faith

Do we need to be born again?

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During the phase of my life when I was trying different churches, I was several times persuaded that I needed to be saved and to be born again. The young and enthusiastic Christians I came across, convinced me that if I just asked Jesus into my life, I would experience a dramatic and more or less instant change. I grasped at this in the hope that it would somehow take away my doubts and problems, spiritual and otherwise.

I wanted to be accepted by the bright, happy people around me. I wanted to smile like them and have all my worries wiped away. Each time I decided that I needed to be saved, I was carried along on a wave of positive feeling for several days. However, after the endorphins wore off, I settled back into doubts and depression, feeling even worse than I did before, convinced that I must be at fault if this magic cure didn’t work.

By the time I had tried to be born-again for the third time, and hadn’t experienced any major transformation in the way I thought or felt, I was embarrassed and disillusioned. I eventually became angry, because I felt that I had been manipulated and put under pressure to commit myself to something that wasn’t right for me. These feelings contributed to my cynicism about churches, and were certainly a big part of the reason why I steered clear of churches for many years.

I am still trying to understand these experiences. Why didn’t being saved and born again work for me? Was I like the hard ground by the path which Jesus talked about in his parable of the sower. The seed didn’t grow there, because the listeners didn’t understand the gospel and birds came and ate the seed before it could take root.

Do we need to be born again? In his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus made it clear that we do. No-one can enter the Kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the spirit.

My problem lay in seeing being born again as a formula that would more or less instantly change my life. As anyone who has had a child knows, giving birth is not a quick and pain-free process and it doesn’t take the same time for everyone. My first labour lasted from 8 am to 5 pm precisely. Afterwards my boss wrily remarked that I had just put in an average day’s work. I know many people, however, who have endured labour pains for two days.

The traditional church in which I grew up put a lot of emphasis on people’s lives turning around in a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus type of conversion, so much so, that people who didn’t have this experience doubted whether they were really Christians. However, although Saul’s life changed direction in an instant, he didn’t become the apostle Paul overnight. In Galations 1, he tells us that he spent three years in the desert before travelling to Jerusalem to begin his ministry.

A new life in Christ isn’t a strong drug that instantly cures our doubts and uncertainties and worries. I was young and immature. I thought that being born again would bring me into some Disneyland-like Nirvana where I would be happy and untroubled. I didn’t realise that to really grow spiritually, I had to go into the desert, and face my fears and doubts in a place where God was the only one I could turn to.

This has been a difficult post to write. I have had to work through lingering feelings of anger and resentment, and realise that the people who pushed me into having born-again experiences were well-meaning and enthusiastic. The prayers I made then did mean something. I am sure that they helped me in some way to eventually find a spiritual path, but God, thankfully, didn’t answer them in the way I hoped he would.

A friend was talking to me about ambitious parents who try to get their children to talk or walk or read before they’ve reached that developmental stage. He said, “You can’t get grass to grow any faster by pulling it.”

We might be given the job of sowing a seed, but it’s God who prepares the ground and provides the right conditions for it to grow. That seed may lie in the ground a long time before it is warm and moist enough for it to germinate. My life is proof of that.

I took a scunner to churches

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I took a scunner to churches, (for a full definition of scunner, see previous post) but before I gave up on organised religion, I visited a lot of different ones.

I moved to London, where there were churches aplenty, and became angrily determined to try as many churches as possible until I either found the right one, which would make Christianity click into place, or bitterly declared that I had tried everything, and that there was absolutely nothing in this religion business.

My attitude to finding the ‘right church’, was as immature as my hope that I would find my one True Love who would swing me onto his horse, metaphorically-speaking, of course, before we galloped off to the happily ever-after. I longed for something I called God, to fill in the cracks and inadequacies in my life. I went to church looking for nice feelings, but I wasn’t spiritually mature enough to realise that faith isn’t just about feelings. Genuine faith means going on, even when you feel desperately alone, in the belief that God is still there.I wasn’t yet ready to realise that God isn’t like a dose of paracetamol or a swig of alcohol, taken to lessen pain or provide a brief high.

