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Nicholas’ post here ttps://jessicahof.blog/2021/01/25/faith-examined/ is a fascinating one, but maybe I am not just speaking for myself if I say that as a non-philosopher, I found some of the terms rebarabative. I am so grateful to Nicholas for explaining them so well, and wasn’t, as it were, to riff off them to say something about faith.
In the first place by definition for me, faith is about a belief in something you can’t prove. It’s not like gravity. If you say you don’t believe in gravity, jump out of an upstairs window to check it!
I have believed in God longer than my conscious memory can recall. When I went to Sunday school as a small child it all just made sense if things. I’d always known I was not alone, even though I was an only child. Even though I had no mother, I felt there was a maternal love that was gifted me from someone. So when the Sunday school teacher explained about Jesus loving me, I knew who that someone was. It resonated with what I knew by intuition.
Was I indoctrinated? All I can say is that if so, it was a poor programme, as few of those who went to that class stayed with the Faith. I saw the other day that the head of the Humanist organisation in the UK, Professor Alice Roberts wrote about indoctrination in Church schools. That actually made me giggle. I can only assume that the professor has never been taught in one? Still, as she also likened the UK to Iran, and thought that the Bishops who sit in the Lords were part of the “goverment” maybe we should not take her too seriously? For sure, none of the Church schools I attended did much by way of indoctrination.
I actually loved school assemblies, but was one of the few girls who did. I also loved early morning chapel when I was a boarder, but again, was one of the few who did. In other words, while there was nothing in my environment growing up (other than my atheist father and a secular society, so nothing major then!) which militated against my believing, there was certainly nothing in the way of indoctrination. Indeed “Religious Studies” lessons were often more about other religions than they were my own.
It may be that I am just unusually suggestible. I loved my Confirmation classes and found them helpful. I love going to church. Communion, which I am denied at the moment, is so important to my well-being that it feels like the hardest and most prolonged Lent ever.
So, when atheists and others start up with the old routine of “where’s the evidence?” apart from their bad faith, as we all know there is nothing by way of an answer that could ever satisfy their sad reductionist idea of what evidence is, the thing that strikes me is the irrelevance of the question. The evidence is inside me. It is the love I know God has for me which draws my love out to Him.
The Creeds give me all the framework I need. I like my Church precisely for the reasons others don’t. It takes a very broad approach to membership. It often seems illogical and a bit vague on some issues, usually those where logic and precision might harm individuals. It gives a lot of voice to the laity, and it refuses (any longer) to torture itself over the place of women in the ministry, and in the absence of a Pope, we don’t get too worried about the obiter dicta of our chief Bishop. It still sees itself as a place where all who live here can go, and it allows you to come and go as you wish without too much in the way of expectations.
Most of all, it is a Church which recognises we are all sinners and which refuses, as a Church, to throw stones. There is a Judgement. But it will be God who judges, and if we are wise and humble, we will not attempt to anticipate it.
I believe because quite literally, I can do no other. There have been, and there are, times when God seems more remote, but I know why that is. He is where he has always been, it is me who has wandered off. But he’s there when I come back. There I have found praying the daily offices of the Church a real help. Even at the times I feel remote, I feel the connection tighten. Like any relationship, you get out what you put in.
As we approach Lent, it is a time to ask ourselves what we do put in? I am going to be running a Lent Book series, but more about that tomorrow. What we can all do at this time of pestilence and fear, is to be kind to each other, and loving, and examine what our Faith tells us about how we come through to better times. I am not sure that keep on keeping on is a philosophy, but it sounds awfully Anglican, so I will go with it.
I often feel somehow too something to be an Anglican. In general I feel I don’t fit well in any particular denomination. Too many questions perhaps.
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I think “not fitting” is a common driver in humanity. It is why we look to make sense of things. We tend, as humans, to look for moral order, ethical order and cognitive order as well as limits and rules to regulate what men quickly will turn into abject lunacy.
So we are pre-wired to find an Other and an Order and Meaning to life. As to the flavor of that is what we call the teachings of any religion and within those religions (bindings as it were) we have differences. What makes sense to us and what gives us a better sense of a jigsaw puzzle that actually has fewer missing pieces than any other is how we operate if we continually search. That some stop at one place and stop looking is normal if it brings them solace and makes sense of the world. When it doesn’t they keep looking.
Seek and find? Some do and some don’t. And some others simply like the anarchistic views of existence which they live within the framework of the world and its mayhem . . . though they have given up on finding any solace in this life or the next.
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Well, you know that I am believer in order.
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Indeed. We both are.
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That’s such a perfect formulation, Dave, thank you so much for sharing it 🙏🏼
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Oh what I like is you can be any sort of Anglican, but also that you can just go and pray in a church, when they are open. 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼
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I seem to be an awful mix: High Church aesthetic preferences ; BCP format for liturgy; pre-Nicea eschatology; and low church polity and ecclesiology and soteriology. I sometimes wonder if I’m more Lutheran in my views….where’s NEO when you need him….
