He is like a tree planted beside the waters that stretches out its roots to the stream: It fears not the heat when it comes, its leaves stay green. In the year of drought it shows no distress, but still bears fruit. More tortuous than all else is the human heart, beyond remedy; who can understand it? I, the LORD, alone probe the mind and test the heart, to reward everyone according to his ways, according to the merit of his deeds. (Jeremiah 17: 5-10)
How many of us feel we are cursed and standing in a lava waste, a salt and empty earth? How many of us have doubts and are not sure we can trust in the LORD? Are we becoming barren bushes losing our leaves or trees with roots no longer stretching to the stream? Perhaps too many of us feel these ways.
Helping us deal with doubts is Brian McLaren, author of the 2021 book “Faith After Doubt: Why your beliefs stopped working and what to do about it.” He said: “Sixty-five million adults in the U.S. have dropped out of active church attendance and about 2.7 million more are leaving every year. Faith After Doubt is for the millions of people around the world who feel that their faith is falling apart…McLaren, a former pastor, proposes a model of faith development in which questions and doubt are not the enemy of faith, but rather a portal to a more mature and fruitful kind of faith.”
His insights include: “Beyond discovering divine love in the natural universe and in relationships with others, we will help our children and students learn to encounter divine, transcendent, universal love in themselves, in the depths of their own being. This, I believe, is what contemplation means. We often say that contemplation involves stilling our thoughts and finding God in silence, and that is true. But there is nothing magic about silence itself. The magic comes as we experience our deepest selves in and with God, beneath our chattering thoughts, obsessive analysis, and noisy commentary”
McLaren provides this opinion: “Faith after doubt, we might say, means living beyond supremacy. For all of the problems with traditional beliefs, at least they told us that there is a supreme being, and we are not It. In other words, at their best, those beliefs humbled us and tried to dethrone us from our individual supremacy teaching us that life isn’t about me and life is bigger than my little personal agenda. Sadly, though, those same beliefs too often kept supremacy alive for us on a bigger scale. Our religious communities began speaking humbly to God, and then they spoke boldly about God, and then they spoke proudly for God, until too often they spoke arrogantly as if they were God. Our gods became our mascots and symbolized the supremacy of our race, nation, tribe, or religion.”
Each of us may have years of drought, and we have yet to be dethroned. Nevertheless, we must keep searching for life-giving water. It is there, and fortunately, we all have God-given roots that can stretch to the streams of faith, hope, love, and charity - streams that always flow near. There’s no doubt about that.
Deacon David Pierce
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