Keeping The Faith - At Least Trying To

Another submission from our friend Jules. Enjoy:

“I believe in the sun, even when it is not shining.
I believe in love, even when I cannot feel it.
I believe in God, even when He is silent.”

Written on the walls of a basement in Cologne, Germany, by a Jew in hiding during the Holocaust.

Faith is not an easy thing to me to write about, but I’m going to try. My faith, that is. I’ve always been interested in the faith of others and how they make it work in their lives, obviously making comparisons to my own struggles with belief and trust in God. I would not call myself a particularly religious person, although I have been raised Catholic from the get go and had strong religious influences growing up. Some of them were comforting, and some of them were scary. Today, I have to admit that my thoughts regarding my personal faith have a “confused” aspect to them, since I was taught that God loves, but God also punishes. Prayer life consisted of praying for the sick, those already gone, for something bad to get better and yes, at a more immature stage, for personal things I wanted for myself. Prayer was structured prayers and a little conversation added on for the personal stuff.

I’ve been praying since I could talk and was told to say my prayers. A younger “me” believed in the power of prayer and the answers that came, not always in the obvious way one might expect. Novenas weren’t something to sneeze at. Like everyone else on the planet, I have had hard times physically and emotionally, some difficult and some not as difficult as what others have to face. I felt God was there for me. So what happened? Over the years, my prayer life has taken on a more apprehensive angle – it’s gotten harder. Sometimes, it’s hard to believe. There are times, many times, when I feel myself praying to the air around me, alone. And that silence – well, let’s say I’ve “heard” that silence quite often, and I cannot not help but feel total isolation and abandonment from God. Hope sometimes goes down the drain.

I know that life is no piece of cake – it’s damned hard at times. We have no choice but to learn to accept. Some things, of course, take longer to accept, and some are perhaps never accepted – and this accumulation of loss, a fact of life we cannot escape, can strip your heart of hope. And how can a person live without hope?

Perhaps knowing, through the honesty of others that I am not alone in these feelings has given me a kind of courage, in a way. Opening up to a Catholic priest about the same age as myself, and also to a wonderful sister at the convent of my parish, I have learned that even the most seemingly religiously “intact” among us also feel this spiritual aloneness. I have desperately appreciated their honesty and sincerity in talking about the ups and downs of their faith. They made me feel less “guilty” about my thoughts, less of an agnostic because they, too, fluctuate in the strength and weakness of their faith. I expected to be chastised, but I wasn’t. I found common ground with these people – people who have dedicated their lives to God and the life of the religious. They sacrificed marriage and children to lives in service to a God they cannot visually see, a God they cannot personally have a one-on-one conversation with. They don’t think that much different than I do – well, that may be taking it a step too far, but I felt a lot better about myself for the conversations that we had.

A book written about Mother Teresa was released a few years ago – an account of her spiritual journey and, ironically to those who held her in high regard as the Saint of Calcutta, her spiritual darkness. I doubt she intended for her most personal thoughts, written in letters, to one day be published in a book about her life, but nevertheless, her most private thoughts about her faith, and sometimes lack of faith, were published. Some people were surprised by such admissions that this Nobel Peace prize winner for her humanitarian efforts had her doubts and maybe they were disappointed by this revelation. To a trusted spiritual director, she wrote, “…the place of God in my soul is blank – there is no God in me… He is not there… Sometimes, I feel my own heart cry out, “My God” and nothing else comes – the torture and pain I can’t explain.” I was grateful for her honesty. I felt little less alone myself to read such words from a woman who devoted her life to doing God’s work and helping the poor, even when she felt that silence. But Mother Teresa didn’t give up. I think of all the people she helped, prayed for, administered to, showed kindness and love toward when she felt her own private spiritual darkness. Yet she was a light in a dark world for a lot of people who were desperate for the basic of human needs. I admire her more now just knowing how she personally felt, as well as the sacrifices and good that she did.

The Serenity Prayer – the prayer of AA, the prayer of accepting, courage and wisdom. That prayer actually says a lot of life and coping. I really like that prayer and try to keep it in the back of my mind as much as I can, when I feel discouraged, and am having problems coping with the cold and heartless realities we all must face. It is a good thing to focus on – a little hope in a dark and confusing world. And we have to have hope – as difficult as it may be sometimes to really hang on to when the going gets rough. But without hope, you may as well never get up in the morning. The world is too difficult a place to cope without it – faith too. People search for meaning and purpose in their lives and maybe sometimes we just aren’t going to find it in the way we want. My faith may have its ups and downs and I may fluctuate during the course of a day. I will have my doubts and my fears. I’m human. I am geared to question. I hope God understands. Because I have to believe He is there, in all this silence.