Still Hanging After All These Years

A dream brought into my conscious/waking life; having leapt from one side of a vast chasm, I remain hanging in mid-air. The air is rather turbulent, occasionally it pushes me toward a more secure foundation, across from the leaping off point, at other times it forms a gravitational pull towards a distant barren and rocky valley. Seems like the story of my life; I’m sure that it represents my faith journey.

No amount of reasoning can lead me to any theistic position and yet, I feel there is much more than a series of chemical re-actions, and it’s implied fatalism, to this universe of ours. My frequent struggle with “the problem of suffering” was only overcome when I could find no solution to “the problem of love … of full blown self giving, self-sacrificing love”. Just how does such love fit into the survival of the fittest?

I realize the line of thought here is over simplified but, the nooks and crannies of my ‘questing’ would require an encyclopaedic volume rather than a simple posting. Anyway, suffice it to say that for me it was necessary to take “a leap of faith”. It’s not that I needed to be presented with all the answers, just think how dull that would be. Sometimes it seems that I have actually landed in the rocky valley mentioned above. When the going gets really tough, I feel that it’s better to have my feet firmly planted on terra firma, albeit a barren and rocky location, than moving forward in what seems like a vain hope.

I suppose the Advent season has brought these matters of faith to mind and, as I’ve scoured the blogosphere I’ve found much food for thought. This morning as I read the posting Strength from God concerning “the servant’s mission”, on ‘Just As I Am’ I felt both moved and challenged; that’s when I recognized that my current position on the spiritual path is one of ‘hanging in mid-air’!

Earlier this evening, I read the text of Rowan Williams Christmas Message and was particularly struck by the following lines:
“We must give an answer to suffering and tragedy in what we do - because the one thing we know is that this is what God does. Faith is restored and strengthened not by talking but by witness in action.”
And:
“There is something about Christianity that always pulls us back from imagining that everything will be all right if we can find the right things to say - because for God, the right thing to say at Christmas was the crying of a small child, beginning a life of risk and suffering. God shows us how, by his grace and in his Spirit, we can respond to the tormenting riddles of the world.”

I never imagined myself being grateful to an Archbishop of Canterbury for moving me, albeit tentatively, towards a renewing of my FAITH!