According to This, My Faith Has Never Been Stronger

Today I read a description of faith that immediately shot me to my keyboard to write this reflection.

In his book, I Asked for Wonder, Abraham Joshua Heschel (one of the great spiritual teachers of the 20th century), writes about his belief that everyone at some point in their life has a moment when the veil is lifted. Where the momentous reality of God mysteriously and magically makes itself known to us. Where we catch but a glimpse of the beauty and the peace of the Transcendent.

Whether that’s true or not God only knows, but Heschel’s larger point is that these moments (assuming they do indeed happen) are incredibly rare, and for some (most?) people they are tantamount to shooting stars, passing by unremembered. Whereas in others they “kindle a light that is never quenched” (p 37). In other words, the rare, probably fleeting moment is so profound, or so noticeable, or so impactful, its glow becomes joined to the source of its illumination and lingers eternal.

Then, the final two sentences of this section from I Asked For Wonder are what caused me to get up off the couch and immediately come to the keyboard. In describing those for whom these lifting-of-the-veil moments kindle a light that’s never quenched Heschel writes,

“The remembrance of that experience and the loyalty to the response of that moment are the forces that sustain our faith. In this sense, faith is faithfulness, loyalty to an event, loyalty to our response.”

I’ve written a lot about faith. The entire first section of my book The Shift is dedicated to recalibrating how many of us who grew up conservative/evangelical tend to think about faith. Whereas I was conditioned to hear “faith” and equate it to, “believing the right kinds of things,” which meant that my faith was strong as long as I believed (and with great conviction!) the right doctrines. Conversely, my faith would be seen as weak should I ever have doubts. Of course, I now see just how small and myopic and misplaced those descriptions are of the concept of faith.

And yet, for all I’ve thought about, talked about, and written about faith, I’ve yet to come across the above description as put forth by Abraham Joshua Heschel.

So do you mind if I say more about this? Specifically how I now see my own faith as a kind of loyalty to a handful of events… events where, for lack of better language, the veil was lifted and I experienced but a glimpse of the beauty and peace of God.

As I wrote about recently, when I was 17 years old my soul cracked open one afternoon while on a church trip with my youth group. (👇🏼Read here 👇🏼)

I’d spent the morning walking the sands of Huntington Beach with a partner going up to strangers with the purpose of saving their souls (aka, getting them to say a magical prayer). But as I returned to my room that afternoon, and crashed on the bed, the ensuing emotional, psychological, and indeed spiritual experience I had was unlike anything I’d known prior or since.

While I can reasonably armchair psychoanalyze why the experiences occurred (likely—as I write about the above article—because I’d just been exposed as a fraud; someone claiming to be a Christian but who actually had no real grounds for doing so), I nonetheless cannot tell you what it was. Sure, I suppose one could go the route of studies like this where researchers claim to find ways in which prayer shapes our brain, or like this where researchers attempt to find the parts of our brain that make us believe in God. That’s all fine and well, and to the person who wants to write off the majority of humanity’s experiences with and/or belief in Transcendence as nothing more than the brain lighting up in certain ways, I’d probably just say, “Meh, okay, go for it.” As I told one guy years ago at a dinner party after he said as much, “Well, to be fair, we are limited finite creatures who can only really experience anything as a result of consciousness and brain activity. So even if there IS actually something like “God” that exists, how else should we expect to experience or perceive that if not in and through and with our brain?”

But the point I want to make here is that something happened that day. Something that, in the moment, felt extremely significant. Something that ended up truly changing the course of my life forever—zero hyperbole employed. I won’t recount the entire event here (that’s what this post was for), but I will simply say that I felt as though God was inviting me to choose one of two paths.

1. Path One: continue life as normal, where everything was all about me, and where my claim to “Christianity” was nominal only.

2. Path Two: make a radical change, repent, and head in the direction of living life for something greater, namely, for God.

Spoiler alert: I chose the latter.

The significance of that moment cannot be overstated for truly everything in and about my life felt different after that. Far more than the common “camp high” experience that typically fizzles out after a few days or weeks upon return, the high of that moment (and the days that followed) was the rocket fuel that propelled me to become who I am right now.

And yet, at the same time, it should also be said that my beliefs, and how I practice my religion, is football fields away today from how it was 25 years ago. My shift from evangelicalism to progressive Christianity is well documented (both here and here), so any reader knows that what I believe today is very very different from what I believed back then (or what I believed 15 years ago, or 10, or 5…).

But my faith?

How is my faith 25 years later?

Which takes me back to Heschel’s definition of faith from above: Faith as faithfulness. Faith as the act of remaining loyal to an event. The continued commitment to the attitude that something happened. Faith as dedication by way of response. Faith as a life lived with perpetual acknowledgment that (such as in my case) the veil between heaven and earth was momentarily pierced and there God was encountered.

Reader, I’m not naive. I know all the very good reasons why it makes more rational sense to audit my afternoon in 1999 and conclude it was any number of things other than an encounter with some Divine Presence. And in the great accounting of all things, perhaps that will be the final verdict. I do not know.

But as far as I could tell then, and with regards to the impact it had on my life, my perception and my reality was that God and I had a chat. And I responded to that chat. An Event happened (which reminds me of what I wrote the other day about “God as Event”), of that I was and am sure.

My faith, then, according to Heschel, might be characterized by the degree to which I have remained faithful to that Event. Again, how I talk about it now, the words and phrases, the theological ramifications… all of that is different today. And again, the beliefs that I latched on to during that time in my life versus the beliefs I have now?Night and day different. SO much has changed in the past two and a half decades.

But my shifting beliefs,

and my altered practices,

and my modified lexicon,

none of these are necessarily factors that affect my faith, per se.

Because today I am still doing my absolute best to try and live for something and someone greater than myself.

Today I remain as committed as ever (perhaps even more so, given that I’ve been compiling this kind of effort for 25 years) to the vision of making my life in alignment with God’s dream for me and for Creation.

Today I still make choices that are a response to the fact that something happened 25 years ago.

My loyalty to that Event has really never wavered… which makes me a bit weepy, to be honest. Like, I’m really proud of that fact. Loyalty feels like a lost art in our culture of constant scrolling, incessant swiping, and holding off on committing to something just in case there’s something even better down the road.

I guess you could say that, irrespective of the way my beliefs and practices have shifted over the years, when you consider the fact that the snowball that began 25 years ago in that dorm-room in Southern California has been rolling ever since,

maybe in terms of faithfulness and loyalty to my encounter with God,

my faith has never been stronger.