Understanding and accepting the tenets of one’s faith tradition can sometimes be a challenge. How can one God be a trinity of three persons? How could Jesus have been conceived by a virgin? What about ascensions into heaven? Are non-Christians excluded from heaven? Why do babies need to be washed clean of original sin in baptism (babies don’t act sinfully!)? Why do bad things happen to good people? Are some parts of the Old Testament religious metaphor rather than literal fact?
I have struggled with some of the questions listed above. I have journeyed with people who have struggled with some of the other questions listed above. I have talked to pastors who say they struggle to deliver sermons about the Trinity.
One of the lessons I have learned is that unexpected faith lessons come to light in the process of trying to make sense of religious tenets that don’t readily make sense. I don’t only mean figuring out that which we’re trying to understand – rather, unexpected faith lessons become apparent to us as we work to make sense of matters that don’t yet make sense to us. Beyond the unexpected lessons that we discover in trying to understand topics that challenge us, we sometimes find answers to the topics we set out to understand. Other times, we may not find answers or explanations to what challenges us. However, genuine effort to find answers to challenging questions can – in time – help us to “make peace” with remaining in one’s faith tradition. We find that a faith tradition as a whole can be true even if one (or a few) topics in that faith tradition don’t readily make sense to us. In addition, I find great value in the homilies (sermons) of pastors who readily communicate their own struggles and talk about their own efforts to understand specific topics they haven’t yet figured out.
The academic and theologian James Fowler did groundbreaking work on how we understand and navigate faith throughout our life stages in his book Stages of Faith. In that book, Fowler lays out six faith stages that people can progress through from early childhood into the more mature stages available as we move through life. The first three developmental stages are readily available by high school. Entering into the subsequent stages require us to actively engage in our faith in an “I am choosing to grow up in faith” manner – including making an intentional personal effort to make sense of faith in deeper ways and to work through life’s difficulties with a faith lens.
Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages. If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog post, please share it with them (thank you!).