When I went to churches, I took with me a wistful longing, but it was wrapped deep in my cynical, critical attitudes. I didn’t go to church with the kind of humble, receptive frame of mind which is required in order to get something out of it.

One example sticks out. I usually tried to slip out without speaking to anyone, but when I visited a church in the States, I was caught at the top of the steps by a beaming man who asked me how I had enjoyed the church service.

I coldly informed him that I had not enjoyed the choruses or the band, because my church permitted us to sing nothing but the Psalms of David without musical accompaniment.

I cringe inwardly as I remember the way his smile collapsed into a look of bewilderment. Before he could recover, I swept down the steps with all the haughtiness of a nineteenth century debutante practising for her presentation to the Queen.

With attitudes like these, it’s not surprising that I got very little out of trying different churches. Sometimes, however, things did penetrate my hard carapace. I remember attending a charismatic church with a friend who was concerned about me. Afterwards we talked for a while with an older person in the church, and I trusted him with parts of my story.

What he said about God’s love cut through all my defences. I realised that although I gave intellectual assent to what the Bible said about God’s love, the words were actually devoid of meaning. My deity placed impossible demands on me and called it love. The gulf between my idea of God’s love and what love should actually be, was impassable and unbridgeable. I didn’t know how I would ever manage to trust God.

In the next post, I’ll continue the story of how I finally stopped going to church.

What have bank cards to do with faith?

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What have bank cards to do with faith? Since starting this blog, I’ve had a lot of mishaps with bank cards. Even though I didn’t really intend this blog to be about bank cards, I felt a need to vent my feelings by writing about these muddles. I thought that the unfortunate series of incidents with bank cards had come to an end in the spring. However, I made another careless mistake recently, and this time I was not quite so sanguine about it. I began to wonder if bank cards and faith are not quite such wholly unrelated subjects after all.

The muddle started off simply enough. I relaxed. I was on holiday abroad, and I sat in a busy cafe and ate ice cream with my family and didn’t think too much about the purse I had shoved deep into the rucksack beneath the swimming stuff and the sun lotion. We went for a swim in a lake, and hiked back along a quiet mountain path as shadows lengthened in the soft evening light. We didn’t quite reach our holiday house, before the children began to flag, and we stopped to rummage through the rucksack for the emergency food rations. By the time we got back, the hillside was in shadow and we cooked a quick meal and bundle the kids into bed. My husband unpacked the rucksack afterwards. I knew that I should really have checked where my purse was and put it back into my handbag, but I was far tired and it didn’t seem to matter. I was hardly going to need it that night.

The next morning, I was just about to hunt for my purse so that I could go out and buy milk when I suddenly fell victim to the holiday tummy. The least said about the next few hours the better, but I can report that I was not in any condition to worry about where my purse was, never mind try to locate it. I wasn’t quite sure where this evil bug had come from. A few days later, when we were out and about, I caught one of my children filling the water bottles from the bowl of the fountain where people spit and pee and let their dogs bathe, rather than from the stream of running water. All was then clear.

To give me a bit of peace and quiet, my husband took the kids out for a longer hike. I recovered remarkably quickly and decided to hike up the mountain to meet them. Before I left, I hunted unsuccessfully for my purse, but expected that it was probably still in the hiking rucksack, which my husband had taken with him. Mild anxiety turned very quickly into total panic, when I met up with the rest of the family and found out that my purse wasn’t in the rucksack.

I walked back to the holiday house to check again. Although I was walking through some of the most stunning scenery in Europe, I was utterly miserable, because I was coming to the following conclusions:

– My purse must have either been stolen the previous day in the cafe or been lost on the way back to the holiday house.
– In either case, I was very unlikely to ever see it again.
– Because it had taken me almost twenty-four hours to realise this, someone had probably used my bank card and my driving license to take a large sum of money out of our bank account.

