Why Belief?
**Proceed with caution if you are in a state of suffering currently. I am afraid that I am processing things after the fact, and may make things worse for those who are still “in the thick of it”**
Our family just lost my Uncle Ricky Mohr to a surprise aneurysm, and everyone is processing it differently. I personally have had a profound sense of my mortality and of the mortality of beloved parents. So I wanted to relay a thought that often goes through my mind at times like these, and put it in print for my loved ones sake and for my kids should they need to try to comprehend why their Dad was so sure in his faith, but never felt that there was a question that wasn’t worth asking God.
I do not believe at this time that my faith is a conviction in the sense that it is usually used. I do not believe in God no matter what data might be shown to me otherwise. I do not feel myself attacked by people questioning my faith or putting it down, and I find myself feeling no more justified when a friend picks it up or affirms it. I have been there, but I do not find myself there anymore. I am not saying that I have “moved on,” or “moved up,” or occupy any privileged position because of it. I do not think that someone who still finds themselves upset or justified is somehow on a lower level, only that I am no longer feel the same (it may be for good or ill, time will tell).
There are a great many reasons to not believe in God, and I think many are quite valid. I think that if I was told that God was the way that many have been told he is, then I too would not believe. It is more than believing that there is a God, it is believing in a person with a personality, and there are a great many people, I am sure, who would like to deny that I exist on these grounds. They are closer to the truth than they know.
Suffering poses the biggest problem I think among those who do not see God, and suffering poses the biggest problem for me in my relationship to God. Perhaps that is why I do not feel rebuked or attacked by atheistic arguments and questions. Our concern and awareness of suffering makes us brothers-in-arms against a single foe, and I am glad to have a fellow fighter. Suffering, and especially death, short-circuits our system and leaves us scratching our heads, looking for answers, and wallowing in the meaninglessness of it all. I do not deny the inherent meaninglessness of death, anyone who has faced it (and the closer we are to the deceased the more obvious it becomes) finds themselves standing at the edge of oblivion, emptiness spread for miles, and nothing to do but “go on.” From this angle, it is easy, and even sensible to reject the idea of it being “God’s plan.”
I do not find that the “evidence for the existence of God,” helps matters, and is also not helpful in why I believe personally. There is evidence, but like scientific evidence, it all depends on what rules constrain the find. Where I see God, another would see a tree. This does not bother me either.
The fact is that as far as I can tell, the concept of God is not a crutch. Believing that there is a God does not alleviate the pain of losing a relative, or personal suffering. Believing that there is a great plan that we are a part of gives one part “meaning” and 9 parts anger of being used to make a logical point. We would not like it if a teacher made an example of us to the other students, and we do not like the idea of God doing it either. The concept of God does not somehow drive out the obvious charge that while heaven may be nice, we would very much he rather just make earth like heaven, and not have sin, death, or disease. You see God is not a crutch, He doesn’t make any of this logically or psychologically easier.
God actually makes it harder, strictly speaking. As a Christian, it means that our Good and Loving God saw it all happen, and even though He could have worked a miracle, He didn’t. God is not a crutch, heaven is not an excuse, and hell is not a threat. All of this makes more great anti-theistic fodder, but as a Christian I can assure it it does not work that way. It is far more of a crutch in my view to believe, “these things just happen,” or “we are merely animals,” or “everything dies.” There is no one who could have done anything, and there never will be.
The reason that I believe in God is precisely because of all the reasons that are posited for His not existing. I do not believe in spite of human suffering. I do not believe in spite of death. I believe simply because He is everywhere present and fills all things. I believe because every time I have looked into the abyss of death, and every time I have looked at human suffering, I have seen Christ coming out. Obviously I speak in allegory and metaphor here, but let me explain what I mean as best I can.
When we stare into the void, and I mean when we choose to go right into it like a child does without guarding the heart and trying to cover it over lest the emotion immobilize us, the heart lights up. It becomes pure fire. It hurts so deeply, so truly, that at that very moment there is nothing there to feel but our love. The more love the heart has, the more it burns at the pain and suffering of those we love. The saints often speak of this burning for everyone throughout the world. The heart has enlarged to include more people than ourselves. At this moment we are jolted out of the animalistic habit of fulfilling our own needs and desires, and find that our heart is so full of someone else, or many other persons, that our heart belongs less to us and more to them. The self-preservation instinct reverses itself, and man becomes as he was made to be, one living for the other.
So what has this to do with God? When we meet God (for that is the real reason I believe) we find Him doing the opposite of the god of our imagination. In our imagination we would have God standing over our loved one, raising him whole from the grave, and causing every knee to bow because “he can even command death.” However, in the suffering of mankind we do not find God there, quite possibly ever. We find God in these moments as co-sufferer. Belief in Christ is not merely belief that God can raise the dead (though this is our faith), rather belief in Christ means not only that God can raise the dead, but that he does it by entering wherever we are (and even becoming closer than we to ourselves) and descending still deeper. We do not see God standing far off and commanding a reversal, but we see God descending all the way to death and beyond, nearer than we to ourselves, to come and get us. He does not fear sin, but becomes sin for us. He does not fear death, but becomes death for us. He does not fear the judgment, but submits himself for judgment. He does not fear these things because the one that He loves is in there and He aims to bring Him out.
This is where death’s meaninglessness is confronted. For as death stands as enemy of God, it stands also as the enemy of meaning, the enemy of the “plan,” the enemy of the outcome for which we were meant. This enemy stands opposed to God, and before this enemy God offers himself and enters directly into his clutches. Following the metaphor, as God stands in deaths prison with all of his beloved whom death has taken captive he descends deeper still to be chained with them, bound with them, and left alone with them. In death’s prison Christ stands, like Shakespeare’s Henry V,
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse himself at Great and Holy Pascha.He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Great and Holy Pascha (Easter)
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say ‘These wounds I had on Great and Holy Pascha (Easter).’
And in a great moment, unwilling that death, suffering, or disease should hold any longer, he ascends taking us with Him. Now, we would very much like it if we did not need to descend at all, but that is not God’s method. For Christ desires much more than to vanquish death that it be gone, but to enter into it that all things might be filled with the grace and love of God. He does not promise us that we will not suffer, because God himself descended to instill himself in all things, that on that last day there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide when He walks among us in the cool of the day. Thus, death is infused with Life Himself, and meaninglessness is charged through with meaningfulness. On that day shall we who die be his brothers, he we ne’er so vile.
And Great and Holy Pascha shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
It is at this that every knee will bow in heaven and on earth, not because it is forced to, but because it could not really do otherwise in the face of such love.
Now many will still see in this wishful thinking on my part, and crazy hopefulness against hope. Again, that is fine. There is only one reason that I am so sure of what I am saying, I see it. Many will say, “I do not see what you see.” And to this I can only reply, “that is very interesting.” However, I cannot deny what I do see. That love overcomes the grave by going into the grave. That adversity among mankind is answered by the love of those who give themselves to living with the suffering in their suffering to lift them out as far as they can. In this I see God. Perhaps more importantly to the topic at hand, is the fact that God descends ever deeper. Many of us looking for Him have looked up for Him standing afar off observing. We missed Him. For myself, I descended once and came face to face with Him, His Mother, the Saints, and now I begin to notice that in order to see Him more deeply I must descend further still.
It is hard to find a humble man, not because there are so few (though there are), but because they do not stand where eyes are looking. How much more with an infinitely humble God?
*My apologies to Shakespeare for ruining his meter and superior poetry, but many thanks to you Shakespeare for expressing such deep truth to us all.
