get committed. If your answer to that question of belief is “yes” every single day, then you probably don’t know what believing in God really means, Buechner writes. “At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you’re human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and…great laughter.”
Commitment to faith, then, is persistence to faith through doubt; it is persistence in faith through suffering and anxiety; it is persistence in faith through struggle and persistence in faith through all the idiots and immoral cretins who speak for faith. It is persistence in faith despite the occasional idiocy of the synagogues, mosques, or churches that are supposed to be the homes of faith. “The church is both my greatest intellectual and moral problem and my most consoling home. She is both pathetic whore and frequent bride,” the Franciscan monk Richard Rohr writes. And still faith is the center and joy of his life.
The Exodus is the journey, and the beatitudes and the love that died for us are the sublime beauty to which it all points. I persist toward that point, through all the ups and downs. At some point I began to realize I’ve inherited a narrative, and I don’t want to live a life that isn’t oriented toward that sublime beauty. I can’t control when I believe or when I don’t believe. I can only be faithful to the living stories and to persist in the bet that the sublime is real. At some point I realized that the train of life had taken me into a different country. I believe. I am a religious person. The Bible, open to an infinity of interpretations, is the ground of truth.
What I’ve really tried to describe here is something we don’t talk about in the newspapers—how the process of inner transformation happens. One doesn’t really notice it day by day, but when I look back at who I was five years ago it’s kind of amazing, as I bet it is for you in your journey. It’s a change in the quality of awareness. It’s a gradual process of acquiring a new body of knowledge that slowly, slowly gets stored in the center of your being. Cynthia Bourgeault writes that the Kingdom of Heaven is not a place you go to; it’s a place you come from. It’s a transformed way of looking at the world, which comes about when you move more deeply into God and God moves more deeply into you.
And what you end up with is this grand sense of connection, the sense of metaphysical singleness. There is no such thing as an egoistic self that is separated from everyone and everything else. That’s the illusion of modernity. The best part of having taken a weird, strange trip over the past five years of my life is that it reminds me of the possibility that I might take another weird, strange trip over the next five or ten or twenty. So nothing is dismissed as too outrageous. When you’ve tied yourself to a spirit you can’t comprehend, nothing shocks you anymore, but everything brings you into a state of awe and wonder.
TWENTY-TWO
Ramps and Walls
Now I just had to figure out how to live out this commitment. How do religious people live? By now you can probably figure out what part of faith would be hard for me—the blind surrender part. There’s a lot of talk, especially in Christianity, about dying to self, surrendering everything to God, taking your hands off the wheel and letting God drive. There’s a lot of talk about the utter depravity of mankind, the supposed opposition between spirit and flesh. I used to think that being religious meant that you admit that God is in control of your life, and you surrender to whatever it is God tells you to do. And I can see why I used to think that. There’s a lot of talk in all religions that gives you the impression that God demands an absence of agency. God is master, and you are servant.
Fortunately, that kind of blind obedience or total self-erasure doesn’t seem to be what God wants. It’s certainly true that the will is problematic. It is self-centered. It tends to see all