Shifting Sand: 19 July 2002
letter to S.
Do you ever think that we're 'bad' Christians? I think that a lot about myself. I don't know if my most recent wave of skepticism is just a summer thing or a break-from-Bible-college thing or the way I really am. Maybe it's just part of being 21.
I just don't understand how I can have so much biblical knowledge and so much immersion in the culture and how I have studied faith for so long and read the writings of so many wise people, but I haven't got a clue how to pray anymore. I know less every year. When I was 16, I was an arrogant Christian, but at least I talked to God a lot. Just because I wouldn't pray that way now doesn't mean it wasn't valid then.
There's so many issues that I don't know what to think of anymore. The other day, I was watching the news with V. and they were reporting about Canada legalising gay marriages (or coming really close to it or something) and she was SO against it and I just ... wasn't . I mean, I can't be against it, it's human rights. Does that mean I'm supporting sin? Is it sin? I don't even know THAT. How am I supposed to reconcile that with my faith in the Bible and the words, "homosexuals do not enter the kingdom" along with murderers and adulterers, etc. What about that? I can't allow both of those thoughts, can I?
My issue isn't with the morality of gayness or whatever, it's with the fact that I have no real foundation anymore. I can't even be a zealot if I want to, because I change my mind every day. Either that, or I never have an opinion in the first place and I never get around to deciding.
I don't know that I need to decide on issues in order to learn to pray again though. I hope not. Right now, it's incomprehensible that God, with all of his unfathomable bigness and all his knowledge, wants to talk to me. It may even have an element of celebrity to it as well: how do I hold my own in a conversation with Leonard Cohen, let alone God? I have nothing to say, I don't know enough, I'm not entertaining enough. And why would he talk to me? Who am I? Who are any of us?
The whole point is that I don't pray much anymore because I don't think God is going to say much and I have little to say, and so I sit with nothing to say and no faith to hear, and so what's the point of calling if I'm just going to sit on the phone saying nothing?
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