Losing Faith in God

For Aquinas, we cannot know who God is, but rather what he is not.

And if it follows that faith in the same God is NOT about the cognizance of divine guidance, NOT about certainty of exultation or triumph, NOT about finding solace, or the soothing trust that one is embraced by the holy acceptance, or allegiance to a persuasion of absolution of some sort, then what does it mean to say that one has lost one’s faith in God?

Over the flip side…

What the mind-body dualism of René Descartes is to modern philosophy, moral dualism predominantly is to our conception of ’self’, of our being. To pursue, in one direction the morally positive; good, happiness, life, love - and to elude in the other direction, the morally negative.

One is often frustrated over constant struggle in the lows of darkness and lostness.I think the good-evil, darkness-light, real-unreal, etc, are problematic dichotomies. Instead of getting into the controlled and organized system of contrasts and differences, that which Jacques Derrida called Plato’s project to dominate reality; are there, in fact other coordinates, other matrix, other dimensions, other models that allow the proliferating of meanings, ambiguity and differences? That which is beyond the real-unreal.

First they came…

Here’s a variant to the original poem attributed to Martin Niemoller:

When they came for the Jews and the blacks,
I turned away
When they came for the writers and the thinkers and the radicals and the protesters,
I turned away
When they came for the gays, and the minorities, and the utopians, and the dancers,
I turned away
And when they came for me,
I turned around and around, and there was nobody left…

Perhaps I am thinking of Nietzsche’s attempt on the beyond good and evil, inquiring, ‘Isn’t living assessing, preferring, being unfair, being limited, wanting to be different?’ But to think of indifference itself as a power, that which blurs the line between cruelty and compassion, good and evil, how could you live according to this indifference?

The Father’s House

The signboard at the church gate greeted me this morning - inviting me into my sunday morning reflection. ‘The Father’s House’. (My reading from John 14:1-14 - NLT): Jesus reminded his disciples that there is more than enough room in the Father’s home. That the Father’s house is big enough - enough space for everyone - and that’s what the proclamation of the kingdom of God is all about - that it is at hand, the Father’s house is open to ALL, big enough for all. That’s the good news. More than enough room! Enough for the poor, the lame, the lepers, the sick, the sinful and the lost. For the prostitutes, the homosexuals, and the tranvestites. Then there are the Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists, Gnostics and more. That’s a renewed challenge for me to re-imagine (or for some to start to imagine) the Father’s House.And the sharing centered on making room for others - welcoming strangers. My thoughts went to the words of Rowan Williams where he wrote about the ‘otherness’ - that God is in the connections that we cannot make. The person who is ‘left over’, whose place I cannot secure, who does not fit , is the person who reminds me of my own limits; and as I acknowledge the incomplete character of my world of reference and my understanding, I may at least see the seriousness of the question about the fate of those not catered for. If in any sense I recognize a claim of care for such people, even if I have no idea how to effect it, I am at least some way towards perceiving how God lies in the connections I cannot make.We are also to resist the passion to bring someone into our own world, our own language. It is indeed necessary to respect the silence of another, even when it unsettles our own hope of completing the picture. The true moral question is what kind of community ought we to be so that we can welcome and care for the other in our midst without that ‘otherness’ being used to justify discrimination.At this juncture, I meditated on Thomas Merton’s seed of contemplation: “The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image” - Lent quote 27. (My choice of quote today)Recognizing the other as other without the immediate impulse to make them the same involves recognizing the incompleteness of the world I think I can manage and moving into the world which I may not be able to manage so well, but which has more depth of reality. And that must be to move closer to God.Elsewhere, Williams reminds us that thinking of a better world does not automatically remove all the injustice, all the sufferings and the ‘otherness’. As soon as we begin to think about them realistically, they begin to look thoroughly questionable. Yet, the gospel challenge us to respond and embody the new life (the new creation) that Paul talked about in 2 Corinthians. The invitation to respond and to move into the ‘otherness’ is not an invitation to see the power of God at play but for us to wrestle with the questionability of the coming of the kingdom of God first manifested in our life. To move from the ideals of ideas to the mess of practising the idea. A challenge to our ‘controlled system’ of salvation game plan.When I become a friend to someone of the ‘other’ it potentially creates a whole lot of ‘other’ dynamics, sometimes resulting in ‘a lot of mess’. When I drive my street-friend home for his monthly bath, I am exposed to some ‘other’ threats and fears. I once playfully (not unneccessarily though) imagined a replay of the biblical scene where Jesus set the adulteress free from the condemnation of the religious men. What if - having been set free, this woman then falls madly for Jesus, following him wherever He goes and threatens Jesus with suicide if He does not love her the way she wants Him to? This is certainly not biblical, but it does happen in the messy world of ‘otherness’. And we are certainly caught up in this mess today. What is also certain, is that these cannot be addressed with simple 3-step solutions.

