Questioning

There are a couple of things about being here in Boston that are challenging for me. One is the distance from all the people back home. The other is trying to reconcile what I'm learning with what I believe and what I trust. Bringing together the past and the present and still coming out sane.

I won't go into details, but be sure that my faith has certainly been challenged by what I have learned so far, and I'm sure it won't be the last time either. I constantly feel like there are a million different trains of thought running through my head about this Theology stuff: what should I believe, what shouldn't I believe, what should I do with this, and so on. I constantly find myself, when confronted with different arguments and "facts" and views and so forth, being like Pilate in John's gospel, asking "What is truth?"

Saying that one is a Catholic is tough. Truly living as a Catholic should is even tougher. But thinking about why one lives the way they do, certainly must be one of the most frustrating and difficult things in the long run. I have always believed that it is better to question, better to think openly about things. Only in rare cases should one hold back from questioning. But believe me, it isn't easy. I think that, despite all of the "deeper" meanings that we look for in Scriptures, in the gospel when Jesus says that we must have faith like a child, I really wonder if that's true.

Because a child doesn't question. Oh, they will certainly ask why, but they won't easily lose faith. They will go along with what an authority tells them and not question the decision. And yet, that's not what I'm supposed to be doing here. I am supposed to question and think about these matters of faith, and the more that I do that, the harder it seems to get. So I wonder, if maybe ignorance is bliss? Maybe simple faith is the way to go.

But something inside me cannot sit comfortably with that. There's that little voice, that in spite of what I read and learn and think, continues to reaffirm what I trust: there is a God, there is a point, and everything else will work itself out. When I grow weary of reading about different descriptions of new terms and ideas that we have zero way to prove or disprove, I come back to those three points. There is a God. There is a point. Everything else will work itself out.

I can't prove any of the three. Historically, there's not much of a basis for any of those. Yet for some reason, I continue to hold onto them. Whether God is this Triune God or just that little voice inside my heart, inside all of our hearts, I continue to believe.

I constantly say that I don't know what I want to do with this Theology stuff, but honestly, that's a lie. I know exactly what I want to do with it. I want to end this complexity. We come up with all these different distinctions and classifications and "understandings," when in reality we aren't going to understand God. Hell, I doubt "God" is really what God refers to God's self as anyways, much less any debates about titles for God, or whether masculine, feminine, or neutered nouns are appropriate for God. Our language is simply our attempt to express something deeper here. It's imperfect, just as I am imperfect, just as everyone and everything here, at some level, is imperfect. But I still have faith that there is something greater out there, and whether that's Allah, Brahmin, Jesus Christ, or simply just that little whisper, I do believe there's something.

At the end of the day, that's what I hang my heart on (thank you Luther). I don't know how my theological system is going to play itself out, what moral issues I will take up and my defenses for them. I don't know what Christological view I'm going to take, what I think about liberation theology, and whether the Catholic church has it all right, has it all wrong, or is a bit of both. I don't know if there's a Christ of Faith, or just the Jesus of history, or both, or neither. And I don't know why we still kill each other over what we believe comes to us from a God of love. I do not know much.

But I still hear that whisper.

And for now, I'm going to do my best to trust it.

"I am a troubled mind, I am a calloused heart
A failing engine from driving way too hard
I was trying way too hard
I pulled a thirty-eight out of my bleeding heart
I killed my selfishness for bringing me this far
This far away from you...

I never second guessed that little voice I heard
It's just a whisper"
-Needtobreathe, "Valley of Tomorrow"