A line in the blacktop

I tend to experience the most clarity in thought while doing mundane tasks, like mowing the grass or shoveling snow. I think the responsibility of controlling my body tends to distract my thoughts, so when I have an activity to participate in that does not require thought, my brain goes wild.

Anyway, last night as I was sealing our driveway, I began to think about the "story of my faith", which has been a roller coaster with more downs than ups. I feel like I am constantly bouncing between doubt and hope, ignorance and peace.

I think I can put every point of my faith experience on a continuum between atheism and peace, having experienced everything from one end of that continuum to the other:

(Please excuse the geekyness of this visual, I think you'll understand why I include it in just a bit.)

I left the right end of this line blank, because I'm convinced that there exists a state of faith that I have not experienced, something beyond peace.

At any point in time I can pretty much put myself somewhere on this line. Most days I hover somewhere around hope. Sometimes this is an intense hope for the future; hope that some day God will change me, make me into someone who isn't always asking questions or doubting or wondering about this or that...

Sometimes this is a more pure kind of hope, hope for eternity. Hope for the day when all questions will be answered, not because I "figured it out" but because God is the answer...

Sometimes I briefly dip into something which might be called peace. Often I have a hard time differentiating between peace and ignorance; I don't know that I have ever experienced the former without the latter.

In any case, I often wonder what is "out there" that I am missing. What would a faith that is "true", or "right", or "real" look like?

So, as I filled the cracks in our aging driveway with black goop, I was reminded of an exchange in the book I just finished reading, A New Kind of Christian, by Brian McLaren.

In it, Neo, the sort of "postmodern guru" of the story, is explaining something to Dan, who describes the exchange:

[Neo] knelt down on the path, cleared away some fallen leaves, and drew a line in the dust. I stooped down next to him.

"This might help you. Very often,” he explained, “debates in the church occur on this level. There are all kinds of positions on an issue, along this line, with the most extreme positions being here and here.”

I offered a couple of examples: “OK. So Catholics are over here and Protestants over there. Calvinists are over here, and Arminians are over there. And charismatics are here and anticharismatics over there. And we could do the same on the issues of pacifism, inerrancy of the Bible, women in leadership, how the church should seek homosexuals, and—”

“Exactly,” he interrupted. “Now, almost all debate in the church takes place on this line. The issue is where the right point on the line is. So people pick and defend their points. Each person’s point becomes the point in his or her mind. Here’s what I’m suggesting: What if the point defending approach is, pardon the pun, pointless? In other words, what if the position God wants us to take isn’t on that line at all but somewhere up here?” He was moving his hand in a small circle, palm down, about a foot above the line he had drawn in the dust.

“So you’re saying,” I replied, “that we have to transcend the normal level of discourse. that makes sense to me. I mean, Jesus did that sort of thing all the time. Like with the woman at the well in John 4. The big debate is over where people should worship, on this mountain or on that mountain. Jesus doesn’t choose one point or the other; he says that the answer is on this higher level, that what God wants is for us to worship him in spirit and truth, wherever we are. Both mountains are good places to worship, so in that way both sides are right. But where you worship isn’t the point at all, so in that way both sides are wrong.”

While I trowelled more patch on the driveway I began to wonder if that "real faith" that seems to elude me is not on my line at all, but somewhere "up here"? (Imagine me waving my hand over a line I have scratched in my driveway patch) Could it be possible to have a faith that includes some of most of the elements on my line? A faith where peace, hope, and doubt can coexist? A faith where I can have peace without the requirement of ignorance?

Maybe that is possible. Maybe it is not. But if it is, it is worth pursuing.