The most probable explanation...

I've been reading and re-reading C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity" lately. I'd attempted to read it as a teenager a couple of times but found it just a little over my head at the time. It was recently given to me by friends, or should I say "prescribed"? Thanks friends! It has definitely provided some relief and keen insights for some of the puzzling things I've thought and felt during the past several months.

So, in the order of mammals, humans are very different in that we contemplate things. We are often found pondering why things unfold they way they do? What happens when we die? What's the purpose for humanity? Is there a purpose to faith? Or is it a self-imposed trick for helping us deal with life with some level of joy and sanity? Sure, I'm guilty of way too much contemplation a lot of times. It often feels like I'm just spinning my wheels and at that point I just try and go out for some fresh air and conversation, or find another safe distraction that lets me escape the questions that seem to generate fear and hopelessness at the lack of clear cut answers. You know like listening to music, soldering wires, cleaning the house, playing guitar, obsessing over my pedalboard configuration, etc... Over the past couple of years I've identified at many times with the Agnostic perspective. I don't find it to be absurd at all to think that we cannot ever prove the existence of God. Sure the next logical step, a.k.a. "pat answer" is to say that it all comes down to faith. True. But what is faith? It is believing as though something is real when it isn't yet. I have to be honest. That sounds very similar to being "delusional". But when I read what C.S. Lewis said in his chapter on Hope I became encouraged and my skepticism softened.

He writes that Christianity asserts, "Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find until after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of my life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same. There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of 'Heaven' ridiculous by saying they do not want 'to spend eternity playing harps'. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books that are written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them."

Just when I thought my proverbial ladder had no more rungs to climb, I just found a whole new set. After reading this I breathed a sigh of relief. I'm still hanging on for dear life mind you, and the stakes are high. I'm just glad to have found some solid thoughts that point to hope.

Thanks Mr. Lewis!

Faith comes by hearing...

So it's been a little while since my last post. I'd really hoped that my next post would be more hopeful and optimistic. Maybe that'll be true by the time this post is over? I guess that could be one of the benefits of blogging huh? Hmmm?

It's actually been an even tougher few weeks for me than before my last post. My skepticism has turned into cynicism and my thoughts, once again became jaded, ugly and hopeless. Out of sheer desperation and with some flippancy I recently listened to an audio talk by one of my favorite songwriter/musicians Michael Gungor. After reading a comment or two that he had made on his facebook page I decided to swallow my pride and pick his brain with a private facebook message. He had referred to himself as a "chronic doubter" and that piqued my interest. So I did the geeky "fan thing" and messaged him, I'm glad I did. I'd read a few of his blog posts over the past few years and that, along with his songwriting, indicated to me that he had some life experiences that I'd love to hear about if it were possible. They seemed familiar and apparently our struggles were similar. I was quite surprised when he actually responded to my message with far greater "depth" than I'd expected. We wound up exchanging a few messages back and forth and found that though I'm a few years older than he, we had SO MUCH in common. Especially with some of the things that we struggled with growing up. We both knew too well the casualties and collateral damage of growing up as a pastor's kid, damage to us, our families, and those who followed the leadership of our pastor/fathers. When our dad's respectively "stumbled" it had quite a ripple effect on everyone on the aforementioned list. ANYways, those kind of events have a tendency to shake your faith a little (sarcasm). In the present, I can see how those events are responsible, at least in some way for this struggle I've been in recently, even though nearly 12 years has passed since those events. Michael shared some encouraging thoughts concerning struggling with faith and some gentle reminders of how he has nurtured his own many times. Oh the irony and profound simplicity of the scripture, "faith comes by hearing...". It was something I really needed to... um... hear. The things I did NOT need to hear were the "christian cliché's" that are offered every time a doubter is rebuked for having questions. The things I NEEDED to hear were honest descriptions of struggling by men and women of faith. So, I've begun to change the "diet" of things that I spend time reading and listening to. I'm the first to admit that I get more from "hearing" than reading, but the two are closely linked. Whether it was an audio "talk", a sermon, a profound lyric from a song, or something I'd read in some form, I had begun to recognize my hunger for something, someone, or some personal experience to re-inform my faith and make me re-examine my beliefs.

As a musician, I had somehow forgotten the amount of strength and encouragement I could receive from a musical experience. Hearing people struggle through their questioning and lack of faith is not something that I'd spent time a lot of time taking in whether from a book, song or even visually. Not in the past few years. Quite the opposite. Music is a language that in the past had spoken volumes to me but only in a "positive" way. Somehow I'd grown sort of calloused to it's effectiveness at informing and communicating ideas. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying I needed my emotions to be elevated or fooled into a certain way of thinking so that I could "feel" better. Not at all. I needed to experience something first hand, a tangible something that forced me to re-evaluate my beliefs. Some good old honest struggling that is often void from modern Christianity. Something I've talked many times with my buddy Frank about what he describes as "making two piles of beliefs, those that we no longer believe and another pile of whatever is left that we DO believe." The first pile is getting larger and the second slowly is dwindling. I'm encouraged by that somehow. It's not getting easier at all but I feel like at least now I've got access to a helpful tool or exercise to get me to a better place.

