The Capacity to Freely Believe

I received a text from a friend tonight. She had dinner with a few close friends who have left the church, apparently because the church doesn’t have all the answers, there are things in its past that are not explained and people within the church make poor decisions. She was texting me because she wanted to express to someone that she knows there aren’t answers to everything and the church is not perfect, but she believes it, it makes her happy, she feels the spirit through living the gospel and it’s what she wants in her life.

I have been thinking a lot about faith recently. As often happens, the past few months haven’t been exactly as I had hoped or planned. Answers that I’ve been seeking haven’t come, relief that I’ve been praying for hasn’t arrived, and I’ve felt overwhelmed with my own insecurities and disappointment. And, as often happens in my life, this has led to introspection on what things in my life I need to improve. Better prayer, more sincere fasting, stronger temple attendance, seeking greater opportunities to serve, etc.

I’ll admit that from the outside, my faith probably doesn’t seem very rational. I’m typically a rational person – emotional, but rational. Even if I am hurt or offended, you can always talk me back into sense. When something in my life is bringing me unnecessary pain, I start seeking a way to change it. So when I am feeling frustrated with the apparent silence of the heavens, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to keep prodding and trying and believing. Albert Einstein said that insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And for someone who loves literature and knowledge, clarity and reason so much, there are certainly a lot of things within the scope of faith that I don’t understand. So wouldn’t this behavior of mine appear to be slightly insane? Actually . . . no.

I feel my faith is rational based on very simple logic. It makes me happy.

Believing I have a loving Heavenly Father looking out for me makes me happy. Believing that He knows me perfectly, loves me, and has a plan for me makes me happy. Communicating with him and having him communicate with me brings me peace and joy and clarity. Obedience to commandments designed to make me a better person makes me happy. Believing that I will see my mother again, that I can be with my amazing family forever, gives me a reason to keep going. Fasting . . . well, I’m not always happy while I’m doing it, but I love the cleansed feeling I receive.

There is a lot I don’t understand and a lot of questions I don’t have the answers to, but it doesn’t frighten me. Quite the opposite, actually. Terryl Givens, in “A Letter to a Doubter” wrote, “I am grateful for a propensity to doubt, because it gives me the capacity to freely believe… The call to faith is a summons to engage the heart, to attune it to resonate in sympathy with principles and values and ideals that we devoutly hope are true and which we have reasonable but not certain grounds for believing to be true. There must be grounds for doubt as well as belief, in order to render the choice more truly a choice, and therefore the more deliberate, and laden with personal vulnerability and investment.”

One of my most life-changing professors wrote his thoughts on faith as it relates to experience vs. understanding. (He’s much more eloquent than I – to read his amazing blog, go here. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/homewaters/2015/01/experience-and-understanding.html) To quote him, “I would rather experience life than understand it. And I would rather experience God than understand Him. Understanding matters and it comes but it doesn’t matter most and it doesn’t come first. Miguel de Unamuno in his inimitable masterpiece, The Tragic Sense of Life, says, ‘the primary reality is not that I think, but that I live.’ Or: ‘the end purpose of life is to live, not to understand.’”

The true marks of faith are not gaining perfect understanding, delivering perfect sermons, or memorizing long passages of scriptures. True faith is shown in consistent effort, obedience, and utilizing the atonement in our lives. C.S. Lewis wrote, “[The Devil’s] is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do [God’s] will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.” We will fail and fall short again and again, but we just have to keep trying and asking for forgiveness when we come up short. Elder Jörg Klebingat said, “Establish an attitude of ongoing, happy, joyful repentance by making it your lifestyle of choice… and don’t expect the world to cheer you on.”

But I will be.