I just picked up a few books that i’m reading at the beginning of the summer. The Da Vinci Code (Brown), The Pagan Christ (Harpur) and The Last Word and the Word After That (McLaren). I’m most excited for the latter, it’s the conclusion of his New Kind of Christian trilogy. So in honour of McLaren’s new book coming out, and also a recent conversation that I had a few minutes ago with a friend, here is a section out of Finding Faith, one of McLaren’s first books. Enjoy.
Paul was one of my best friends growing up. We were adventurous boys and rowdy teenagers together-and we both became committed Christians during the same time period too. We got married the same weekend and stood in one another’s weddings. We had kids around the same times, and both of us had children with some serious health problems. A few years before my third child was diagnosed with cancer, Paul’s oldest child needed open heart surgery.
I remember visiting Paul and Josh in the ICU after surgery. Paul was bent over the bed, his face just a few inches from Josh’s face. Josh was hooked up to all kinds of technology via tubes and wires. Josh was crying, groaning, screaming with a hoarse voice-his chest hurt so bad. And as I came closer, I could see what else Josh was doing: He was pounding on his father’s chest. His fists were pounding out a message his little mind couldn’t yet articulate: “You’re my father! You’re supposed to protect me! You’re not protecting me! This is your fault! I’m in pain! I’m angry at you! I hate you! I think you must hate me to put me in this hospital and subject me to this pain! You’re a bad father! I must punish you! I don’t trust you anymore! I don’t love you anymore!”
Poor Paul. I can only imagine what he must have felt. Driving home, I felt empathy for Paul, an empathy that would intensified a few years later as I had to hold down my crying, writhing son while he got spinal taps and bone marrow tests as part of his cancer treatment. But that day, driving home, I not only felt empathy for Paul, I also felt sorry for God, if I can put it that way.
I saw how my doubts are often like Josh’s little fists-trying to express my pain, my rage, my terror, at being in situations I don’t want to be in, difficulties I can’t understand, predicaments I can’t solve. And there God is, loving me so much that he draws even closer so I can hit him all the harder…because he understands that’s what I need to do. I read the book of Job in the OT, and I think of Josh and Paul there in the ICU. These are stories of doubt, but also of faith. Don’t you agree?
So I am learning also to see faith in Josh’s fists. After all, he doesn’t lash out at the nurses. He doesn’t cry to the doctors. He doesn’t punch and the nurses aids. He doesn’t expect anything of them. It’s his very connection to his father that makes him express his furious doubts in him. It’s his very love for his father that forces him to say, through his fists, “I hate you.” And, I am learning, it is my faith in God that forces me to sometimes doubt him. They say the opposite of love isn’t hate; it is rather indifference. And I have to think that the same is true with faith. Doubt isn’t a spiritual danger sign nearly as much as indifference would be.
There’s something else I have learned. Doubting my faith isn’t the same as doubting God. My faith is my own creation-a worldview, a paradigm, a map for life, a set of guiding principles-that I am assembling and reassembling from what I read, who I know and respect, what I experience, and so forth. My faith isn’t perfect, and it isn’t static. It is guaranteed by my finitude to be incomplete, inaccurate in many places, out of proportion, in need of continuing midcourse corrections. Therefore, it deserves to be doubted at times-doubted so it can be corrected. If I didn’t doubt my faith, I would protect it, not correct it; defend it, not amend it.
So I’m learning that when I doubt my faith, I don’t have to doubt God. In fact, doubting my faith can be an opportunity for increased faith in God. A proverb in the OT says as much: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your path.” There is a difference-subtle but very significant-between having faith in my faith (i.s. faith in my intellectual concepts about God-another way of saying “leaning on my own understanding”) and having faith in God. There is a corresponding difference between doubting faith my faith and doubting God.
When I doubt my faith (in other words, my own understanding of God, life, the universe, etc.), when I can’t lean on it because I’m not sure it will hold my full weight, then I can paradoxically more fully lean on God with my whole heart.
I like the writing you put up from Mclaren. Although I do have something to point out.
It talks about how there’s a difference between doubting God, and doubting your faith in him, because your faith is your concept, or the way you understand God. When the boy was pounding on his fathers chest, saying ‘i hate you’ he was clearly saying he hates his father, even though he knows his father is there and exists, and hes just angry for his father letting him go through the pain. What happens though when you put it into a person, who isn’t doubting his faith in his father, in God, but is actually doubting God, that he even exists, that he’s even there to pound on, and for you to tell him you hate him. What happens then?
Just looking at it from another angle.