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I somehow feel sure you can be a Lutheran Anglican 😊 I feel for you. I love the BCP, hold a very high view of the Eucharist and of the Sacraments, and in many senses see myself as a Anglo-Catholic. But I firmly support the ordination of women, I take a liberal view on gay rights in the church, and am a sort of William Temple disciple on social policy. Typical mixture for an Anglican 😱
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I’m similar in terms of my politics to some extent. I believe that until we tackle the problem of land reform, the gears of our economy will continue to crunch, crushing the people between them.
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You sound like a Lutheran, or an Anglican, Nicholas. None of us, from Scoop with a Tridentine Mass to the wildest left believer you can imagine is completely happy with their church, and I doubt they have been at any time in the last 2000 years. Yes, you can find any of those things in the Lutheran church, but probably not all in any given Lutheran church. I suspect it is the same in Anglican churches. In many ways, we are twin churches, both claiming to be the Catholic church, reformed.
I’m personally far too conservative for my flavor (at present) of Lutheranism, and strangely, so is most of the congregation, but unwilling to put up with the strictures of the traditional church. I doubt there is a real solution, this side of the second coming, and who knows, somebody will probably tell Christ, he’s wrong on the church.
A fractious bunch, Christians, it’s amazing we find any time to do the Lord’s work instead of our own.
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I guess my Catholic question of myself and to others is: am a I looking for a Church that I can get to conform to me or can I conform to a Church that actually exists, still exists and will exist forever; perfect in its formation and eviternally unchangeable? It is the the reason that Traditionalists do not move along the freewheeling adventures of Modernism. Some things in our times cannot be brought into conformity with logic. And if even the angels have a hierarchy (spiritually beings being sexless) they still have a proper order of the lower to the higher. It is why I think the male hierarchy is important as well: for it is men who have to come to grips with being obedient to their spouse as a wife is to be to her husband. For we are all in a sense the “other half” as a bride is to the groom. So we teach the same in our family but can we accept the same in our spiritual relationship where we are the feminine aspect of the relationship? We must humbly comply and give obedience. When we are told not to be obedient to the way the Church was formed then how will we ever conform to this Heavenly Wedding?
For me, I know the Church still exists in small pockets. It has left us rather than we who left Her. So we try to find the little nuggets of gold that are lost in the sand of this earth and they are getting to be harder and harder to find as of late.
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I guess the problem is incoherence. You find some part that makes sense and conforms with Tradition, but other parts that don’t. But there can be reasons for enduring in a situation where one would prefer to leave, and chief among them is compassionate love. For better or worse, we are a community and we are supposed to bear with one another through the faults.
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Bearing with them and remaining in their community can be two different things. Depending on the severity of the situation, it seems to me, that you love and pray for those who are killing the teachings and practice of the faith but that you are not to be part of an occasion of sin by participating or supporting their subversion. Best to separate in that case and try to understand that we all have shortsightedness to some degree but principles that have become “who we are” cannot be simply thrown to the wind. I pray for them and a I pray for the Church which is now suffering persecution and nearly completely hidden . . . and I pray that I might find a bit of gold dust in the sand which I might be able to guard and salvage and remain with until my days are finished.
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Last Sunday we went for a walk in the village near Bath where we are staying. The Anglican Church was locked but a poster said it would be open between 3 and 4 pm for private prayer. In a few moments the vicar arrived on time to open the church, we entered with a few brief words between us. The vicar sat at the front and we at the back in private prayer. I prayed for the vicar to be encouraged in theLord. After a while, my wife opened up a conversation with him mentioning some of the authors we knew of amongst the available books. Remarkably in conversation, we learnt that we had both attended the same Christian conference over 25 years ago. We prayed for one abothe before we left and we intend to go along for the next 3 weeks that we are in the area.
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That is such a wonderfully uplifting story, Rob xx
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Your writing resonates how I have felt for years. I have always believed. Sometimes my faith was wildly skewed by misunderstanding but even then I still believed. In many ways it feels like I was born into it even though my parents were not believers and discouraged faith in me.
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Oh it’s so nice to know I am not alone in this 😊🙏🏼
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I think many of us feel the same. We come to faith from some other tradition (mine was the New Age and Wicca) and realize that even while we were believing lies God was working with us and drawing us by His grace.
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Yes, the Lord works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform xx
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Amen!
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My parents also sought to discourage my faith. I think it simply served to strengthen it.
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Odd, but rather wonderful, how that works xx
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I have often wondered if faith wasn;t some sort of weird rebelliousness in me.
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That’s an interesting thought xx
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I do wonder whether God is Ok with that kind of rebellion.
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The irony of those concerned with something like indoctrination is that for some reason they always believe they’ve escaped it in their own life.
I tend to use a mixed bag approach teaching Catechism and talking about Jesus with others. For example, I was speaking to a more mainstream pro-Francis Catholic, so I quoted Pope Francis. My parish is predominantly Spanish speaking, I’ve taken on an appreciation of their traditions of the faith.
I was just talking to a co-worker today about religion. He said, “you know what problem I have with religious people, they avoid talking about things that conflict with their ‘faith’.
“Oh..”I said. “In my experience, Christians have tried to study science to understand our faith more…have you ever heard of Fr. Georges Lemaitre and the Big Bang Theory?”
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Great points, and lovely to see you here again.
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