Important caveat: ideas and musings here are entirely my own. Feel free to disagree... Nolan was asking about post-modernity, here is my riffing on one part of the answer from my POV...I'll explain more as I riff on things.
Inspired by a meaningless work trip three months or so ago: If you ever get a chance to do a one day round trip business meeting in Denver, pass.
Exhausted from a wake-up time at what my brother colorfully would describe as "The Amish Ass-Crack of Dawn," this was then followed by crowds, lines, a turbulent crowded flight, a 2 hour meeting, and then I swiveled around to face West and do the whole morning travel ritual in reverse.
So, I'm slouched over in the back seat of a cab on the way to Denver International, thinking how although in another setting this would be gorgeous terrain zooming by, today it is just too big and bright. The sun is too close and it all just hurts.
I read a lot, so I've got my latest book, and I can read in cars and planes and not get sick, so that's what I figure is the best option. Just leave me alone, world. But the cab driver wants to talk. He asks where I work, what I'm doing in town, etc…When he hears that at the time I worked for Sony Pictures, he tells me that he has a script he's working on. Now, I know that pitching me a movie – I worked for the Internet group of a studio – would get you as close to getting a project "green lighted" as pitching it to the guy that paints the movie posters on the side of the studio walls. But I humor him, and decide that just listening is the path of least resistance to get me back to my book.
"I've got this idea, it's like "Taxi Cab Confessions, but not all sexed up. It could be a movie; it could be a cable show." Sony doesn't own a cable network, but I keep quiet, following the whole "getting back to my book strategy." And then he tells me about him driving a cab for like 15 years, and how many amazing people and seemingly authentic confessions people will tell him. "It's like being a bartender or priest, "he says. Then he goes into a number of stories, some disturbing, some amusing.
Then the last one my ride had time for was what he called " The Crying Fundamentalist Story." It was about a hysterically tearful older Christian woman, who had just gotten in the cab after sleeping with someone she was not nor likely would ever be married with. She told him that she was a very strictly conservative Christian woman, and had been married for dozens of years, since early teens. She made a point to say she'd always been sexually faithful to her husband, who had died a year earlier. After a year of grief, she'd only just begun "dating" again, something she never really ever did much of before. And she'd and spent the night with her date and now she was heading home the next morning, hating herself, sure that God must now hate her too. Confessing her sin to the stranger driving her back to her empty house.
"Now, I am NOT a religious person," the Cab driver said to me, "But I did have some Sunday school stuff when I was a kid, and I told her this: 'Look, allegedly God is a God who is about love. And allegedly, he forgives people who know they did wrong and are sorry about it, and Lady, you are clearly sorry about it. If that God stuff is true, I think He'll give you a pass on this one." He said that after she heard this, she stopped sobbing, calmed down, and by the time he dropped her off, she even managed a mild smile as she said goodbye and thanks.
I thought about it for a moment, and told him. "You did good. You'd make a good priest."
The pause in my reaction is that I was initially put off by all the "qualifiers" and "if-then" statements and the number of times "allegedly" was used in his benediction. See for me, growing up as a Christian I was taught either explicitly or implicitly the following:
True Faith = "100% Certainty and being Absolutely Sure Of"
Questioning ="Second Thoughts" "Shakiness" "Betrayal of the Truth"
Doubts = "Weakness, the beginning of 'backsliding.'"
Faith isn't supposed to be "IFFY" Faith isn't supposed to be about "ALLEDGEDLY." I was taught this, and believed that 100% at the time.
After all, it seemed that Scripture made it clear that: "Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see" (Hebrews 11:1 NIV) And did James counsel us to " believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind…he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does." (James 1:6-7 NIV)
This seemed to me then to sum up what God wanted from us in the faith department. Pretty straight forward, right? After all, folks like Paul and John the Baptist, and Jesus weren't IFFY about their faith were they?
The answer in my late teens through to my early twenties was clearly NO. But as I got to know the Bible a bit better, I started to see some evidence that this wasn't so. That like all of us the faith of Paul and John the Baptizer, and even the faith of Jesus was in fact IFFY at times. They had second thoughts. They thought through "what if" I'm wrong. Even the Best examples of faith were for lack of a better word, uncertain at times.
I began to suspect that uncertainty isn't the defect in faith I used to think it was. In fact, uncertainty increasingly began to look like a non-optional and even valuable component of faith itself. It struck me then that relative certainty, and thus relative uncertainty, this odd mix may be not just where we all live, but how Jesus seemed to expect us to live. At least on this side of heaven.
It became clear that that my faith in what faith itself was needed a personal redefinition. Early on as a Christian, I would deal with any tension or question of my faith, by in essence faking certainty, manufacturing it, out of thin air if need be. It was what Theologian Reinhold Neibuhr called a "Frantic Orthodoxy," which "is never rooted in faith, but in doubt. It is when we are unsure, that we are doubly sure."
Instead of faking certainty (which wasn't working so well anyway) I began to start re-looking at what the Bible says about faith soberly and with fresh eyes. And this three part essay is is me describing where I've come to so far... Including that Hebrews 11 may mean almost the opposite of what we usually think and that Scripturally (as Anne Lamott points out) doubt is not in fact the opposite of faith, that certainty is. More soon...
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