I tried to pray, but my faith felt like a threadbare rag which no longer covered me. I was assaulted by feelings that I was a bad, good-for-nothing person whom God couldn’t possibly love, and that God had just been waiting for me to relax and let my guard down, in order to punish me.

A thorough search of the holiday house, including under beds and in drawers and kitchen cupboards, revealed no sign of the missing purse. I phoned my bank to cancel my card, and just before the credit on my phone ran out, I heard the assistant gabble something about all cards held in this name will be cancelled. Now I had another thing to worry about. It was a joint account. Did that mean that the bank would automatically cancel my husband’s card too?

Because half of our holiday money had been in my purse, we didn’t have enough money left to pay for train fares to the airport. While my husband went out to try and make another withdrawal from the cash machine, I went through the following worst case scenario:

– We won’t be able to get any more money out because
a) a thief has already emptied the account, or
b) the bank has also cancelled my husband’s card
– We won’t have enough money for food and so we will have to starve ourselves so that the children can eat.
– We won’t have enough money for trains to the airport. I couldn’t think of a way around this one.

My husband returned with some money, and none of these fears were realised, but it was still a pretty grim evening.

The morning sun, brought a little more hope and optimism, even though my schedule for the morning was going to be a long, hot hike to the tourist office on the off-chance that someone had handed in a lost purse, with possibly a detour via the police station, to officially report a missing purse.

Just before I set out, my husband said that he would make one last search of the house. I didn’t have any hopes that this would yield anything. However, he shook out the covers and checked the bed. There it was, wedged between the bed and the wall. I had checked under the bed the day before and had totally missed it. All night, I had been worrying about the missing purse, while I was lying right beside it.

I am utterly convinced that God must have a sense of humour.

I am still not sure quite how or why this mix-up happened, but it showed me that when push comes to shove, I still have a shockingly bad image of God as a petty tyrant who is waiting to pounce if I let down my defences for a moment and actually enjoy myself. There’s no point blaming it on my Calvinist upbringing. It’s my problem now, and I have to deal with it. The incident also showed me how vulnerable I feel and how little faith I have when the security of my bank card and access to money is (apparently) taken away.

I think I need to revisit ’30 Lies About Money’ by Peter Koenig, an unusual book which begins by stating quite frankly that it is about the relationship between money and soul.

Signs of spring

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I’ve discovered that I can insert photos into posts! I’m not much of a photographer but I’m going to take some photos of our very late spring and start decorating some of the blog. It’s been a long hard winter, but things are starting to grow again, and sometimes, just sometimes, it feels as if my faith is coming out of hibernation.

Clash of two kingdoms

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I wanted to use this blog to write about my own personal journey towards Catholicism and how I dealt with some of the issues which presented themselves. However, I’ve recently found myself writing about other things, such as struggles with doubt.

I also want to be honest. I don’t want to put up a post about how I dealt with Catholic teaching on Mary, even if I’ve already drafted something, if I’m feeling, as I do right now, that I’m having issues with trust. It’s easy to lie when I see people, to put on a brave face, and tell everyone I’m fine, and, if I’m in church, to dab the dampness from my eyes just before the sign of peace and shake hands and smile as if I feel perfectly peaceful inside.

What I find difficult, and what I really don’t want to do, is to lie when I’m writing and say that everything is going well when it isn’t. That’s why I’ve decided to write a bit about the problems I’m having at the moment with trust. It will help me to capture the thoughts whizzing around my head and, who knows, it might help someone else who’s going through something similar.

Until recently, I thought that I was the only one, or one of only a few people, who struggled with trusting God. When I became Catholic, one of my in-laws gave me a very helpful little book called Doorway to Faith which has made the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) a lot more accessible. On each page it takes a section of the Catechism, comments on it, and gives a short prayer linked to the comments. With the help of this wee book, I realised that I had read swathes of the Catechism (I gave up around page 250) without understanding what it was about. For instance, I failed to appreciate CCC 397:

Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command. All subsequent sin would be disobedience towards God and lack of trust in his goodness.

