Alone, Yet Not Alone
There is a strong vein of hostility against orthodox religious believers
in America today, especially among the young. When secular or mostly secular
people are asked by researchers to give their impression of the devoutly
faithful, whether Jewish, Christian or other, the words that come up commonly
include “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” “old-fashioned” and “out of touch.”
It’s not surprising. There is a yawning gap between the way many
believers experience faith and the way that faith is presented to the world.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua
Heschel described one experience of faith in his book “God in Search of Man”:
“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement...get up in the morning
and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is
phenomenal. ...To be spiritual is to be amazed.”
And yet Heschel understood that the faith expressed by many, even many
who are inwardly conflicted, is often dull, oppressive and insipid — a
religiosity in which “faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by
discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the
splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living
fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with
the voice of compassion.”
There must be
something legalistic in the human makeup, because cold, rigid, unambiguous,
unparadoxical belief is common, especially considering how fervently the
Scriptures oppose it.
And yet there is a silent majority who experience a faith that is
attractively marked by combinations of fervor and doubt, clarity and confusion,
empathy and moral demand.
For example, Audrey Assad is a Catholic songwriter with a crystalline
voice and a sober intensity to her stage presence. (You can see her perform her
song “I Shall Not Want” on YouTube.) She writes
the sort of emotionally drenched music that helps people who are in crisis. A
surprising number of women tell her they listened to her music while in labor.
She had an idyllic childhood in a Protestant sect prone to
black-or-white dichotomies. But when she was in her 20s, life’s tragedies and
complexities inevitably mounted, and she experienced a gradual erosion of
certainty.
She began reading her way through the books on the Barnes & Noble
Great Books shelf, trying to cover the ones she missed by not going to college.
She loved George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” and was taken by Tolstoy. “He didn’t
have an easy time encountering himself,” she says, sympathetically. “I was
reading my way from darkness into paradox.”
She also began reading theology. She’d never read anything written
before 1835. She went back to Augustine (whose phrases show up in her lyrics)
and the early church fathers. Denominationally, she went backward in time. She
became Baptist, then Presbyterian, then Catholic: “I was ready to be an
atheist. I was going to be a Catholic or an atheist. “
She came to feel the legacy of millions of people who had struggled with
the same feelings for thousands of years. “I still have routine brushes with
agnosticism,” she says. “I still brush against the feeling that I don’t believe
any of this, but the church always brings me back. ...I don’t think Jesus wants
to brush away the paradoxes and mysteries.”
Her lyrics dwell in the parts of Christianity she doesn’t understand. “I
don’t want people to think I’ve had an easy time.” She still fights the
tendency to go to extremes. “If I’d have been an atheist I’d have been the most
obnoxious, Dawkins-loving atheist. I wouldn’t have been like Christopher
Hitchens.”
Her life, like all lives, is unexpected, complex and unique. Her music
provides a clearer outward display of how many inwardly experience God.
If you are a secular
person curious about how believers experience their faith, you might start with
Augustine’s famous passage “What do I love when I love my God,” and especially
the way his experience is in the world but then mysteriously surpasses the
world:
“It is not physical beauty nor temporal glory nor the brightness of
light dear to earthly eyes, nor the sweet melodies of all kinds of songs, nor
the gentle odor of flowers, and ointments and perfumes, nor manna or honey, nor
limbs welcoming the embraces of the flesh; it is not these I love when I love
my God. Yet there is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I
love my God — a light, voice, odor, food, embrace of my innerness, where my
soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that
time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where
there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a
bond of union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my
God.”
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