I am always on the lookout for new ways of understanding things. By ‘things’ I mean the big things: is there a transcendent reality? (much more than a yes-or-no question!) What does it mean to be alive? What should be my philosophy of life? How should I define my morals? Most Christians, Athiests and agnostics I know* aren’t seriously interested in these questions. They find various answers that they think work for them and consider the case closed. Of course, I have to find answers that I feel ‘work’ as well. But for whatever strange reason, I feel I need to keep these questions open: I need to believe that all answers are only provisional– that my beliefs are never as profound as the things they attempt to explain. This doesn’t mean that I have no convictions. It means that I try not to idolise them.
This is maybe the most difficult thing anyone can do. After all, beliefs are what we use to interpret and filter our experience of life. The more certain we are about things, the less we have to think about them. We use our convictions to either highlight or disregard the things we perceive: the things that confirm our beliefs become all-important, while those that might challenge them are quickly forgotten. That behaviour is simply a part of human psychology, and I can’t escape it any more than anyone else.
But what if someone were to try? I can’t say I made a conscious decision to. But I constantly find myself challenging my own beliefs about… well, everything. It is sometimes painful, and takes a lot of energy. I don’t think too many people understand that about me. They do see that I am difficult to talk to, because I am constantly re-thinking, re-defining and qualifying things as I say them. It is difficult to hold up your thoughts and see they are like a cloth full of holes, and quickly try to patch them together, only to find so many more. I must be a difficult person to work with, and I constantly find myself biting my tongue so as not to be as critical of others as I am of myself.
Probably my non-Christian friends will immediately agree that thoughtless conviction is an unsavoury trait of religious devotion. In my experience, unquestioning conviction is at least as common a trait in the non-religious. It it so rare to find someone humble enough to consider their own thoughts! What is it we’re afraid of? Is it really better to live in a personal fantasy than to see things as they really are, even if it destroys the things we consider valuable, the idols of thoughts and philosophies and beliefs?
Maybe the reason we fear it is because we don’t know if we could exist without them. Who would the Athiest be without his reason? Who would the Reformed Protestant be without her refined systematic theology? Who would the New Age mystic be without feeling of cosmic unity? I think we are all afraid to become vulnerable to that question. Whatever idols we choose to own, it is they who end up owning us.
So I have my convictions, but I don’t hold on to them too tightly. If Logic and Religion and Philosophy have any value, it is that they point us in the direction of the great mysteries which they can never fully explain. ‘For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the LORD made the heavens.’ To that I say, Amen.
*sorry to say I don’t have good friends who are devoted followers of other faiths. If you are one, please be my friend.
