What Journey Are You On?

Leigh had a great post recently on how faith evolves -- and sometimes gets lost -- as we mature and re-examine our beliefs in light of new experiences. As a fellow OU alum, I can relate to her thoughts:

So, college … Didn’t take away my personal belief – something I have and will struggle with. Rather, it taught me that my beliefs are just that – beliefs: a theory, a world-view shaped profoundly by experience, a preference for how to answer enduring questions.

Regardless of where life takes you after high school, you are bound to encounter new ideas and situations that challenge your beliefs and re-shape your world view.

In Athens, Ohio, I never stepped foot in a church. While I continued to attend occasional church services on weekends at home, the one time I needed a bible for an assignment my freshman year, I had to borrow a dog-eared copy from a girl two doors down the hall. She was a devout evangelical Christian, but I'm sure even her systems of belief were shaken a bit before she left Jefferson Hall.

For the most part, I left organized religion behind after college but continued to pray on my own terms and (to be honest) at my own convenience. For awhile I felt guilty about not attending church, but then I realized that I was feeling an emptiness that I had mistaken for guilt.

This emptiness became more clear to me when I suffered great losses -- miscarriages, deaths in the family, and the grief and confusion we all felt after 9/11. But I also felt God in my life every day and experienced true joy with the birth of my son.   

But I did not agree with the Christians I saw represented in the media. Their extreme views of right and wrong and their condemnation of everyone who differed from them continued to turn me away from organized religion. So I started looking for an alternative Christian message -- one of hope and love and sharing, not one of judgment and wealth and war.

I became a seeker of progressive and postmodern Christian thought, and I've been surprised to find many great thinkers who reinforce -- but still challenge -- the beliefs in my heart.

These thinkers embrace religion as a community of love and sharing, but dismiss most literal interpretations of dogma and biblical teachings. Instead, symbolism, mysticism and metaphor are encouraged, intellectual debate is applauded, and the liberal ideal of helping those in need is the No. 1 theme.

It's a community of faith where I feel welcome and at home, and it's one that I think needs a stronger voice today in the national arena where the Religious Right has co-opted what it means to be a person of faith.

Which brings me back around to Leigh's original post and my most important point: Leigh's journey to exploring what is truly Right is equally as valid as my journey to postmodern Christianity, which is equally as valid as another person's journey to Wicca or Buddha or the Koran.

They're all paths that involve a re-evaluation of your religious background and childhood beliefs, and the re-assemby of a new philosophy that in all likelihood is filled with contradictions and holes. But it's that rebuilding, time and time again, that makes us all human.

As Alan Jones says in Reimagining Christianity:

I am no longer interested, in the first instance, in what a person believes ... I am more interested in what role belief plays in shaping the believer's personality. I wouldn't trust an inch many people who profess to a belief in God. Others who do not or who doubt have won my trust. I want to know if joy, curiosity, struggle, and compassion bubble up in a person's life. I'm interested in being fully alive.

What are you interested in? What journey are you on?

Comments

[Kelly]

Alison, I agree with you on the feelings of emptiness. I have dealt with each of those within the last few years as well, and a person doesn't forget that. My help has been my faith - not only my Catholic faith, but faith that the emptiness does begin to be filled with wonderful things - even if it takes a long time. I grew up as a Catholic going to church every weekend. When I got married, I spent about 8 years away from church, give or take maybe 20 times during that period. During those 8 years, I felt guilt for not being in church. My own actions were the cause of that certain emptiness. When I relocated to Arkansas in 2002, I became a member of the Catholic church in Benton and have been going every week. Megan goes to the Catholic school and attends Mass three times a week during the school week. No, I do not agree with everything about the Catholic religion (confession, Purgatory, and obviously the horrible mess some of the priests have been involved with), but I do know that I feel safe when I go to church and that my week is not complete without it. We have a perpetual chapel at our church open 24 hours which is very comforting to go to when I just need a quiet place to pray or think.

My journey for the last six years has been to bring my daughter up with good morals and a good heart, and to show her that I am capable of taking care of her by myself, that it is OK that it is just the two of us. We are just as much of a family as anyone else, sometimes I think more so. This journey will not stop even when I am no longer with her because she will remember what I taught her as a little girl (at least I hope that she will).

I fully believe in the power of prayer and have seen it work within my own family and that of my friend's families. I belive in Heaven. Hell scares me, as does evil. I am aware that God is in my life and with me at all times. I once knew someone who questioned me on my faith and asked me how I knew there was a Heaven and a Hell. I know because I believe what I have been taught throughout my life. I told him that I would much rather live my life in a fashion that helped me achieve what Heaven has to offer and find out later that there was no Heaven, than to live my life like there wasn't and find out too late that I was wrong.

Through all of this and all of my journeys, I rely on faith that there is something better than this world and I certainly want to be a part of it.

[Alison]

It occured to me tonight that perhaps I've been putting a lot of undue blame on the Religious Right for the current state of Christianity. As an organization, the Religious Right is an easy scapegoat for many things. But the truth is, organized religion made a bad name for itself years before the Religous Right ever came along.

So what does that mean for those of us who have chosen not to abandon our religion despite all its flaws? I think it means we have an even greater responsibility to right those past wrongs and to make a better name for what we believe. That's not an easy task. Especially if you believe, like I do, that The Church has a lot to answer for and a long way to go before it can be saved.