Okay, I think that means that I’m alone when I have problems with trust.

My own lack of trust has two aspects. The first is a lack of belief in God’s goodness. I’ve been calling this ‘attacks of a bad image of God’, but I think it is also linked with a bad image of self. When I doubt that God loves me, this is usually associated with the feeling that I’m unlovable. I’m not going to go into my bad images of God, but they’re usually associated with me being some sort of unattractive squishy creature like a worm or a beetle which fully deserves to be crushed, but which God might decide to spare even though he finds it quite unsavoury. I can no longer remember how much of this was spelt out by the minister, and how much was supplied by my own imagination as a child. However, I imagine that other people struggle with bad images of God for many different reasons.

If I can’t believe that God really loves me, it is hard for me to believe that he has my best interests at heart and this brings me to the next aspect, the struggle between two kingdoms. I have my own ideas about how my life should be run, thank you very much, and when God seems to have other plans, I become frustrated, disappointed, depressed and angry.

My dog often thinks she knows best. She barks at strangers, tries to chase cars and bolts off in her own direction so fast that my back jerks painfully when she gets to the end of the lead. I’ve been trying to train her and our relationship is a lot better when she recognises that I’m in charge, not her, and that she’ll be rewarded if she’s patient. However, there are still difficult, frustrating days when she thinks she’s the leader. On these days, I wonder if this is what God feels like, when he deals with me.

Recently it’s been difficult to pray, the gulf apparently uncrossable. After she’s been told off or done something she knows she shouldn’t, my dog slinks reluctantly towards me, head down. I feel like that. There are times when I don’t even want to try praying. I want my kingdom, not God’s, even if it is a dry, barren place ruled by a depressed despot who wants everyone else to be as unhappy as herself.

I’ll give the last words again to Fr. Gerard W. Hughes. From ‘Cry of Wonder’, a glimpse of what could be:

I want my life to be a song, in tune, in harmony with God, with all humanity with all creation and with my whole inner self. I have no desire to be the songwriter, the conductor, or to control the whole choir and orchestra.

A talent for chaos

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I blame it on my grandfather. When he came round to tea, my grandmother told stories about a funny man who was always getting himself into trouble, Laurel and Hardy style. One time, he locked himself out of his car and had to go through a pile of old keys from scrapped cars until he found one which unlocked his own car. While visiting friends, he mislaid his car keys and they turned the house upside down in a futile effort to find them. He gave up, decided to walk home and the missing keys tumbled out of his hat as he put it on his head. Another time, he locked himself out of his house and had to break in through the bathroom window. A neighbour caught sight of his legs disappearing through the window and called the police.

I was quite old, perhaps eleven or twelve, before I twigged that the hero of all these stories was my grandfather.

I’ve inherited his talent for self-created chaos. It lay dormant for a while, but it’s come back in full force over the last few months. Not long ago, I had an incident with car keys which my grandfather would have been proud of. I bundled the dog into the back of the car and closed the boot. The car doors clicked as they automatically locked, and I realised that I had dropped the car keys onto the floor of the boot while I adjusted the dog’s seat belt. I could see the keys lying beside the dog, but none of the doors would budge.

Fortunately more help is available for people like me than there was in my grandfather’s day. I called the AA, with the help of my mobile ‘phone, an invention which my grandfather never took to, although he did learn to use a computer in his eighties. The AA man managed to squeeze a wire through the door and hook up the handle to unlock it. I was amazed at how easy it is to break into a car. Perhaps car doors aren’t as solid now as they were in my grandfather’s day.

