Doubting

I just did a message with my students about doubt, and I'm not sure I really said anything.  I told them of times of doubt in my life.  I said that doubt can be used to deepen or further your faith.  I'm not sure I really explained how.  It turned into a "look at other people who doubted but chose to act on faith anyway" message instead of a "this is how doubt can be good for you" message.  All I really said is that you are going to always have doubts and questions, but I didn't get into how it works.  Maybe it's because I have some residual "it's not okay to doubt" lesson leftover from my childhood.

As I think more about it, I keep coming back to the book Insurrection by Peter Rollins.  In this book, Rollins talks about what he termed "Pyro-Theology" (please excuse the lack of page numbers, I don't have the book with me).  This is the process of lighting everything about your faith and religion on fire.  Whatever stands at the end of the fire is what faith is about.  Run with your doubt so that it completely deconstructs all that is part of your religious and faith experience until you get to the stuff that can't be taken apart any further.  Then, build your life on that.  Doubt is what you use to grind away the unnecessary fluff of religion, the stuff that doesn't make sense, the stuff that is contrary to real life experience, the stuff the leads to hate or destruction.  Doubt is needed to get past the junk in our faith traditions so that you can truly come face to face with truth.

Trying to do this Pyro-Theology would definitely not be easy.  It wouldn't be comfortable, but maybe it's comfort that is keeping us from authentic faith.  Maybe authentic faith cannot come without setting fire to the faith you have.  Maybe doubt is more important to faith than acceptance.  And perhaps once you burn it all down to see what's standing, you'll find that all the fluff that burned to the ground makes more sense.  Then you can build it back up with purpose and understanding, while replacing the structures that don't fit.

What do you think?  How has doubt helped you go further and deeper with your faith?  What have you burned to the ground?  What was left standing?

Immutable

Today, I was trying to center myself and get in tune with God.  I was laying on the floor praying, meditating, contemplating, when I started saying in my head, "Thy will be done" over and over.  Then, it morphed from the Lord's prayer to something more like "Not my will but yours be done."  Which I think is from Jesus' prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane (only took two times to spell that correctly).  

Then, my contemplation broke down, or at least changed.  I began to think about immutability. I began to ask is God immutable or am I?  Is the problem God or me?  I've been having a hard time conforming to God's call and I found myself wondering if God has compromised as much as God will.  Maybe I'm the one stubbornly standing my ground.  Is it me digging my feet in, not willing to bend a little?  Maybe God isn't the "Unmoved Mover" that Aristotelian thought has poisoned our faith with.  Maybe God is super flexible, yet knows when to stop. 

There are a couple of different lines of thought that remove immutability from the list of attributes we give to God.  Most notable is the Open Theism of the Evangelical movement (Greg Boyd is a big proponent of this), and then there is Process Theology, which is based from Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy.  Both of these visions of God show a God who is moved by us.  A God who loves us and responds to us, who is changed by us (this might more process than open theism). But I wonder what the Eastern Church or the Church fathers thought of this.  If you know feel free to leave a comment. 

This process/openness thought seems much truer to the God who offered to spare Sodom and Gomorrah (three tries on that one) as God struck a deal with Abraham.  The God who changed plans in the desert during the Exodus as a response to the way the Israelites acted.  This seem more mutable than immutable.

So what do we do with this?  Is helpful to recognize that God is bending at least to point to us and is inviting (not forcing) us to bend a little more towards God? 

The Prayer Exchange?

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about prayer, partly because I'm doing a series at my church on it, and partly because I've been struggling with prayer.

The struggle I have often with prayer is simply, what does it do?  I know that it is a way to connect and build a relationship with God.  That seems to work in a contemplative style of prayer, which I love.  But what about those prayers of petition.  You know the prayers asking God for things.  Besides the feeling that God should be a cosmic vending machine giving us what we ask for if we can only put the combination of change together and hit the right button (part of the message for tomorrow), I just wonder what the point is if God is really going to do whatever God feels is best at the time.  And looking around the world, it can be pretty hard to see what God is doing.

So I can pray for whatever I want and God will answer however God wants, then what's the point?  Should we do these kind of prayers at all?  Even prayer request time can quickly turn into gossip time.  Someone will lift up a prayer and then we ask all kinds of questions to get more detail as if the more details we give God the better the chance of God granting that wish (Is God a Genie?).  Which seems to be a perversion of the spirit of prayer requests. 


In exchange for talking to God, God will grant us three wishes, I mean prayer requests.  Then all will be well.  Except it doesn't seem to work that way at all.  It seems like God works in this world differently than how we expect.  Sometimes it can feel like God doesn't work at all, or is that just because God refuses to encroach on our free will.  Then what do prayers of petitions do other than voice our deepest desire to the creator of the universe?  Maybe that's all it is...