Second Tuesday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
A Crisis of Faith and Its Friends
by Kyra Schat
At the mid-way point in the pandemic unveiling (or nightmare, if you prefer), I had nearly convinced myself that the Christian faith was no longer for me. You remember this time, I’m sure. We had all stopped cheering for healthcare workers, and winter was setting in, so we didn’t even have daylight after work anymore to remind us that life might still be worth the effort. The only reserves of energy anyone had left were those dedicated to suspicion and fear, and as the months passed, all we could do was argue about vaccines, if children should be in schools, and whether our political opponents could be recipients of God’s grace if they could be so foolish and/or cruel as to advocate for (insert your hot button issue of choice here). New variants, online school, the increasing likelihood that my uncle would not survive his battle with cancer, nor my aunt her battle with heart disease, racial injustice, division within my denomination about sexuality and gender identity, you name it. Give me one more reason to doubt that this is true, and I’m out, I regularly informed a God I was no longer sure I believed in. (In retrospect, I realize I was perhaps less concerned with the truth of what I had believed than whether I could say with equal confidence that it was also both good and beautiful, but drawing out that distinction is a task for another time.)
What I am wondering now that I have emerged from this season is what part of this experience, which has often been called a “crisis of faith,” was truly about my uncertainty itself and what part was simply a lack of theological resources that would allow me to conceive of my uncertainty as anything but a crisis. Too often, we have conflated these experiences—uncertainty and a faith crisis—leaving ourselves with two options. First, we might tell ourselves that certainty and faith are synonymous and cling to the perpetual cognitive dissonance that is claiming certainty about something that is, in many respects, beyond our fallible human comprehension. If this does not work for us, we abandon this faith in anger and grief, only to find ourselves searching for what, more often than not, turn out to be new certainties. Is there a better option available to us? If certainty does not serve our relationship with God well, what foundation are we left with?
This is where students of theology like myself eventually realize that we must befriend poets. (Not least because poets tend to be better theologians.) I have been granted the remarkable gift of many poet friends, and one of them directed me, in my season of perceived crisis, to another poet who gave me an instruction about this very challenge: “To say that one must live in uncertainty doesn’t begin to get at the tenuous, precarious nature of faith. The minute you begin to speak with certitude about God, he is gone. We praise people for having strong faith, but strength is only one part of that physical metaphor; one also needs flexibility.” This passage belongs to Christian Wiman and his book My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer.
Wiman, living with an extremely rare and incurable form of blood cancer at the time of the book’s composition, finds very little about the convention of pretending to be more sure than we are to be useful to our life and faith—especially when it is worked out, as his has been, in the shadow of death. However, he does not claim here that we can say nothing that is true about God; he is not calling for a complete abandonment of all confidence so that we are left entirely to our own devices, following the whims of our intuition in any given moment. So, what does Wiman mean by flexibility? I suspect there are a number of fair ways of answering that question, but from my own experience, I see it breaking down into two primary parts: A flexible faith requires trust and imagination.
What trust communicates, which certainty struggles to leave space for, is assurance that does not make perfection a prerequisite. I perceive this to be necessary if we are to understand that faith is not first and foremost an assent to a set of propositions, but a relationship into which we are invited. This distinction is captured in the spirit of the lectionary Psalm for today, Psalm 21, as David praises God for his blessing, presence, and unfailing love—indeed, his very life:
1 The king rejoices in your strength, Lord.
How great is his joy in the victories you give!
2 You have granted him his heart’s desire
and have not withheld the request of his lips.
3 You came to greet him with rich blessings
and placed a crown of pure gold on his head.
4 He asked you for life, and you gave it to him—
length of days, for ever and ever.
5 Through the victories you gave, his glory is great;
you have bestowed on him splendor and majesty.
6 Surely you have granted him unending blessings
and made him glad with the joy of your presence.
7 For the king trusts in the Lord;
through the unfailing love of the Most High
he will not be shaken.
Certainty, it seems to me, is easily shaken because its prescriptive and proposition-oriented nature leaves us with little to hold onto when life—pandemics, grief, injustice, broken relationships—pulls the rug out from under us. Trust, as David writes in this song of praise, is much harder to undermine because its foundation is not propositions but a loving relationship which accommodates the reality of suffering—as we reflect on throughout this season of Advent—by entering into it.
Imagination is the second part of what I believe could serve as an antidote to our certainty addiction. Another one of our lectionary passages can begin to point us in the direction of what this might look like. In Isaiah 41, the prophet is speaking to the people of Israel, exploring the future fulfillment of God’s covenant promises after their return from exile. However, his message of hope in this chapter is given to a people who remain in exile, a people who must have been asking some questions about the certainty of a good and gracious God who had apparently allowed them to be colonized and captured by a foreign and oppressive power. It is in these circumstances that Isaiah offers these words:
18 I will make rivers flow on barren heights,
and springs within the valleys.
I will turn the desert into pools of water,
and the parched ground into springs.
19 I will put in the desert
the cedar and the acacia, the myrtle and the olive.
I will set junipers in the wasteland,
the fir and the cypress together,
20 so that people may see and know,
may consider and understand,
that the hand of the Lord has done this,
that the Holy One of Israel has created it.
The words of this prophecy require not only the trust of the Israelites, but also their imagination. Hearing this message from Isaiah, the Israelites could have reasonably claimed certainty about the fact that rivers don’t flow on barren heights. Deserts, by their very nature, do not contain pools of water. Groves of trees do not thrive in wastelands. What is therefore required of the recipients of this prophecy is imagination. Imagination suggests to us that while we can sense no good reason to trust right now, there could be something beyond the edges of our vision that, if we hold space for wonder and curiosity, may just reveal itself to be a river, gushing forth from a barren height; or, if our imagination can’t quite carry us there, perhaps a sprout breaking through the cracked surface of a wasteland.
Trust and imagination. These have been better friends to me in recent years than certainty. But I’m not interested in establishing new prescriptions. I simply want to explore new possibilities. If you are in a season whose suffering has taken such a strong hold that even these friends of mine seem beyond your grasp, then hear again from Christian Wiman, who, in the face of his own death, offers these words: “Faith is nothing more—but how much this is—than a motion of the soul toward God. It is not belief. Belief has objects—Christ was resurrected, God created the earth—faith does not. Even the motion of faith is mysterious and inexplicable: I say the soul moves ‘toward’ God, but that is only the limitation of language. It may be God who moves, the soul that opens for him.”
May you be surprised anew this Advent season by the God of David’s song, the God of Isaiah’s prophecy, and by the child, wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger. A child who is this God, moved towards you.
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