How then does this sit with our ‘bring in-clean up-send out’ kind of salvation answer? As Sivin puts it, some may take years to change!

Contemplation.

Lord, You have taught me to love humilty, but I have not learned. I have learned only to love the outward surface of it - the humilty that makes a person charming and attractive. I sometimes pause to think about these qualities, and often pretend that I possess them, and that I have gained them by ‘practicing’ humility.If I were really humble, I would know to what extent I am a liar!

Teach me to bear humility which shows me, without ceasing, that I am a liar and a fraud and that, even though this is so, I have an obligation to strive after truth, to be as true as I can, even though I will inevitably find all my truth half poisoned with deceit. This is the terrible thing about humility: that it is never fully successful. If it were only possible to be completely humble on this earth. But no, that is the trouble: You, Lord, were humble. But my humility consist in being proud and knowing all about it, and being crushed by the unbearable weight of it, and to be able to do so little about it.

How stern You are in Your mercy, and yet You must be. Your mercy has to be just because Your Truth has to be True. How stern You are, nevertheless, in Your mercy: for the more I struggle to be true, the more I discover my falsity. Is it merciful of Your light to bring me, inexorably to despair?

No - it is not despair that You bring me but to humility. For true humility is, in a way, a very real despair: of myself, in order that I may hope entirely in You.

What man can bear to fall into such darkness?

Compassionate Religion - an Oxymoron?

Gubra - spelt controversy.

Finally got down to watching it. The film, which was shot in Ipoh (yay, my hometown!) and which has won the Best Picture Award at the 19th Malaysian Film Festival has caused quite a stir in the local scene for allegedly insinuating the legalistic indoctrination of the country’s official religious authority.

I decided to post up a scene from the film as my personal response to Kak Min’s (Yasmin Ahmad - film director) expression of her spiritual perspective.

Here, the Bilal (an offical appointed by the mosque to call Muslims to prayer - the Azan) is shown to be patting a three-legged-dog while on his way to performing his duty.

 

Kak Min’s openness to the need to wrestle with - i. Prophetic hadiths that warn Muslims about getting into contact with dogs (which may cause a sizeable amount of reward be taken away from a person’s record of good deeds), and ii. Surah 6 Verse 38: There is not an animal (that lives) on the earth, nor a being that flies on its wings, but (forms part of) communities like you - is also in many ways a challenge to my personal journey; a context within which I am required to not see the given as neat answers, but to think of them realistically and wrestle through the ‘questionabilities’ of living them.

Even more, Kak Min’s attempt in the film on some of the ‘unquestionables’ speaks of a need to appeal to a test for any will, desire, decision that I might be tempted to attribute to God, tempted to justify as obedience to God.

Gubra Kopi Kopi

Contemplation on roti, mentega, kaya and kopi

Are we not troubled enough?

For a while now, the concept, or more precisely the conception of church has, in my opinion taken a somewhat boring development, if not perilous. The general contention is that church is not a building -it’s about people and about relationships. I can applaud such enlightened view but that’s just that.

One of the deadliest disease of our time within the church culture is ‘abhorrent believe’. We hide our selfish and irresponsible nature behind a seeming righteous trust and faith in God. If I believe and confess enough, things will take care of itself. And if I believe right about church, then the question of what a church is will somehow look after itself. What about choices I have to make? What about the life that I have to live?