That wasn’t the last silly mistake. The bank sent me a card to replace the one I had accidentally torn up. Well and good. Life went back to normal and I could pay for the shopping. Not long after, I was sent yet another new bank card. Perhaps this was the one I would have got anyway, if I hadn’t needed a replacement. I decided that I didn’t need two new bank cards and so I shoved the new, new one onto my in-tray and made a note to myself to ‘phone the bank and ask them about it. I hate ‘phoning the bank, especially giving my personal details to a computer while I wait to talk to a flesh and blood person, and so this item was way down my priority list.

Last week I did the kind of mega shop I do once in six weeks to stock up on tins and food for the freezer. I put everything through the check-out, bagged it and when I tried to pay, my card was refused. Shooting an apologetic look at the queue of customers behind me, I ran out and tried the bank machine which informed me that my card was invalid.

Hmm. I suspected that it had something to do with that new, new card and so I asked the supermarket staff to put my bags in the chiller while I ran home to check. I ‘phoned the bank and a very nice lady explained that my new card ran out one month after the new new card was issued, regardless of the expiry date.

I had to return to the supermarket, put everything through the checkout and bag it all up again. This time the payment worked. I returned home, tired, but feeling as if I had managed to maintain a sense of humour and a little bit of peacefulness and patience with myself. Sometimes it’s hard living with myself, and so I have sympathy with other people who have to put up with me.

What has this got to do with faith? Nothing except that it’s part of life.

This was going to be mainly a funny post, but since I wrote the first draft, I received news that the close relative I wrote about earlier has become ill again. It felt as if I was taking up a burden, that is almost too heavy for me, one which I had perhaps never completely put down. It’s a burden which doesn’t make any sense because there is nothing I can do by worrying. Didn’t Jesus say something about burdens? Handing my burden over means trusting that God really is there, knows what he’s doing and that he’s really got our best interests at heart. It’s comparatively easy with a self-induced mix up with bank cards, but it’s a lot harder when it comes to the health of someone you love. I’m not sure I can manage that much trust right now.

If anyone is reading it, I would appreciate a prayer, or just a thought, if you prefer to put it that way, for me and my family.

Suffering

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Not long ago an older person was telling me that their children, whom they had brought up Catholic, no longer attended church. He was probably wondering why I had come back to church after many years of non-attendance. If I could have put the reason into one word, it would be suffering. A painful, apparently unresolvable situation pushed me into seeking out the church. However, one word only tells half of the story. The joy I found in the church and in a renewed relationship with God is what has kept me coming back.
A few years ago, a close family member became seriously ill. Long before that I had kicked against the traces and left the traditional church in which I was brought up. However, I still remembered many of the Bible verses I had learnt as a child, and I decided to cling onto the promise that if we have faith as big as a mustard seed then we can move mountains.
Although I believed in God, I couldn’t honestly have said that I was comfortable with anything more specific than that. I decided to be ecumenical and asked an Episcopalian priest, a Salvation Army cadet and our parish priest for prayers. I wasn’t just hoping. I decided that however bleak things looked, I was going to hold God to his promise and believe that He could change an apparently hopeless situation. A word of warning for agnostics: if you ask people to pray for a loved one, watch out. You will probably be included in their prayers, and you don’t quite know where that will take you.
I asked our local priest for prayers, and wrote in an email, ‘I am not a very religious person …. I don’t feel I am very good at praying. However, I have a strong belief in God and his goodness and that in him we live and move and have our being. I feel that there is very little I can do in this situation but I still have faith that there will be a way through.’
The reply I received, helped me to keep on hoping. He wrote, ‘But you watch, your faith and hope and, above all, your love, will have startling results.’
He was right. I couldn’t have foreseen what would happen. Over the last two years, my loved one has made a long slow journey back to life, and, even more unexpectedly, I have experienced the great joy of becoming Catholic. The prayers of others sustained me through a dark period and it meant a great deal to me that my friends in the Episcopalian church and the Salvation Army expressed their support and happiness that I have finally found a spiritual home.