The Simple Faith

Theology of the Unburdened

Sometimes I feel like I’ve wasted half my life trying to understand what I believe; arguing for it, dissecting it, turning it into bullet points so that I can make other people understand it. Thousands of hours of my life obsessed with; rightness, avoiding my own demise, the ego boost you get from a “like” on Facebook, and the need to KNOW. While I feel like this obsession has stolen a lot from me, I’m not sure I would be where I am now without it - I can’t help but regret the life I haven’t lived, but I find myself at peace with the process as it was probably my only way.

I think I was around 6 years old when I first encountered a religious dilemma. The preacher at the Pentecostal church I attended made claims about speaking in Tongues being a requirement for “salvation”. To a 6 year old, Salvation is pretty important - this became the first burden of my faith: there is a right way and a wrong way to make it to heaven and you better not fuck it up.

Various pastors and adults in my life - not to mention me - began burdening that faith and that child from that day forward - from the minutiae to the big stuff. There are dozens of examples of this theological burdening written in the archives of this blog, so I won’t belabor the point.

While I don’t often know what I’m starting when I do start something, sometime in the last 5 or 6 years I started something new - to try and unburden myself of all the things that had made my faith heavy and interpret it through the simpler eyes of a child - specifically the me that was so malnourished of comfort when I first started seeking G-d’s approval. This is the first time I’ve spoken of this strategy; I often keep these efforts very private while also letting them show in my writing and way of being. With it, I also made efforts to be more open minded about things I had previously ignored, avoided, or refused - to participate in ritual, to talk to more people about what they believed and what shaped them - especially people who deconstructed and still believed, to listen more and respond less.

Applying the logic of a child to something you’ve dissected into a million pieces is a difficult task, it took me about 4 years to become proficient at it - 6 year old me still held a sense of wonder at the world, too much empathy for his own good, and terrible, terrible fears that my father might end up killing one of us - to acknowledge those fears as core to my burdening has held its own importance which I will likely discuss another time.

Young me was shocked to find out that most of the local pastors were paid salaries and that the money didn’t go into a big pile to help people with - this is one of those moments that always stuck with me - I had read the words myself, in my simplicity I believed that must be the way it worked or else why would we be reading the same book and singing the same songs about it? Somehow this simple fundamentalism I felt so shocked by back then never left me - a hate for profiteering on the Gospel that still makes me shake.

This is the mind I have tried to inhabit as I process this faith again - simple logic, no rabbits to chase, no hypostatic union to try and figure out, simple. The detailed but unfinished results of this mind can be found here: This I Believe

The simple faith I have found is rooted in the following passage from Matthew 22:

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Jesus is telling this to a lawyer, who's life's work IS the Law - he's telling him that all of his own obsession, his religion and devotion to it are useless if they are not accompanied by a moral devotion to the humanity around him. He’s telling him to relax, because the Law and the prophets won’t gain you anything if you aren’t first radically devoted to Love as a way of life. This simple faith lightens the intellectual and theological burden a great deal, which leaves me with the really hard part: the Loving.

The grace, and mercy, and forgiveness. The laying down your life. The hard parts that are unsurprisingly kept from our vision if we are focused on theological debates, doctrines, and other such worldly pursuits. Yes, I said that.

Utterly Changed Into Fire

In what is one of the most beautiful songs ever written (which I’ve listened to several hundred times in the last year), The King Beetle on a Coconut Estate by mewithoutYou, the main character is a beetle king demanding an explanation from his subordinates for a mysterious fire that burns off in the distance every night (a fire set by the coconut plantation workers to get rid of the coconut leaves)- a professor and a soldier each take their turns and find themselves singed and defeated by the fire - which brings to the king the realization that in order to find out what the light is he must leave behind everything that matters to him and experience the light for himself. “Why not be utterly changed into fire?” echoes in chorus as the song ends; when I’m alone in the car I sing these words - when I’m not, they are on repeat in my head.

Here is the song on Youtube - with a Hollow Knight interpretation of the lyrics that I have found to be fitting with the beauty of the song and its intent.

If anything has changed in me over the course of my effort to view this faith through the eyes of a child, it is that I find myself drawn to the fire; called to a life of love, grace, forgiveness, and sacrifice - a life I can only experience by thrusting myself into it. Simple faith. Childlike faith. A faith unburdened by having been burned before.

I will never know G-d until I first know Love and it consumes me.

Why not be utterly changed into fire?

Why not be utterly changed into fire?

Why not be utterly changed into fire?

My Lord

Utterly changed into fire.

I plan to do a series on the various bits and pieces and revelations that have occurred during this experiment - If you subscribe you can get them delivered right to your inbox as they slowly make it onto the page.