Last weekend I spent some time at Belong London, a conference held by a group called The Liturgists. The purpose of the conference was to provide “… a safe place to have honest discussions about doubts, hopes, fears, and faith.” I went to the conference because, like a lot of people there, I’ve recently been having doubts and questions about who or what God is and how that relates to my life. Growing up in the church I thought I understood who God was, who I was in relation to God and what that meant for my life. But in the last year or so, that understanding has been totally deconstructed. Almost everything I thought I knew about God, the Bible, and issues such as sin, grace, free will, and sexuality has totally crumbled. It’s like the carpet has been pulled from under my feet and I’ve landed head first onto the ground. My world doesn’t feel the same any more, it’s like I’ve gone from seeing in black and white to full colour, and I can’t ever go back. It’s been painful and confusing and has given me a whole lot of questions, and these questions lead me to Belong, a place where I learnt I wasn’t on my own.
The reason I’m writing this post, which will probably be the first of a few, is because I’ve realised that what happened to me isn’t unique. From chatting to friends, colleagues and others at Belong, I’ve realised that I’m not alone in feeling the way I did, the questions I had were similar to a lot of other’s and I’ve realised that talking about these things helps. Talking helps us to know that we’re not on our own, that it’s OK to doubt and have questions and that there is hope on the other side. I recognise that writing about my experiences may offend some people, from the outset I want to say that this isn’t written from a place of trying to diminish anybody else’s religious or spiritual experiences, theology or ministry. I value every step of my journey, and every person that has helped me to become the person I am today. Whilst I may not agree with some of the theologies or positions that I believed in the past, please recognise that this is my story and my experiences, and just because I don’t agree with you, doesn’t mean I don’t value the experience I had.
As I mentioned before, recently my faith has been going through a total deconstruction from what I believed a couple of years ago. In the midst of my doubts and questions, the ideas and preconceptions I had about God as I grew up have been deeply challenged and pulled apart as I’ve struggled to make sense of things. As I started to question things I realised just how much stuff I’d just believed without question. This lead me to question everything and filled me with doubts about almost all I had been brought up to believe. But as I searched for answers, as I struggled to piece together my faith after the foundations apparently crumbled at my feet and I fell into a pit of doubt, I found God at the bottom. I discovered that faith wasn’t about the absence of doubts and questions but about continuing on in spite of them. I discovered that the beauty of God and the Christian faith isn’t in complex doctrines or sophisticated apologetic answers to my questions.
It’s in the mystery.
It’s in the mystery of love and sacrifice and death and resurrection.
So often we look for certainty in this world, we want facts and answers and black and white. But in reality the world is full of colour. We look to science for understanding of the world around us, but any physicist will tell you that our understanding of the universe is extremely limited. There are so many things we don’t understand, so much that we still have left to learn. The world is full of mystery.
The Bible was written thousands of years ago, when humanity had a much simpler understanding of the universe. The ways in which it describes God are ways which would have made sense at the time, and helped to paint a picture in people’s imaginations as to who or what the mystery of God is. So much of what it says is poetry or metaphor, the authors of the Bible use familiar words and concepts to explain the indescribable nature of God. Of course we’ve now moved on in many ways from the understandings of that time, so some of the ways they described God then, don’t particularly work for us very well now. In order for us to talk about God today in our culture, we need to understand what the world was like in their culture, and why they talked about God in that way. Once we know that, we can apply the message to our own situations and understand what God should mean to us now.
A lot of the time God is thought of as something external to this universe. Often people describe God as being up in the sky (sitting on a cloud playing a harp), and this is because in ancient times that was the way they understood the universe. They had what people now call a “three tiered model of the universe”. Before we had aeroplanes, satellites and Google Maps, humans thought that the world was flat, above the earth were the heavens and below the earth was the depths, the place they associated with death and the grave. When the authors of the Bible were writing about their experiences of God, they came from this understanding of the universe. We hear about God coming down to earth in the book of Genesis, we hear about Elijah going up to heaven and when the Bible mentions hell it talks about a place below earth. This is important to us because it helps us to understand where they were coming from, why they wrote what they wrote, and what that can tell us about God. Nowadays we have a totally different understanding of the universe. We no longer believe the earth is flat, and we’ve been to space and found no sign of heaven or God.
Talking about God as something external to our universe creates a number of questions. If God is somewhere else, is it possible for the universe to run on it’s own? Why does God seemingly intervene at some points, like when somebody needs a parking space, but let other things like the holocaust or the recent terror attacks in Paris happen? Why would God let so many wars be fought in the name of religion? I don’t think I could believe in that kind of God, especially as many people agree that God is a force of love.
In the book of Genesis, there’s a story about a man who had a dream. The man I’m talking about is not Joseph with his Technicolour Dreamcoat, but Joseph’s dad, Jacob. Jacob has a dream about a ladder reaching up to the heavens (think back to the three tiered model of the universe again), he sees God at the top of the ladder and hears a message from God.
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“I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”
“Behold, I am with you…”
Here, God is speaking to Jacob, and the readers of the text using the worldview they understood, but is delivering an important message into that. God was not external to their universe, God was with them, and God is with us.
When Jacob wakes up from his dream he says, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” (Genesis 28:16, ESV). In that moment, Jacob became aware that God was present with him. So often I find myself missing out on things because I’m not paying attention. I’ll be sitting on the bus, lost in my phone or a book, and not realise that one of my friends has got on the same bus and sat near me. It’s only when I look up and notice them (usually when I’m about to get off the bus) that I realise they were with me the whole time. I think that the same can be true with God, God who is with us, where ever we go, we just need to pay attention.
Paul Tillich describes God as “… the ground of our being…”, God is the source of all things, that which holds the universe together. The writer of the book of Colossians wrote about Jesus:
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“We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen. We look at this Son and see God’s original purpose in everything created. For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels—everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him. He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment.”
As I said at the start, going through this process of deconstruction has been one of the hardest things I’ve been through. I’ve had doubts, have questioned everything, and had to let go of a lot of ideas I once had about God. But I’m so glad that I’ve been through it, because I’ve developed faith in a God who I believe is for me, who I believe is with me and who I believe holds the entire universe together. I know I don’t have all the answers, and if I’m honest, I never will. But I’ve discovered a simple faith, and I’ve learnt to appreciate the beauty that’s only found in the mystery.
Related Reading
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Seeing things differently, you might like a book by Padraig O Tuama, . He is a leader of the corrymeela community in N Ireland. Its his book of struggling to understand God in the midst of coming to understand his own sexuality, the world and the church. A Good book.
In the shelter.
Thanks! Will check it out!