the friendship where we’ve made a pact to stick together. It is the friendship where we’ve dismissed parent and teacher, authority and sibling. Yes, at times, we are so cynically-minded. But it is also part of that great dynamic wherein older siblings and parents, teachers and authority, do encourage us to cultivate that friendship, even at their own expense. They are wiser than to be put off by our hiding out. They are eager to see us companioned and uplifted.

So friendship teaches us something that souls without such experience simply gape at. They gape, unable to reconcile their differences with us. They hold at arm’s length, unable to imagine a future where we’ve been a blessing together. We bless them, but they hide, not wishing the blessings of a sinner. We go about our business, go our merry way, and they gape and line up the accusations for such an hour as when we forget our own prodigal nature. So it is a plea to put down the arms and to accept what is different from us, yet in fact is a lot like us in the need to be forgiven. It is a vast excitement of coming to know someone so different from us. Yes, this encounter we pray for, knowing that the devil is wildly at work trying to dismantle such connection, fingertip touching fingertip, plausible enmities no longer given ground, a Vision that seemed legit, seemed attainable, until we learned just what and where war comes in its time. So we give thanks for the wide playgrounds and experiential living, yet also see the tears and the lonesomeness of such a time, if we are honest. There was always something fought over.