Retirement has a lot of advantages, among them the time to actually think about things, instead of merely reacting to a steady stream of work/life/family deadlines. Given, that “thinking” can get a person into trouble: too much time to wallow in too many failures or to obsess with too many problems, or whatever it is that your unstable minds often find to trouble us — but still, thinking does a person a lot of good.

If you have followed me for any time you’ll know that at 76, almost 77 years I have been a believer in Jesus for well over 50 years. I am not a card-carrying anything anymore. Never been Catholic, Roman or Orthodox. Have been “protestant” in the sense that I’m among those who diverge from the Catholic church in ways consistent with Martin Luther, but not Protestant with a capital “P.” For well over a quarter century I was a bi-vocational pastor — as our group of followers did not believe in a paid ministry. And there came a time when, over idolatry, I stood away from the fellowship I had been part of and took a different path.

After leaving that fellowship I began looking at other groups of believers. I had a lot of conversations with a lot of pastors, priests, elders, deacons, and whatnot investigating the reasons they had given their lives, or devoted their lives to religion. Suffice it to say that after speaking, face-to-face, with a lot of church leaders I was saddened by how many — the vast majority with whom I spoke, admittedly at random without scientific selection of my sample group — of those now church leaders had joined the ministry because it was “a job” that they thought they might like. I literally found zero among those I spoke with who talked about any particular “conversion” experience. For all of them it was a rational decision. Some talked about feeling a calling — but those conversations were a bit iffy — undefined — vague — and I’ll never know whether they were the result of my questions and a sense that they needed to justify their role in the church.

The result of all those conversations has been that Peg and I have maintained our faith along a mostly quiet and private pathway. We remain as full of faith and as devoted as ever — just not among a great group of others.

Recently I was watching reruns of the TV series Lewis. There’s an episode called, I believe, “Born of Fire” in which one sentence comes up repeatedly:

“On the road from the Garden to Gethsemane I lost my way”

I suspect that a lot of folks lose their way on faith’s road. The signposts are sometimes difficult of understanding. The way is filled with obstacles — even Jesus and the Apostles warned us of that reality. And whatever God you believe in or worship — they are pretty quiet about their ways and their willingness to offer tangible interactions. That’s why it’s a walk of faith and not of sight. We BELIEVE in God, we don’t SEE Him/Her/It.

In my “group active” days — when I was pastoring a congregation I came to appreciate the way our seemingly faith activated decisions affect our ABILITY to actually exercise faith. Take the idea that a “church” needs a place to gather and worship together. That idea means that a place, a building, a building site needs to be acquired and plans made to erect/maintain it, pay for it, etc., etc., etc.. Suddenly the conduct of religion becomes incrementally less about faith, and sharing one’s faith with others and more about the mechanics of maintaining a physical “thing” — the Church — and suddenly the emphasis is less upon the work of believing and more upon the work of “churching”. Church leadership becomes about budgets and fund raising and committees to get things accomplished. Where the work of evangelizing, or the growth of individual members in their faith takes place has to be shared with the management of the Church.

All of this has nothing to do with what I have really been thinking about — it’s only background about WHY I may have been thinking along these lines.

We humans ARE gregarious and I guess we are also tribal. It’s not enough that we interact, we seem compelled to formalize our interactions into ethnicities, into communities, into special interests, into employer/employees, into a million different categories that we all have tucked away in our brain. Violations of some of those boundaries or groupings can give rise to wars, hatred, and persecutions. Every year there are ethnic disputes that have boiled over into armed conflict, death and destruction, and we take them all with a grain of salt as if they are inevitable and nothing to be thought very much about until terrible pictures are pasted all over the media and then for a few hours or days we are incensed by the violence before going back to our everyday lives.

In such a world we humans make rules about who God is, and what God wants. Sometimes we have historic reason for doing so — the existence of texts written long ago. Other time seers arise among us and claim to have messages from God. Still other times it’s in the stillness of a prison cell that we hear from God, a la Charles Colson who was converted whilst in prison, or Madame Guyon who’s dungeon writings spawned faith groups a couple hundred years earlier.

Faith is very individual. Faith is the willingness to step out on thin air not knowing if there is anything solid beneath our feet to catch us — the scene from Indiana Jones is an excellent example of human faith — when the search for the chalice of Christ pushes Indy to step into the unknown across a cavernous void. But the reality of that cinematic moment is real for believers the world over. Faith allows us, causes us, compels us to act. But to act upon WHAT? That is the question.

Earlier I mentioned being retired. For me, the blessing of retirement has been that I have had time to investigate the diversity of this world. From the number of stars to the appalling number of species of cockroaches we live in a universe that is more diverse than we can ever imagine. All our attempts to fathom why there need to be thousands of species of various creatures the likes of which we want nothing to do is more than we can ever guess. The abundance of different spiritual ideas — zen, buddhism, taoism, Christianity (regular and orthodox) various poly-theistic faiths — and many other that I know. nothing about about — all bind humans together in the search for something bigger than themselves — even if we cannot agree upon what that something might, perchance, be.

I happen to believe in Jesus, and a specific role that he played in how humans can, should and will function. Others hold differing ideas, even among those who say they believe in Jesus. Some would say my way of looking at things is heresy. In another century I might even have been tortured for my views. Fortunately in this century we aren’t doing those things openly. But the bottom line is that our insistence upon having groups of our own choosing and confining our world-view to the ideas held by that group has severely limited our ability to see the world around us. We observe without seeing. Things are right in front of our eyes and rather than being amazed and learning from them we categorize them, and prohibit them so that no one else should be aware.

I suspect that whatever might lie ahead of us after death, there will be a great many surprises.

I for one don’t blame God for anything. I accept that many things happen that appear horrendous and utterly “unfair” (if we even have any concept of what “fairness” really is). I need only look at the actions of humans to realize that the vast majority of tragic events are our own fault. Decisions have consequences. You can’t jump out of window and not expect to fall — we all know this — but we all make myriad decisions that temp the laws of the universe just as much as trying to walk on air — and these stupid choices are so easily blamed on God. And when “bad” people do “bad things” we fail to accept that people aren’t born bad they learn how to be bad from others and the fact that they are willing to injure or kills others is because they were never taught — at a time in their life when teaching was possible — that humans oughtn’t to do such things. There are precedents and antecedents to everything and re simply aren’t willing to look at them long enough to accept that there is no need to blame a distant God when very present humans are here to accept blame.

I guess for me the lesson behind hundreds of millions of stars, and multiple ways of faith, and the magic of why people fall in love, and the mystery of musical harmony is that in a big world we are very little people. We have an infinitesimal grasp of the big, wide world, and perhaps we need to be more understand and a bit slower to jump ahead and change things we don’t understand.

I hope you have a great day. It’s quiet here with a lovely layer of snow on the ground and the world looks so pure and peaceful. I know that’s an illusion. I know that this country has just intervened in another nation’s sovereignty and unspeakable acts of violence and corruption are happening as I write. But beyond my ability to sound an alarm, I have to leave the end all and be all of this world to a power greater than myself and I bow in prayer knowing — believing — trusting that there IS a final reckoning and I have nothing to fear.