I have found myself, over the last few years, asking a lot of questions about everything. I need the questions to know that I am living my own life, thinking my own thoughts, finding the path that is meant for me and me alone. But some of the questions have been harder than others. I find myself questioning my religion, my faith, the things I've been taught about God my entire life. And those questions can be scary. They can sometimes even feel wrong. But I believe firmly that questions which are truly openly seeking truth can never be wrong.
I have found myself torn between my faith and my practicality. I'm an imaginative and creative person, yet I am also very pragmatic, realistic, often driven by logic. So on the one hand I believe in unicorns and multiple universes within multiple dimensions of space and time. But on the other hand, I can't find it within myself to place the full weight of my faith into a religion based on the belief that a book written thousands of years ago, by many different authors, compiled into its current form by a committee of powerful men, is in every way factual and true.
I realize that Christianity includes a huge spectrum of beliefs, but my view of the religion has been primarily informed by the churches I grew up in, the beliefs of my family, and the other Christians I have found myself surrounded with. And even though Christianity can be so broad, so varied, so diverse, I find that each individual group tends to look at the others with distaste and scorn, often believing that their own version of Christianity has captured the truth of the matter more completely and accurately than any of the other versions available. And so you find Christians preaching at other Christians and trying to convert people to the real form of Christianity and warning others who believe in God and Christ that they may still be in danger of hell because of their errant beliefs.
So as I find myself questioning- not the existence of divinity, not the essence of faith, but rather the details of the religion I grew up with- I also find myself pushing back against the voices of those who have formed my religion, telling me it's dangerous to ask questions, telling me that those other churches are mistaken, telling me that I'm straying too far and am in danger of losing my way. I hear those voices, but I can't bring myself to believe them because in them I hear so much fear and sometimes ignorance. For I know, in the depths of my heart, that a faith that can't be questioned is no faith at all.
In the midst of this journey of faith, I sometimes find myself looking up at a cross hanging before me in a church sanctuary and ask myself what it means to me, ask God to guide my discovery, for I don't ever want to search on my own. I gaze up at this cross and can no longer say that I believe, for certain, that a man named Jesus, who was also God, died on a cross and rose again for the salvation of my sins. There is no way to know for certain that this happened, and I cannot insult my own intelligence by forcing myself to believe that. But I also cannot look at that cross and tell myself that it means nothing. And so I ask God- whatever, wherever, whomever God may be- to guide my search, to direct my heart, to give me peace about where I end up.
Sometimes I hear an answer, just a whisper inside my soul, that reminds me that anything is possible, and this is the essence of God. This voice reminds me that truth is not the same as facts. I come away from gazing at the cross with this feeling that the message of the cross can be true, can be the definition of God and of love, whether any of the words of the Bible are factually accurate or not. I come away with the realization that the definition of Christ- salvation, redemption, sacrificial love- is an accurate description of something that is out there in the universe, calling to us to share in the beauty and truth of this love, whether it was ever with us in the form of man or not. It's still there somewhere, somehow, in some form or other, for us to reach out to, become a part of, for us to find our true life within it and through it.
This is where my questions have led me so far. But for me, the beauty of asking questions, of seeking truth, is knowing that it doesn't stop here. I know that the questions will always lead me into new territory, into new understanding, into new leaps of faith. I know that the questions will never find an end, that the answers will never find an end, that there is no bounds for truth. And this is beautiful and exciting to me.