My wife and I recently spent half a day in Charleston, SC... without our kids as they were spending a few days with family up in NC. After spending the day driving and then walking around the downtown area (sweating like crazy in the blistering heat) we ended the night by attending a concert by another favorite songwriter/musician named John Mark McMillan. Let's just say it was a much needed experience that I consider an answer to the order I consistently placed with my pitiful little prayers over the past few months. I was simply overwhelmed by the beauty, awe and sheer power that we can sometimes see and experience in God's presence. That experience has been a much needed source of hope and re-informing. I'll re-cap that evening in another blog sometime soon. Still processing that night...

Faith & Doubt. (Or is it "difficulty"?)

My whole life I've been told that to have faith you have to get rid of all doubt. The two cannot co-exist, it's one or the other. I've believed that wholeheartedly until a few months ago.

I've been in a bit of a reading phase over the past several weeks, mainly fueled by a individual crisis of sorts, okay, of faith. I've been experiencing more doubt than ever about all these things I've believed for most of my adult life, the truth about God, Jesus, Creation, Christianity, my own experiences, those who claim to follow Jesus, what happens when we die, etc... It's been very tough and to be honest simply depressing. At the same time it's been comforting to discover that many, if not all of the influential men and women of the Faith throughout history (even the non famous ones) have consistently battled with their own doubts about these things as well. St. Augustine, St. John of the Cross, Thomas Acquinas, Martin Luther, C.S. Lewis, Mother Theresa, the list goes on... Fyodor Dostoevsky, a Russian novelist (I'm told) said, "Sometimes the greatest act of faith is in the doubting." In my own recent experiences I've still felt moments that I would clearly describe as severe doubt. On the other hand I am also starting to understand what the Russian fella means,... I think? The fact that I'm "doubting" is causing me to really dig deep and put to test those things that I've taken for granted and just believed in some ways on "borrowed faith" of those I've looked up to. I, like many people in the community of American church-goers have done, am guilty of just taking my pastor's word for it without ever wrestling with the ideas being presented for myself, at least not wrestling enough. It's one thing to arrive at your perspective with an informed and somewhat educated understanding of the idea, it's another to just take the information as truth and broker the information without ever having researched it or sought it out for yourself. In other words I found myself not having ownership of what I thought was my own faith in God and the previously mentioned list of concerns is having to be either re-discovered, altered, or dropped altogether.

It definitely feels like the "switch" in my brain that controls the flow of faith has just been turned off. It's been difficult to say the least. More recently I've started shifting from labeling my thoughts and feelings as "doubts" and leaning towards "difficulties". I think this is a positive step back towards a slow resurgence of something that resembles the faith that I used to have. The longing to return to some solid ground is definitely there and the more I think about all of this the more I want to believe it has to be God that has put me in this season, that somehow I'll get out of this one day and "own" my faith.

I spoke candidly with a trusted friend a few weeks ago and an analogy just popped into my head, (as they often do, but often I'm the only one that "gets it" because they are weird and subjective, anyways...) this one actually made sense. If my faith was a mountain that I had ascended to the very top throughout the course of my 32 year existence, I've found myself suddenly at the very bottom with no explanation how I got there, wanting to return and discouraged that I may never get back to the top. The challenge is I'm forcing myself (or is God?) to climb it all over again, this time finding a totally different path that takes me up the opposite side, one that is not clear or illuminated by the fellow climbers of my youth and their flashlights, one that is dark and full of shadows and difficulty and my map is now horribly out of date. It sounds miserable huh? It is.

On a brighter note, a few weeks ago a close friend gave me a "word" (message from God). As usual I began processing it with much skepticism, but this one was different. One of the very few times in my life where someone has delivered a specific and accurate message to me that just skewered me to my chair. In a nutshell, it was a confirmation of this "mountain analogy" that I had been holding on to. I was going to eventually emerge from this difficult season and my Faith would never be the same, it would be stronger and better suited for what lies ahead for the rest of my life. Interesting...

John Henry Newman says this, "I am far of course from denying that every article of the Christian Creed, whether as held by Catholics or by Protestants, is beset with intellectual difficulties... However, ten thousand difficulties do not equal one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate". So more accurately, my "doubts" are being slowly recognized and better categorized as "difficulties". At the same time I'm realizing that the "pilot light of my faith" has apparently never gone out after all. Whew!... Then maybe, just maybe I'll have a consistent fire going again soon.

So I have a blog now...

Yeah, so I have a blog now... I'm not totally sure what I'll do with it to be honest. It'll probably be many different things, at different times, and at a very slow pace so... lower your expectations. Every now and then, if there's something worth sharing, then I might bring it to people's attention. For the most part this will help me organize some of my thoughts, at least the ones I feel are worth sharing. I'll probably talk about guitars, pedals & gear, movies, people... other times I might just share some of my thoughts on faith, Jesus, and other topics of religion. God help us all. Yep. So now I have a blog.