Doubt | Rumblings

May 2

Grace, Finally

I arrived at work in a bit of a grouchy mood today. I had spent my twelve-minute commute listening to the first part of a recent podcast from CBC Radio’s Tapestry—a program that explores faith and spirituality in the twenty-first century Canada. The host was in conversation with “Adam” (a pseudonym)—a pastor at a fundamentalist church in the southern USA who lost his faith a few years ago but has remains in his position despite his unbelief. For the interview, Adam had phoned from an undisclosed payphone in an undisclosed town and his voice was distorted to protect his identity and preserve his job. It all felt very grave and dangerous and important. And annoying. Read more

Apr 13

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“I am Deeply Loved By Jesus Christ”

I opened my reader this morning to discover no fewer than six tributes to author, speaker, and contemplative Brennan Manning, who passed away early this morning at the age of 79. Brennan Manning is, regrettably, one of those writers that I have seen quoted endlessly but have never actually read. Consequently, I spent a bit of time this morning doing a bit of reading about his life and work, digging up quotes, and generally trying to learn a bit more about this widely admired figure who seemed so keenly tuned to grace. Of course, I also ordered a few of his books :). I am looking forward to my relatively late introduction to Mr. Manning.

Why Do I Have Faith?

Last week, I found a message from a reader of this blog buried off in some dark corner of Facebook-land that I hadn’t noticed for at least a month. It was a message that was both encouraging on a personal level, as well as provocative in the best sense of the word. As it happens, the powers that be in Facebook have thus far prevented me from responding to this message. Every time I try to reply, I get a message telling me that I cannot do so due to some setting in one of our accounts (I don’t have an email address for the person who wrote to me, so I’m at the mercy of Facebook). Rather than wading through the labyrinth of Facebook’s privacy settings, I decided to do the only rational thing and simply write a blog post in response :). Read more

Apr 5

The Light of Life

Jesus said, I have come that they may have life,

and have it abundantly.

Whoever follows me

will never walk in darkness

but will have the light of life.

Every morning this week, these words from John’s gospel have framed the morning prayers in the prayer-book I use. They are good and hopeful words with which to greet a new day. They are appropriate post-Easter words. As is the case throughout John’s gospel, there is this wonderful contrast between the light and the life of Christ and the darkness and death we see all around us. Jesus’ words are true and good and full of strength and hope

And then I walk out the front door… Read more

Apr 1

If Christ Has Not Been Raised — Pity Us All

I spent the morning after the triumph of life over death reading about the triumph of death over life.

Well, that sounds a little more dramatic than it actually was. What I was in fact reading was a fairly ordinary little book by David Webster called Dispirited: How Contemporary Spirituality Makes Us Stupid, Selfish and Unhappy. It’s hard to imagine a book with a subtitle that catchy being almost a complete waste of time, but it was. I was really looking forward to reading Dispirited after hearing an interview with Webster on the radio (he made some intriguing comments about contemporary spirituality and how it perpetuates selfishness, individualism, consumerism, etc.), but the book turned out to be a rather poorly written, sloppily edited collection of loosely connected rants against the increasing prominence of the (admittedly irritating) “I’m spiritual but not religious” claim. Read more

Mar 27

Thy Kingdom Come

Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (Mat. 6:10).

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:20-21).

Some reflections on the Wednesday before the Friday and the Sunday that changed the world… Read more

Mar 19

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The Training of Doubt

One hears a lot, these days, about the virtues of doubt. There is much talk about creating space for doubt, encouraging doubt, dignifying doubt, about how doubt is preferable to the illusory certainties of faith, about how doubt can even be an important part of faith. We have doubts about whether or not there is a God, whether freedom is real and meaningful, about the possibility of things like absolute truth and objective value. This is all fine, as far as it goes. It is good to acknowledge that we don’t know as much as we think we know or as much as we would like to know. I think that at its best, a willingness to live with doubt can engender a humility and patience with others that is quite obviously preferable to the wearisome alternatives that we are all too familiar with.

Going to Church

Often when I get up in front of the congregation I am a part of on Sunday morning, I will silently wonder why each person has come to church that morning. Did they come hungering for an encounter with the living God? Out of grim duty or rusty habit? For their kids’ sake? To worship? To hang out with friends? Because there were rumours of a soup lunch afterward? There are likely as many different reasons (or combinations of reasons) as there are people in the pews on a given Sunday. One Sunday a number of years ago, I began the service by saying, “I’m not sure what brought you here today…” but before I could finish the sentence, a middle-aged man with a penchant for loudly and delightedly answering any and all rhetorical questions posed from the front blurted out, “The bus!!” Like I said, many responses… Read more

Mar 5

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The World We (Don’t) Want

Our daughter belongs to a swim club, and swim clubs mean—hooray!—fundraising. Bingo, specifically. I have discovered that one of the (very few) benefits of spending five hours at the Bingo hall on a Thursday evening is the opportunity to catch up on a bit of reading (I was the “pay runner” last week, which meant that I basically sat around waiting for people to yell, “Bingo!” before springing enthusiastically into action). Last Thursday, I brought along a book that had regrettably slipped to the bottom of the veritable mountain of unread books on my desk—Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist? Read more

Feb 19

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Who Sees Clearly?

