Faith is not certainty so much as it is acting-as-if, in great hope.
What chutzpah to quote my own words right under the title of my blog. Well, why not? It IS my blog. And the words describe my faith quite well.
Perhaps due to old age and a greater conviction that there really is nothing new under the sun, I seem to be repeating myself more and more. Nevertheless, I'm convinced that if Christianity is about anything at all, it is about hope, and I often speak those words - to myself and to others - my Good News, so to speak.
The prophets in the Hebrew Testament and the writers of the Christian Testament show us the path of hope. Above all, the Gospels, the books that tell the story of Jesus, our Lord and Savior, the Word made flesh, the One whom we are called to follow - the Gospels, above all - point the way to hope. The Incarnation, the teachings, the healings, the embrace of the outcasts, the death on the cross, and the Resurrection, the whole of the human life of Jesus Christ shows us the way to hope.
In the face of our own sinfulness, struggles, sicknesses, losses, deprivations, and all manner of adversity, we are called to be a people of hope.
From Isaiah in the Lectionary on the feast day of St. Mark, a bearer of the Good News:
How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,
who brings good news,
who announces salvation,
who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.’
Listen! Your sentinels lift up their voices,
together they sing for joy;
for in plain sight they see
the return of the Lord to Zion.
Break forth together into singing,
you ruins of Jerusalem;
for the Lord has comforted his people,
he has redeemed Jerusalem.
The Lord has bared his holy arm
before the eyes of all the nations;
and all the ends of the earth shall see
the salvation of our God.
Isaiah 52:7-10
Mimi, I love that passage from Isaiah. It reminds me of my time in Vienna and a house group I belonged to that sang a praise hymn to the beginning verse of Isa. 52. How lovely is the Good News.
ReplyDeleteAmelia, the Isaiah is one of my special passages, too. I have so very many favorites.
ReplyDeleteTrust
ReplyDeleteWhen my worry runs rampant, when my projecting and wishful thinking run out of possibilities, when my despair exhausts my spirit and beats any flicker of hope out of me...when betrayl has found me (again) and destroyed my feelings of joy and security...when my innermost fears are realized...I still have Trust in God...one foot in front of the other...all I need do is remember that I´m powerless. I do only what I can do, my attention count, I try to accept reality as it really is and presented before me and not how I try and force things into being.
Trusting God, without question, or clear answers, has always been the greatest vision for acceptance of my life to death and beyond...it´s in the not knowing that I´ve become more secure.
Interesting entry, Grandmere. I've had something similar kicking around in my head, but it hasn't made it's way to my fingers and onto my blog as of yet. Isaiah has much wisdom.
ReplyDeleteLeo, trust - hope, perhaps two sides of the same coin?
ReplyDeleteSCG, I love so much in Isaiah, 2nd Isaiah especially.
People of Hope, and a Resurrection People.
ReplyDeleteI'm still trying to figure out this blog business, and I've been at it almost a year.
ReplyDeleteGrandmere, your statement of faith assures me--perhaps assures us all. And you say it like it is a prayer.
ReplyDeleteWhen another priest and I walked from Richmond to Washington Dc on a pilgrimage praying for peace, this bit of Isaiah was what held us together.
Thank you for your faithfulness.
Yes, Counterlight, that's a good way to put it.
ReplyDeleteI'm past two years now with the blog thingy, and I still don't have the hang of it.
Margaret, I am humbled by your kind words. I find that as I grow older, my faith becomes simpler, more focused on the essentials.
ReplyDeleteReally thoughtful words. For me it is not hope, as much as it is that rope to hang on like mad to as I swing out over that chasm of pain called life.
ReplyDeleteIt is a blessed part of our "becoming venerable" that things begin to simplify. We get nearer the core of things even as outward things are stripped away from us (friends and relatives die, we're not as spry as we once were, we find ourselves letting go of old dreams, etc.).
ReplyDeleteYour faith seems to be doing fabulously. It is a faith full of questions and struggles but undergirded by hope.
You are all such beautiful people of God. You make me cry, you know. What a blessing to have such loving and faith-filled friends.
ReplyDeleteI tend to notice love more than I notice hope. But one thing I've been thinking about this morning is how tangled together love and hope really are. Many of the people who love me express that love through statements of hope; "I hope your day goes well" and all the more specific variations on it are more than just platitudes dictated by etiquette.
ReplyDeleteSt the same time, it seems to me that any act of love, any gift of time or thought or energy or resources, is underpinned by hope.
One of the most astounding things that has happened to me us that other people, by loving example, have taught me to hope.
I get confused over hope and faith and belief. Some of my beliefs seem quite solid, others not so much. Maybe an important difference is the distinction between wishing something were true and not doing anything about it, and hoping that it is true and choosing to act as if it could be.
My thoughts on this are still quite scattered, as you can see! But thank you, thank you for this post.
Song, I believe that faith, hope, and love are tangled together. It's Jesus and the Gospels that I look to more and more, and what Jesus said, and what he did during his life on earth.
ReplyDeleteI believe that if someone could prove to me incontrovertibly that Jesus is not God, I would still choose to live my life according to the way Jesus laid out in the Gospels, because, to me, it seems the best way to live a life.
If that's the way to go, then I don't spend too much time thinking about how great or how small my faith is, I try to live my life in the way of love that Jesus laid out.
Of course, I fail much too often, but then, I try again, instead of giving up. That's my version of acting-as-if in great hope.
Some serious reflection on this theme Grandmère.
ReplyDeletehttp://peterrollins.net/blog/?p=192
Sorry can't do links at the moment.
I love your link about acting-as-if. that's the greatest faith, in my opinion. and it makes things happen.
ReplyDeleteTheMe, thanks for the link. I took special note of the following words:
ReplyDelete"I want to show that it is important to distance the idea of belief from an affirmation concerning the world that can be defended empirically. Indeed it is the idea that belief can be defended empirically that I argue actually eclipses the nature of belief itself."
I agree. And Rollins' words about torture speak a vital truth.
"For example, as soon as someone argues that torture is wrong because it does not work, because it is not effective in the obtaining of reliable information, they have given too much ground to the advocate of torture and lost, even if they win. As Zizek points out, the truly disturbing thing about the Bush Administration admitting that they tortured people was not that it was a revelation (we already knew that they were doing it, we had evidence of rendition flights refueling in the UK etc.). Rather the horrific element of the disclosure was the way that they were making the unspeakable speakable. By opening up a debate about torture they took the US into very troubling water. As Zizek says, we all agree that rape is wrong, but we do not rationally defend this position around coffee tables. It would be a moral disaster if rape was to become acceptable for our society to discuss and something we critiqued on rational grounds."
When we discuss the utility of torture, we cede the moral ground.
I urge all to read the entire post at the link.
Diane, Rollins says the same thing as you about acting-as-if.
ReplyDeleteI find that as I grow older, my faith becomes simpler, more focused on the essentials.That's called "sanctity", Mimi, and you have it in spades (Another compliment you weren't fishing for---deal w/ it! ;-/)
ReplyDeleteAnd damn, there's another italicized quote I forgot to put in the "New Normal".
ReplyDeleteJCF, thank you for the lovely words, but the sanctity bit is far off the mark, way far off. Just ask Grandpère. He'll set you straight.
ReplyDeleteI've mostly taken to quotation marks instead of italics for now, because I forget the BR.