Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis

by Lauren F. Winner

And yet in those same moments of strained belief, of not knowing where or if God is, it has also seemed that the Christian story keeps explaining who and where I am, better than any other story I know. On the days when I think I have a fighting chance at redemption, at change, I understand it to be these words and these rituals and these people who will change me. Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchanted, and not left alone. I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze.

One thing you do, having stumbled into God’s absence, into God’s silence, is wonder at your own sin. You understand that the most straightforward explanation of this, God’s absence, is that you have sinned.

“When the Word left me,” Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, it was as though “you had taken the fire from under a boiling pot.”

Another thing you think, when you have come to God’s absence, is this: it is not God who is absent at all, it is you who are absent.

There at the Communion rail, I don’t yet know what illness lies behind this gesture, I know only the couple’s hands and mouths, and that I am seeing one flesh. I have read about this, heard sermons about a man and a woman becoming one flesh; and here at the altar, I see that perhaps this is the way I come to know such intimacy myself: as part of the body of Christ, this body that numbers among its cells and sinews an octogenarian husband and wife who are Communion.

There is abundance in these dozens of pies, and you eat beyond the point of necessity and hunger, because Annie Johnson made this and she may not be comfortable sitting around a circular table talking about Jesus, but this is her offering, and you will taste her pie and in that moment, God is not lost.

As far back as I can remember, anxiety has been my close companion, having long ago taken up residence in the small, second-floor bedroom of the house that is my body. Sometimes my anxiety takes long naps. Sometimes it throws parties. But I don’t imagine it will ever tire of this neighborhood and move out for good.

“O God of peace, who hast taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength: By the might of thy Spirit lift us, we pray thee, to thy presence, where we may be still and know that thou art God.”

Dickinson wrote, late in life, to a judge whom she might or might not have wanted to marry: “On subjects of which we know nothing, or should I say Beings . . . we both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble.”

Later that night, I find myself thinking, maybe this is a way of inhabiting faith that is, indeed, faithful; that is generative. Maybe God has given some people belief like a pier, to stand on (and God has given those people’s steadiness to the church, to me, as a reminder, as an aid), and maybe God has given others something else: maybe God has given to some this humming sense that we know nothing, this belief and disbelief a hundred times an hour, this training in nimbleness (and maybe that is a gift to the church, too). terminology

Here is historian Christopher Grasso writing about the religious culture of late-eighteenth-century America: “Faith . . . meant more than intellectual assent to a set of doctrines. It was a commitment of the whole self, a hope and trust that, if genuine, ought to be the foun dation of an entire way of life and vision of the world.”

“What you promise when you are confirmed,” said Julian’s father, “is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that that is the story you will wrestle with forever.”