The problem of evil is frequently cited as one of the most powerful arguments against religious faith. The existence of suffering, whether on the micro or macro level is seen as evidence against the existence of a benevolent and powerful deity. And yet, the empirical data around suffering and religious faith stubbornly refuses to fit into this view of how and why human beings believe what they believe about the world. Religious faith seems to be the highest in contexts where suffering is the greatest. Read more

Feb 11

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“God Always Finds a Way of Sneaking In”

I watched part of the Grammy Awards last night. The decision-making process was a tortuous one. I had serious reservations about the worthiness of the Grammys to occupy my Sunday evening time due to, a) the overhyped, oversexed, undertalented spectacle it seems to have become; and b) the fact that I was far from convinced that I needed to spend over a third of the next few hours subjecting myself to mindless advertising. As it happens, the stasis produced by a fairly exhausting weekend full of church activities won out over my myriad principled objections to watching the Grammys. The best laid plans, and all that. Read more

Feb 8

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Is God Fair?

A couple of conversations this week have me thinking about fairness. The first was a kind of prolonged lament about the unfairness of life. This person had the (mostly justified) impression that life had treated them profoundly unkindly and this unhappy fact coloured how they interpreted virtually everything else they encountered in daily life. The second conversation occurred with a friend over supper last night. His daughter had been learning about the importance of fairness in school, about how everyone needed to be treated exactly equally. “Why tell them this?” he asked as we were getting supper on the table. “Life isn’t fair—the sooner they learn this the better!” Indeed. Read more

Feb 4

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A Place for Religion

So, this one has been making the rounds in the social media universe… Apparently, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has “defeated” the world’s leading atheist evangelist Richard Dawkins in a recent debate at Cambridge University. Quite handily, in fact—324 votes to 136. The resolution under discussion was “religion has no place in the 21st century.” Apparently it still does. Rowan Williams has saved the 21st century… or at least the day. We can all take a deep breath and relax. Religion will be around for a while.

“Sometimes I’m Afraid of God”

Sometimes I’m afraid of God when I read the Bible.

The statement came from my son after he had spent a bit of time wandering around in the delights of Genesis 19 for an assignment. It’s quite the passage. You have a guy voluntarily sending out his daughters to get raped in order to avoid the apparently more odious prospect of having the men of his town sodomize a couple of angels who had paid him a visit, you have people being struck blind and being turned into salt, you have God raining down sulfur and fire in judgment of the Sodom and Gomorrah, you have two young women getting their dad plastered in order to have sex with him and produce children, and generally an overall scene of depravity and sex and violence that would make Quentin Tarantino blush. Well, maybe not. But still, it’s not exactly PG material. Read more

Jan 16

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It Hurts

I know a man who is watching his wife die. Slowly. Dementia. It hurts to hear him tell the story of how she once was, how she is now, hurts to hear about how on “good” days she recognizes who he is and doesn’t ignore or get angry at him. It hurts to think about how what is looms large and menacing over what was, always lurking, always threatening to steal life and joy from the past, robbing even memories of their sustaining power. “She can’t speak anymore,” he says, “so we have to communicate without words. Sometimes she squeezes my hand.” Read more

Jan 7

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Monday Miscellany

It’s Monday morning, the kids are back in school, my Christmas flu finally seems to have released me from its miserable grip. A New Year has begun, and life is back to normal. A couple of miscellaneous topics and ideas for a Monday morning, then. These have very little to do with one another other than that they have been collecting dust either in my brain or in my “drafts” folder over the past little while. If this comes across as a rambling mess, or a series of incoherent rants, well, I blame on the accumulation of weeks worth of flu medication which has undoubtedly scrambled my brain. Read more

Dec 19

The Kind of World God Has Made

I had to take a short road trip today so, armed with coffee and an iPod well-stocked with podcasts and sermons, I ventured out on a brisk December prairie morning. Given its close proximity to the shootings in Connecticut on Friday, I knew that last Sunday many pastors and preachers would have been wrestling with issues around the problem of evil and suffering. I was curious to hear how others approached it—both from a homiletical as well as a theological perspective. Read more

Dec 17

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How God Deals with Rejection

The world of social media has been all abuzz today with Mike Huckabee’s weekend response to the “Where was God in Connecticut?” question. Huckabee’s “answer” is as familiar as the question to which it responds, and has been sombrely rehearsed by American evangelical types frequently over the past few decades when it comes to these kinds of tragedies. You know it well, don’t you? It goes something like this: “Well, why should we expect God to show up when we have spent the last fifty years systematically removing him from our [insert public institution—usually schools].” Simply put: “Where was God? Well, we kicked him out!” Read more

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