Peekaboo faith

Bill Moyers and Christian Wiman, renowned poet and editor of Poetry magazine, were talking about me the other day.

Here is the thing. I have been feeling faithless recently. I used to have a kind of cynical mantra about faith, “Anything works for a little while,” which means, any new insight, any religious experience, even any new diet will make you feel good for a while, as if you have the ultimate answer, and then it will stop working and it will seem like a blip on the flatline radar screen of “real” life.

I haven’t thought about that recently. I thought I really had reached a new level of serenity and belief and even comfort with my many unbeliefs. I felt like what I’ve been writing here really expressed all that and perhaps could help other people find new paths to their own faith. Dreams. Energy and bodywork. What happens in church. New looks at Jesus. Our relationship to the earth and our allies in nature. The delights, the holy ground, to be found in the everyday.

But none of that seems to be working for me now, not this week. I can’t even bring myself to try to remember my dreams. That no-burp diet has reduced my digestive problems but I haven’t lost weight. I am disillusioned with the idealistic and visionary parts of my environmental work. My enthrallment with the political Jesus lasted a few weeks and then, nyah. I should go out to visit Sister Tree but I doubt that she will shake me from this.

But I always doubt, even in the midst of the experience and certainly afterward. This doubt is far more certain and tenacious, in fact, than the faith, which seems to be encapsulated in evanescent experiences. Now you see them, now you don’t, and mostly you don’t. If you say you believe anyhow, without the catch in the heart that came with the initial, or former, or even recent experience, you are fooling yourself into treating faith as a matter of the intellect. A head thing rather than a heart thing. Which, by the way, is what most religions depend on to keep going. But I insist on considering faith a matter of real experience, not a set of beliefs, because I have experienced it that way and, having experienced that, I cannot accept any substitutes.

I was feeling that ho-humness, that distance from faith experience last Sunday afternoon when I tuned in to Bill Moyers and found him talking to Christian Wiman who, incidentally, is dying of a rare cancer and so his radar is sharply tuned to meaning. I highly recommend the whole interview because if they were talking about me they were perhaps talking about you, too.

Here is a segment that directly addressed this peekaboo quality of faith:

 ***

CHRISTIAN WIMAN: I think in retrospect, [not writing any poems for six years] certainly was a crisis of faith. I think I mean, a crisis of faith is the only crisis there is. We're always having it. Everyone's always having it. We mistake it for other things. 'It's a crisis of my job. It's a crisis of my marriage. It's a crisis of this.'

I think it's always a crisis of how are we relating to our ultimate concern? If life is messing up, it's messing up because we are somehow out of whack with our ultimate concerns. There may be things that we've got to take care of, there often are. But you can't fix your life if the ground of your being is messed up. If the ground of your being is unsure, then your life will always be unsure.

BILL MOYERS: It sounds to me as if this is what you mean when you write, two or three times, “Every expression of faith is provisional."

CHRISTIAN WIMAN: I think so, because I may speak constantly about faith, but I'll fall away the minute I walk out of here. You know, I think we are condemned to express things provisionally, to live in contingency. And I think that's just, that's just the way it is. That's why I'm so moved by Christ, the notion of Christ, the incarnation, because that is an intrusion of God into reality, into the contingent nature of our lives.

 ***

Amen.