I don’t think I’m alone in this struggle. I’ve read many accounts of people, even people we think of as deeply religious who struggle in this way. It is good for me to have heard these people’s stories. Their honesty and openness in this struggle has helped me keep up the fight. I hope I can be as open and honest.
So, what do I mean when I say I believe in God? In part, I mean that I’ve come to the point where I see the evidence for God as being stronger than the evidence against. This is the source of my intellectual belief in God. Getting to this point has been a mental exercise, in large part one of removing intellectual barriers. C.S. Lewis helped me a lot. So did many intelligent and wise Christian pastors, preachers, strangers and friends.
Another part of what I mean by believing in God is acknowledging to myself that I am drawn to God in ways that have always been, and largely remain, a mystery to me. This is almost the opposite of the first. This is the non-intellectual belief in God. I had to get to a point in life where I realized that my intellect was not nearly enough to understand the world or myself or to have a full life. I had to find value in my intuitions, feelings, emotions, longings. And I had to learn to start listening to them more and my intellect less. This struggle is, I think, my fight with modernity. This is the source of my passionate reactions against objectivity, logic, rationality, empiricism, and science. I haven’t abandoned them, not by any means. And I don’t aim to. There’s far too much value there. But I do think that I’m too logical and rational in my approach to life. And I don’t like it. I think understanding things intellectually is just a small part of what we are here for. I remember a comment my Grandmother made to me after some personal tragedy. She was visiting, and when she was leaving I gave her a hug as I usually did. But she said it was the first time I didn’t stop the hug first. I’ll never forget that. I long for the day when I can hug people, and interact with them in general, and have it feel totally natural. This is, I think, a longing for the heart of God, which we can probably best find in this world in each other.
Perhaps the most important thing when I say I believe in God is it means that I think God is good and that knowing God and having a relationship with God is good. This, what is in many ways my strongest way of believing in God, is probably best seen as a process. I will never fully know God in this life. But I think life might be the process of getting to know God. I can even believe in God in this way when I fail to in other ways. In fact, it was this way of believing in God that led me to him in the fuller sense in the first place. Back in the days when I didn’t believe in God intellectually, in the days when I wasn’t listening to what my intuitions and feelings were telling me, I would nonetheless often find myself talking to God or thinking about what God was trying to do in my life. Sometimes I would even find myself angry at God—that is—the God who I didn’t acknowledge existed!! In other words, I think I had a relationship with God even without knowing it! It wasn’t intellectual, and I didn’t value my non-intellect at that time, but it was there and it was real. I think that was why the Footprints poem about walking on the beach with God was so powerful to me – I think at some level I knew all along that God was there with me and that I might someday be able to see it. I think the poem spoke to a longing I had that I couldn’t admit to myself had any value.
So that is why I believe in God. I could and might someday extrapolate on the above. But I think it important to understand the above if one wants to understand the rest of my thoughts on God. You might have noticed something I didn’t say. I didn’t say I believe in God in order to win Salvation. And I didn’t say I believe in God in order to avoid damnation. Those things don’t really draw me to God. In fact, they push me away. I’m still trying to understand the place Heaven and Hell have in my belief system. I’m even struggling with trying to understand why it affects me so strongly to think or discuss it. In part I suspect it is because it kept me away from God for so long. So many people tried to win me over to God in many ways. Often they would make some headway, but then ruin it by adding that I would be rewarded with Heaven, or that I would avoid eternal punishment. At that point I’d feel God slip away from me. “Love me or be damned!” It just doesn’t work for me.
(First posted on MySpace, May 1, 2005.)
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