‘Conception’ gives us the notion of the ‘coming to being’ or coming to existence, beginning. When we talk about the early Christian church, we always think we knew what church was. That the apostles designed and knew what church was. But what if nobody really did understand what church was in the first century of the Christian era.? In Rowan William’s words: you didn’t begin by knowing the answers; but were responding rather, at the very beginnings of the church’s history, to something that had happened. And working out bit by bit, not very easily, not always very clearly, what the kind of difference was that Jesus had made, and what life together expressed that difference….

And if there is one thing we can learn from the early church, it’s this: much like the way they saw themselves in the conception of church, in that it was still not clear to them what church was, that they were learning bit by bit, not always very clearly - that we too are STILL in the conception - still learning the whats and the hows. For we have yet to see that which is perfect, that which is in its fullness.

…Now we have to think hard and ask more searching questions about why and what the church is…. Structures are important. Good structures are those which serve the essence of a community, which help it to be faithful to what it really is. And when we ask about the structures of the church we must surely ask if these are structures which allow that fundamental reality to be visible and real. Do the ways in which people behave, relate, make rules, worship in the church, do all those things speak of the new creation? Do they let the event of encounter with Jesus happen afresh? Are they structures and patterns which let that basic event of encounter happen again and again? Because if not, the church has become something very different from where it started: it’s become a community which says once there was an encounter with Jesus and we like to remember that or in the terrible words of a well known hymn, “and still the Holy Church is here although her Lord has gone!” Now I think the very opposite of that is asking how do we have structures that allow the basic event to go on happening. And neither individual conversion alone nor institutional extension alone deals with that. We have to ask much more radically, how do we structure a society in which it goes on being possible, even likely that, people will meet Jesus and, in meeting Jesus, will want more people to meet Jesus?

And if our structures are shutting people out, hurting more, causing people to be disconnected, stumbling many, are we not troubled enough?

Theology For The Rest Of Us

Unlike deliberations on nuclear physics or quantum mechanics - where our commonselves are humbled by our limited understanding, discussions about God almost immediately releases the theological expert in most of us. We instantly and enigmatically assume the scholarly-apologetic position. We insist on what can and cannot be said about the whole concept of God.

When we develop our systematic explanation about God, we develop a theology. All of us have our own theology (either developed or received), but when we have a wrong/inaccurate theology it is called heresy.

Modern theologians’ take on the crisis of theology today is to attempt to identify new ways to legitimize the entire religious program from the ground up. Whilst traditional apologetics sought to construct PROOFS for TRUTH OF DOGMAS, there is now a renewed effort to offer rational grounds for believing them, i.e. how these dogmas might still be meaningful despite the reasons to doubt them. Christendom has witnessed the rise of feminist theology, black theology. political theology, liberation theology all which in many ways were trajectories to a more reformed, progressive faith community that we have evolved into today. These theologies have challenged the ‘conservatives’ to adopt a more critical reflection as they proceed with their theological attempts.

One has to, in my opinion, recognize the continuous reflection and redefinition of Christian theology (explaining God) as pointing to our inaccurate knowledge of God. In such context then, any theology offered as THE CORRECT (and unquestionable) theology is heresy. But more importantly it points us to our need to actively work on our ‘intolerance’ to difference and heretic labelling when God is being imagined outside our theological allowance; that our quest for reformation is not ephemeral.

For we know in part and we prophesy in part but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

1 Corinthians 13: 9 -12

We need to constantly acknowledge that this is an on-going journey, conversation, quest, search, study, enlightenment, or call it whatever we may, where a finger pointed to that which lies outside the present theological framework (which incidentally is where God can be found) is not that which God rejects. They are only what we reject - that which does not agree with OUR explanation, OUR theology, OUR God - but God nevertheless to the rest of us.

Our Own Personal Christ

Every one of us forms an idea of Christ that is limited and incomplete. It is cut according to our own measure. We tend to create for ourselves a Christ in our own image, a projection of our own aspirations, desires and ideals. We find in him what we want to find. We make him not only the incarnation of God but also the incarnation of the things we, and our society and our part of society, happen to live for.

- New Seeds of Contemplation