Faith in God, Faith in Jesus, and Faith in Questions

Here's something I read this week on Sister Joan Chittister's blog.

As a young teenager, kneeling in a dark cathedral one night, with no illumination in the church but the sanctuary lamp, I had an experience of intense light. I was thirteen years old and totally convinced that, whatever it was and wherever it came from, the light was God. Perhaps it was a good janitor working late, or a bad switch that did not work at all, or a startling insight given to a young woman, given gratuitously. I did not know then and I do not know now. But I did know that the light was God and that God was light.
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It has not always been easy—I went through a terrible period as a young sister—to the point that I thought I would have to leave religious life because I doubted the divinity of Jesus. Only when I realized that I did believe deeply and profoundly in God could I come to peace with the fact that faith in God would have to be enough. It was a dark, empty time. It threw me back on the barest of beliefs but the deepest of beliefs. I hung on in hope like a spider on a thread. But the thread was enough for me. As a result, my faith actually deepened over the years. The humanity of Jesus gave promise to my own. Jesus ceased to be distant and ethereal and “perfect.” Jesus let no system, no matter how revered, keep him from a relationship with God. And that union with God, I came to understand, was divine. Then I also understood that questions are of the essence in a mature faith.

I don’t fear the questions any more. I know that they are all part of the process of coming to union with God and refusing to make an idol of anything less. The point is that during that difficult time I didn’t try to force anything. I simply lived in the desert believing that whatever life I found there was life enough for me. I believed that God was in the darkness. It is all part of the purification process and should be revered. It takes away from us our paltry little definitions of God and brings us face-to-face with the Transcendent. It is not to be feared. It is simply to be experienced. Then, God begins to live in us without benefit of recipes and rituals, laws, and “answers”—of which there are, in the final analysis, none at all.

--from Joan Chittister: In My Own Words, ed. Mary Lou Kownacki (Liguori)

UPDATES

Women in the neighborhood around the Hombro A Hombro clinic have been receiving sewing instruction three afternoons a week. I am working on helping them figure out things they can make to earn some money.l

These two little guys, whose pictures from almost a year ago are still posted, were at the CRN Christmas party last month. Luis, at left, is now at a normal weight for a one-year-old, according to his mom. Marcelo, on the right, is likewise at a normal weight, but his blindness remains. When an ophthalmologist friend from UK was visiting, she helped us confirm the cause--lack of vitamin A in the weeks after his birth. He is going to have an operation, but the prospects for much improvement are very slim.

One of the high points of Kate and Liz's Christmas visit was our hike around Cuycoche, the volcanic lake in the background.

Sometimes

Sometimes, like yesterday when I was out walking, hopping off and on the broken sidewalks filled with people and commercial activities (motorcycle repair, tent making, chicken roasting), I’ve found myself fuming with righteous indignation. This city is filthy, broken down and without basic infrastructure (not to mention usable sidewalks)…. A few examples: .....There are open manholes everywhere, because thieves sell the covers to scrap metal dealers, both parties acting with impunity….. A woman died one night last year when she drove her car into a three-story-deep, 50-yard-long hole in a street close to our apartment; the hole was unmarked and unguarded, and remained pretty much the same way for another seven months before city workers finally filled it in after completing whatever construction work was involved….. Rather than households being connected to a central water supply, water is delivered three times a week, with different neighborhoods taking turns receiving it……Sewage? I shudder to think what happens to it, since I haven’t seen or heard of a processing plant nearby, and the fact that nowhere is the water potable is no doubt related…..The traffic is out of control, pedestrians running for their lives when they have to cross a busy street or hop off a sidewalk…..

What a way for 400,000 people to live!!

And yet they get along, and are generally very good-natured about it all. Only someone like me gets crabby about such things. Ecuadoreans seem impervious, I think because experience has taught them that government is of little use in their lives. It saddens me how often people say that everyone in government is corrupt, using a tone of voice implying inevitability.

On most days the concept of “inevitability” goes against my grain. We wouldn’t be down here trying to do something about injustice in the world if I we dwelled too much on inevitability. Anyway, it reminded me of a poem I ran across in November when we were in Kentucky spending an evening with friends, and I’ll put it here as a nice way to begin 2009.

Happy New Year.

Sometimes

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,

from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel

faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail,

sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;

elect an honest man; decide they care

enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.

Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go

amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow

that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

Sheenagh Pugh, b. 1950