You gotta have faith . . .if you know what I mean

I've been thinking lately about faith. Maybe we could call it "cheap faith." Sorry Dietrich. ***

You can't swing a live cat without hitting a preacher, book, magazine article, blogpost, podcast, song, t-shirt, bumper sticker, tatoo or coffee mug making some statement about faith. Faith is hot.

But what is faith?

I am not sure. Rick always quotes Hebrews when we talk about faith, "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen." I love the words, but I still am not sure what they mean. Like Bonhoeffer, these are words that are good to chew on for awhile.

Trust, belief, reliance. Many words come to mind. But I don't think I'm up to defining faith tonight. I would like to just make a couple of observations about stuff I am learning these days.

More than one friend has recently hoped i would find peace during my "dark night of the soul." ("La noche oscura del alma") which it must appear I am going through. (I think it is more like a dusk of the soul) One of my favorite preachers uses a similar phrase with a southern twist, "darker than midnight in a cypress swamp." The dark night of the soul is a mystic notion most famously defined by Saint John of the Cross, a Spanish monk and poet, based on some earlier thoughts of Aristotle and others. The dark night of the soul is a period of emotional and spiritual isolation and seeming despair which inflicts a normally spiritual person. Saint John believed the despair and feeling of isolation arose from the reduction of one's ego to the point that God could first reveal those things that need to be changed, and then change them. The vulnerability that results creates fear and the appearance of faithlessness. Praying becomes difficult, spiritual disciplines become empty. Faith is exercised by going through the motions of spiritual discipline, without the good feelings that are associated with them. The upside to the notion is that the night does come to an end, although some, perhaps like that of Mother Teresa, last thirty or forty years. I don't really think I am in the dark night of the soul. I think I am just a bit whiny. But it has made me think.

Faith is not created by accumulating enough evidence to attain a reasonable degree of certainty. It is not about discovering the truth through study, as important as that may be. It is not about the warm, wonderful palpable presence of the spirit that comes while we are in fellowship with one another.

Faith is what happens, what allows us to act, when there is no certainty, when there is no obvious truth, when there is no warm feeling to rely upon. Faith is that decision made, that action taken, not based upon evidence, but rather in the presence of no evidence at all, or at times, in the presence of what appears to be evidence to the contrary.

Faith is my choice. An abundance of certainty and evidence requires little faith. Faith necessarily increases with the scarcity of evidence and certainty.

Faith is not in the thing to be done, the correctness of the choice to be made, or the consequences of either. Faith is in the one who requests obedience.

I am so thankful that God expresses His love and grace abundantly and diversely. This love and grace helps us to know God better, whether it comes through study, worship, prayer, service or fellowship. Through these expressions of love and countless more, we learn about God.

But strangely I am also becoming thankful for those times when God loves me enough to let me think I am alone with only my faith.

That's when I learn about me.


***.I have sat at many a table and discussed Dietrich Bonhoeffer's notion of "cheap grace," which is described in his "Cost of Discipleship." It's a good book to have on the table by the bed or sofa because it is slowly digested and must be read deliberately and more than once. I am not writing about it tonight, but since I brought it up you can get a taste of it on many websites, like this one: http://www.crossroad.to/Persecution/Bonhoffer.html Go ahead and get the book. It is a classic.