Monday: predawn ramble
Now and then I copy and paste one of Richard Rohr's daily meditations as especially bullseye for me. This one was and is.
Fr Rohr's daily CAC column is free and automatic into morning email, and, like the tentative post-worship comment to the preacher on his sermon, "you gave us something to think about", has been helpful and encouraging to me over the years, his Franciscan theology and world view either affirming me outright or at least giving me something to think about.
Not so in elementary school or university, nor in life forever after, but in high school I was sort of a math nerd with what we had, which I thought was pretty sophisticated but wasn't, and've enjoyed applying it now and then. For example, Plane Geometry exercises that hurrication year when the scaffolding was up and many HV residents were seeing the forest and complaining while I was seeing the trees and enjoying the triangles, parallelograms and trapezoids. Currently, a little Algebra One for my faith formula that fits with Fr Rohr's meditation about doubt below - -
F = C + D
Faith = Certainty + Doubt
just so,
F - D = C
or
Faith without Doubt is BS.
1 Corinthians 13:11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. Just so, when I was a child, our Nicene Creed began
I believe in one God,
the Father Almighty, ... and so on,
and it was fine with me when I was a child (and it's still an option in Holy Eucharist Rite One for anyone who is stuck there), but during the liturgical reform about the Time I turned forty years old, the church revised the Nicene Creed such that, instead of putting me as an individual on the spot every Sunday morning, it was an assertion of the Christian community's historic faith (Hebrews 11:1, faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen), and I can say it with integrity, although starting with one of the gender police's new PC personal pronouns might be even better.
Anyway, Fr Richard's meditation commending Doubt:
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
From the Center for Action and Contemplation
Week Twenty-Two: An Evolving Faith
An Evolving Faith Includes Doubt
In my mind, one of the markers of an evolving faith is an ability to integrate doubt—to hold the tension between what we’ve been taught and what we’ve come to know as true. When grounded in an experience of Love, doubt does not represent a step backwards, but is a necessary condition for any movement forward. CAC teacher Brian McLaren speaks of his personal journey with doubt as the essential ingredient in the evolution of his faith from “orthodoxy” or right belief to “orthopraxy” or right way of life.
Before doubt, I thought that faith was a matter of correct beliefs. My religious teachers taught me so: that if I didn’t hold the right beliefs, or at least say that I held them, I would be excommunicated from my community, and perhaps, after death, from God’s presence. They taught me this not to be cruel but because they themselves had been taught the same thing, and they were working hard, sometimes desperately, to be faithful to the rules as they understood them. I tried to do the same, and I would still be doing so today if not for doubt.
Doubt chipped away at those beliefs, one agonizing blow at a time, revealing that what actually mattered wasn’t the point of beliefs but the clear window of faith, faith as a life orientation, faith as a framework of values and spirituality, faith as a commitment to live into a deep vision of what life can be, faith as a way of life, faith expressing itself in love.
For all those years, when I said, “I believe,” I thought I understood what I was doing. But more was going on, so much more. . . .
Looking back, I now see that underneath arguments about what I believed to be true factually, something deeper and truer was happening actually.
For example, whether or not the creation story happened factually as described in Genesis, I was committing myself to live in the world as if it actually were a precious, beautiful, meaningful creation, and as if I were too. . . .
What mattered most was not that I believed the stories in a factual sense, but that I believed in the meaning they carried so I could act upon that meaning and embody it in my life, to let that meaning breathe in me, animate me, fill me. . . . Whether I considered the stories factually accurate was never the point; what actually mattered all along was whether I lived a life pregnant with the meaning those stories contained. To my surprise, when I was given permission to doubt the factuality of my beliefs, I discovered their actual life-giving purpose. . . .
Doubt need not be the death of faith. It can be, instead, the birth of a new kind of faith, a faith beyond beliefs, a faith that expresses itself in love, a deepening and expanding faith that can save your life and save the world.
Brian D. McLaren, Faith after Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do about It (St. Martins: 2021), 206, 207, 212.
Image credit: Chaokun Wang, bamboo 天竹子 (detail), 2015, photograph, Wikiart.
Image inspiration: The capacity of bamboo to grow mirrors our own potential for inner unfolding. As long as there is life, there is evolution. As long as we have breath, our faith can continue to grow.