Faith Journey - The Art of Belief
by Izzy Harbin
My journey toward some workable faith has taken a lifetime. What began as the formulaic faith offered to me by the church of my childhood, (a kind of certainty that never made sense to me), has evolved over time into a faith filled with questions. There is nothing certain about my faith. I don’t know who God is or how God works in the world. I don’t preach absolutes to people, nor do I believe in the inerrancy of scripture. My faith teaches me that God is still speaking through all my lived experiences and all the folks with whom I come in contact every day. I have come to believe that the presence of the divine exists in all living things and that the miracle of creation, and the interconnectedness of all life, is only a glimpse into the heart and mind of the divine. I refer to this mystery as the ineffable.
The ineffable—that which is too great or too extreme to be expressed in words—is what I’ve come to know as God. But even when I make the claim for the existence of God, that doesn’t mean I have any kind of understanding of what God is. St Thomas Aquinas wrote a series of proofs in his tome Summa Theologica in an effort to prove the existence of God. At the end of this work, however, he admits with great clarity that he doesn’t know what he has proved. Aquinas realized that God is unknowable from a human language perspective. Karen Armstrong, a religious historian, takes Aquinas’ truth and expands his claim to include how we read and understand all sacred texts. From the perspective of world religions, Armstrong argues that all scripture, all sacred texts, point us toward the concept of compassion. Scripture, however, does not clearly define who God is or what we mean when we use the term God. She argues that when we talk about God, we don’t really know what it is we’re talking about. We don’t have the language to adequately describe God or define what we call the divine.
The idea of the unknowable perfectly defines the place I choose to live, a place where there are more questions than there are answers. The more I understand about myself, creation as a whole, and the interconnectedness of all life, the less I understand about its creator. I don’t know why God chose to create anything, let alone human beings. The act of creation will always remain a mystery to me. And yet, I continue to search for the meaning of life in the pages of a variety of religious texts and through spiritual practices from across the world’s religions. It is in the engagement of these texts and practices that I glean the courage to ask one more question; to challenge myself to see the world from as many perspectives as I possibly can.
My lived experience has taught me that there are many kinds of “knowing” and that learning to know something in our souls requires engagement with people and materials across the spectrum. I look for the presence of God in all the faces of all the people I meet, even those I don’t agree with or who don’t agree with me. At the end of the day, what my faith teaches me is that my purpose here on earth is simple: I am called to learn how to care for others in community; to see them and to know them for who they really are, not who I want them to be.
Regardless of what I call the divine, that presence is most felt when I strip away my expectations of who God is supposed to be. Many times, I have experienced something of the divine, but I have never been able to fully comprehend what it is I’ve experienced. There is something that happens internally that reminds me I am never alone, something that nudges me to seek greater connections with others, to increase the diversity of my lived experiences.
Faith pulls me back to the center, to that fundamental core of the ineffable. Faith reminds me that even though I cannot define God, I can still seek God in the various communities of which I am a part. When I choose to engage in community from a place of compassion, I am living into my highest calling. Faith is the intentional fulfillment of that calling, and the questions that arise from those relationships keep me searching ever more diligently for the divine.
