Spirituality: Portraits of Faith

Some who claim to lack faith might welcome the prospect of a God who disturbs our complacency, only to propose a better and more intimate love. They may feel they can deal with a God committed to the human enterprise to the end, in good times and bad, but not a moralist God or a God invoked only to solve problems. Whether such a God exists and may prove to be a reliable conversation partner remain the crucial questions, of course. But willingness to imagine a God that one might be prepared to consider is an exercise in honesty.

In the end, each of us must decide whether our own life story is more truly narrated with God included as a major stakeholder and interlocutor, or not. No one should be misled into believing that the Jewish and Christian Scriptures offer uniformly attractive or reassuring evidence in favor of faith. For believers as well as unbelievers, some episodes remain life-long aggravations. Yet, in the end, believers are not sure they want to see them removed. Problematic stories are valuable in dramatizing aspects of dealing with God that it is best to know about.

Adrian Lyons, S.J. from Imagine Believing