Finding God (part three) : faith is not a straight line

I read a fascinating article today, a relatively old one (from 2009) that someone posted on Facebook. In it, the writer A.N. Wilson describes his journey from believing Christian to atheist and back again. (http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2009/04/conversion-experience-atheism) and his description really resonated with me. If you don't have time to read the whole article, let me summarise. He talks about the moment when felt that, after a lifetime of going to church, "the whole house of cards...collapsed for me", and how as he discarded all the ideas and practices and framework of Christianity he felt such a sense of relief that it was like "walking on air". And then he writes that his tendency towards doubt challenged the very atheism to which he had converted, and as he looked at the nature of people, and materialist explanations for human existence which left God out of the picture, he found himself increasingly "convinced that we are spiritual beings...that the religion of the incarnation...[a]s a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience...fits." He ends by saying the following:

My departure from the Faith was like a conversion on the road to Damascus. My return was slow, hesitant, doubting. So it will always be; but I know I shall never make the same mistake again. 

Like I say, I found this fascinating. Partly because I love his description of the journey he has been on, not a straight line but circuitous and arduous, but also a journey that is intellectually vigorous and that demonstrates the fact that it is possible to draw logical conclusions about faith. It is my experience that people in western countries like the UK tend to assume that having faith means you are intellectually stunted and can't think logically; I love how Wilson demonstrates the weakness of that assumption. But also partly because of his honesty and total lack of fear about admitting to being a man of faith in a British context where secularism has really become the norm, at least in public intellectual life (with a few exceptions).

One of the things I love about living in Israel is the way that faith is deeply rooted in the people here, whether Christian or Jew or Muslim. It's not weird to believe in God, in whatever form; it's not weird to pray; it's not weird to celebrate holidays and build life on the foundation that there is a higher being than us, whose presence gives peace in a place that is often not peaceful. I don't want to generalise; of course there are people here who don't subscribe to any faith, and of course there is plenty of 'religion' that is (to my eyes) ugly and judgemental and exclusive. But on the whole, coming from a context where people are astonished that someone still has faith, or still chooses to go to church, it's so refreshing to not be judged - at least, not for that reason.

A wonderful, inspiring woman called Amy Orr-Ewing, who works as an apologist for the Zacharias Trust (http://rzim.org/) wrote a book called Why I Trust The Bible, and in her introduction she states that she is a Christian because she finds Christianity to be "intellectually robust and existentially satisfying". I love this. I love that this acknowledges the two parts of us - heart and head - and affirms that both can be satisfied by Christianity, when so often it's one or the other that people argue leads us away from Christianity. Over the years, I found that when one faltered, the other stayed strong.

Having said that, from the 'faith' perspective my five years in Jerusalem have been rough - ironically, given that so many come here on pilgrimage and given that I have, countless times, walked in the footsteps of Jesus. There have been moments when I've doubted everything I ever believed, from the historicity of the person of Jesus Christ to the existence of a supernatural being to the decision I made to follow Christ when, frankly, it's just really damn hard and sometimes not following is just so much easier. Maintaining the daily life of faith was never something I excelled at without a firm community structure, like that provided by 'my girls' that I prayed with - week in, week out - for eight years before I came here, and I have not been blessed enough to find a similar thing here (which is not to say that the friends I've made who are believers haven't been encouraging and supportive). I have been fortunate enough to be part of a super little church, the Church of the Nazarene on Nablus Road, where my friends have encouraged and supported and not judged. I've been equally fortunate to have friends who have lived in Jerusalem a long time and seen it all: people converting from one thing to another, marrying someone of a different faith, becoming ultra-conservative, or ultra-liberal, giving up faith altogether. These people have prayed for me and encouraged me to stay on the straight and narrow and to, as Archbishop Ramsey advised the young priest, "continue to worship Jesus in the Sacraments...faith will return."

There have been times when both my head and my heart have wanted to give up and I'm not really sure how I managed to cling on to my faith in God and in Jesus Christ, other than sheer bloody-mindedness and the principle that if I've come this far with this framework, I was buggered if I was going to give it all up. As I've said before, it's like pulling the central thread out of a tapestry: the whole thing unravels. God is that central thread for me, whether my head or my heart or both have abandoned ship. Right now, the head is holding sway; I'm sure we'll swing back around and the heart will have its moment on top again. Swings and roundabouts...

I still struggle with that daily walk of faith, and I often feel like a 'bad Christian' who has moved backwards on the path, even though I know that is absolutely not the point of the cross. Reading about A.N. Wilson's journey has encouraged me immeasurably. I think that I've been trying to measure the faith that I have now against the faith that I had before I moved here, and that's not a fair comparison. I've seen faith manifested here in all shapes and sizes, from Greek Orthodox monks to Syriac priests to Catholic nuns to evangelical Christian Zionists to just regular evangelicals, and I'm utterly convinced that no one has the monopoly on spirituality. I'll confess that I struggle when I go home to handle some of the things people say; people in the West can be so black and white and if there's one thing I've learned in this messy, complicated place it's that life is significantly greyer than I thought before. What God has done in my life is deeper and richer than I ever thought possible.

Faith is not a straight line.