Faith

I was the first born to a young hippy couple that were part of the Jesus People Movement, a west coast Christian movement that broke down the barriers of traditional church. My early life was lived in communal housing with both street people and hippies. Once a second child was born we moved to our own house and had different boarders living with us. The house was always filled with all sorts of people: some intellectuals, others musicians, some shoemakers, others teachers, some mental health patients, others healers, some wanderers, others searchers, some peacemakers, and others rebels. Our young imaginations were left open to the vast enormity of it all and I felt God all around me.
When it came to faith, my parents allowed each of their 4 children to find their own journey. As a result, all 4 of us developed extremely different expressions that each now ring true with who we are and where we are in life. It was with such a family that I continually learned how to live alongside and learn from others.

When I became a teenager and chose to go to a popular church and youth group, I found myself facing rigid views I had never come across before. There was a way I was supposed to believe, feel, think, and act in order to be part of this Christian community at large. I spent a time trying to conform, as though God wasn’t attainable in the truest sense unless I jumped through these hoops. I began feeling rebellious, in my continual failure. The teachings never sat right with me. God, the one from my childhood, and Christian community soon became two very different places for me. I was careful not to let the latter too close to destroy the God I knew.

It was sometime around my mid teens when my family switched to a church with an intellectual pastor who had the mind of an artist. He thought outside the box and allowed me a glimpse of hope that my faith might still be legitimate. Still, my 20’s saw me firmly established as “one to pray for” in some Christian communities and I felt a strange compulsion to stir the pot and provoke them.

One day I saw my faith as a shelf of jars. Each jar was a different doctrine or belief. As I studied which jars were on my shelf I realized that there were many that had been placed there that I was not convicted of. I began the process of picking up each of those jars to put on the floor only to realize that there were more jars strewn around the floor. These were even more thoughts and beliefs, some of which I had taken off my shelf at times when I felt I wasn’t supposed to believe such things. I was overwhelmed and the process of moving jars back and forth didn’t appear straightforward.

It was around this time that I decided to announce I was no longer a Christian. It seemed the best way to eliminate the pressure of other’s expectations and to allow me a clear space to think out what I believed. The first thing I did was clear the entire shelf of jars. Everything went on the floor. In doing this I realized that what I was really searching for was truth and love. Truth, because there I would find God. Love, because even as a child I knew without a doubt that love was the most important thing in the world.

Two jars went on to my shelf. Two jars I was convicted of: firstly, Love and secondly, the fact that there was a creator who loved me. That was it. As simple as that. No doctrine. No having to feel washed in the blood of a lamb. Nothing. There were no barriers that God had to conform to. No rules of engagement that I could feel secure seating myself in.

I felt free and I felt excited. If I could say I could sense God at all, I sensed that he was waiting for me to do this all along, as though he couldn’t operate in the box either. It was a liberating time in which a lot of my early convictions came flooding back to me. But instead of life becoming black and white and lining up in neat rows of easily distinguishable laws, I was relieved to feel things getting greyer, less defined. Life grew even more colourful, imaginative, creative, and daring. Anything could happen. As things became less defined they became simpler, as contradictory as it sounds. Instead of figuring out whether something was right or wrong I was to just accept and love. This sat well with my soul.

I was heavily involved in the arts and found an extremely accepting community among them. Artists by nature are somewhat counter culture and so accept each other with all their warts and bruises, destruction and rebelliousness, and ever realness. I could be myself there and people appreciated who that was. I found I could openly talk about my deep protected faith at unguarded moments and they still accepted me.

I've had a handful of friends over the years that between us we could share our faith in a way that supported the other. One was a Muslim. One practiced her First Nations ancestor’s beliefs. One was exploring Buddhism. I hate these titles, because these individuals are so much more than labels, but it makes the point that I felt a deep connection with what might appear on the surface to be very different people. We were each either searching for love and truth or we had both in some way met the Creator.

And so it sits. My shelf remains pretty bare. 3 jars currently sit there. The third came from a person I heard speak about the cycle of physical addiction and how it relates identically to the cycle of failure within faith. Although I would say that there is a lot I stand for, experience, and believe, I don’t often define things as concrete as my jars.

My last thought and a profound realization for me is this simple truth:
“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”