We Get Different Answers

Walking through the bookstore the other week I saw a book that caught my attention. (Not a particular surprise in that!) The title was Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace by journalist William Lobdell. Lobdell was the religion columnist for the LA Times, a position he lobbied for after he became a Christian. He wanted to give a more fair and positive view of religion.

In the end he lost his religion.

I didn't buy the book, but I did some surfing on the web and found his web site and the article he wrote in the LA Times coming out of his now atheist closet.

He came to the conclusion that there is no God. It was a difficult move and he was afraid of telling people. Yet he felt there was no way around it. A couple of stories he reported on led him to this conclusion, most painfully the clergy abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church which he was going through catechism to join. That and TV evangelists on TBN including "faith-healer" (sic) Benny Hinn. Then finally covering a child-support case involving a former seminarian (now priest) who had fathered a child. He pleaded that he could not give support because he had made a vow of poverty. His plea was accepted.

In his several years of wrestling with these issues he had come across all the standard answers, the two most common being 1) to look at the God behind the very fallible human face of an institution and 2) God is so much beyond our understanding we just have to accept these paradoxes. (My words.) They didn't work.

God either doesn't care, is brutal and mean - or there is no God. It came down to that basic issue.
Lobdell felt that there was no God.

Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don't. It's not a choice. It can't be willed into existence. And there's no faking it if you're honest about the state of your soul.

It is easy to understand Lobdell's conclusion. It truly is the only logical conclusion. It is the only one that makes clear A + B = C sense.

But I can't go there. It just doesn't work for me. I have tried to think that way since seeing the book and reading his essay. I read another similar book a few months ago, Reasons to Believe: One Man's Journey Among the Evangelicals and the Faith He Left Behind by John Marks. He came to the same conclusion after seeing the cruelty and devastation of war and the treatment of children and women in war zones. I tried to imagine there was no God as John Lennon urged almost 40 years ago.

But I could not. My mind will not allow me to go there. My mind will not accept the non-existence of God. I can porbably give you some "emotional" reasons. I may even be able to express some "intellectual" reasons. But for me it is not a matter of either of these even though many people will rely on those. For me it is part of a deep, inexplicable mystery that just is. It is the understanding that when Moses asked the God in the burning bush who he should say sent him, he was told, "I am." It is the knowledge that when Jesus was asked who he was he said "I am."

Simply, I believe God is. Period. And I try to live that way.

Again, the money quote from his column admitting his loss of faith:

Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don't. It's not a choice. It can't be willed into existence. And there's no faking it if you're honest about the state of your soul.

While I may not accept the easy way out answer of you "either have it or you don't" is do agree it is a leap of faith. Faith. Unprovable, unseen but not necessarily beyond our awareness. You take the leap of faith and act "as if..." You move and live and act within the belief.

Is that faking it? Yes, it may be. But as you "fake it" you are also opening yourself to the possibility that it is real.

I need to work more on this, but this week, especially, in light of sadness and grief within my church's extended family, I am more convinced than ever that there is a God. I for one cannot imagine or understand life without God.