At lunch with lifelong friends, talk turned to the church which accepted my hesitant application for membership 10 years ago. They’re mildly puzzled. What about all the terrible things that God allows to happen? Look at all that has been done or not done by those who claim to follow Jesus Christ. The God in whom I have placed my faith is not easy to explain, and I kicked myself all the way home for not even trying. Idling at a stop light, perhaps the path was opened before me. The French call it la pensée de l’escalier—the rejoinder that comes too late as you head down the stairs after a party.
So here’s what I hope I’ll say next time.
Some say they were born again—end of argument. You don’t hear that often in mainline churches such as mine. Most of us enter hungry for nourishment of the spirit, in search of, well, something more.
My Oxford Canadian Dictionary defines faith as “firm belief, esp. without logical proof…spiritual apprehension of divine truth apart from proof.” A friend, The Reverend Steve Filyk of Kerrisdale Presbyterian in Vancouver, is inclined to see faith as what you lean into, count on, what you place your bets on. “From this angle,” he adds, “everyone has faith in something. Some people just have smaller gods than others.”
Two kinds of bad things happen. Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods and drought strike a universe filled with the violence of exploding stars and crushing meteors. Children are stricken with incurable disease and cancer sows tragedy in families. The ancients saw a vengeful God. Science has patiently discovered much about the unchanging laws that rule the universe from subatomic particles to the limits of the Hubble telescope. Those laws also explain seeds bursting into flowers, medicine that cures disease, the awesome spectacle of the night sky, and the miracle of the life God permits us to think we create.
For all the scientists who claim to be atheists, there is probably an equal number who have found their faith enriched by the beauty and harmony of the human genome and the dance of distant galaxies. Science has, to say the least, cast many Biblical anecdotes into question. So the universe was not created in six days, but ancient myth and poetry trump facts any day.
Then there are the sins we commit against ourselves, from Hitler and the Holocaust through ethnic cleansing and apartheid to the criminals who scar friends and families. These are the gruesome sins of man, the sickness of mind and spirit that lead the news headlines.
There’s another, less told, side to the story. Beyond the high profiles of Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa and Jean Vanier, millions quietly seek to nourish the peace and grace of God. Witness CBC journalist Brian Stewart: “I’ve never reached a war zone, famine or crisis anywhere where some church organization was not there long before me.”
Buoyed by faith that a loving, forgiving and ever-patient God actually exists, we are encouraged by little miracles that happen every day if we want to see them. A gesture of friendship, an encouraging word, a tulip in springtime, a talented teacher, a child’s laughter, a stranger’s smile.
If there is a sort of secret handshake that binds people of the church, it is the confidence that those little miracles are signs of God’s loving presence, His very existence. It is probably why there is so much laughter in church meetings and hallways. It is confirmation that our faith is not misplaced, and it has, I think, led me to become a better person.
I suspect that God is far from finished with me, and if you’d like to share a work in progress, I’d welcome you to join me at church any Sunday morning.
