Journeying from despair to goodness
Out of the despair and grief, I trust that you, too, have entered into a renewed season of hope.
At my first Board meeting back in November, I was asked to bring the morning devotional. I began that talk with a quote from Christian Wiman, from his book My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. “In fact, there is no way to return to the faith of your childhood, not really, unless you’ve just woken from a decades-long and absolutely literal coma. Faith is not some half-remembering country into which you come like a long-exile king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which you’d been betrayed. No. Life is not an error even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life — which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived — or have denied the reality of your life.” *Comments have been condensed and edited throughout for length
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I honestly thought that at my ripe old age, my faith had progressed and developed to the point where I had concluded the doubt, the shifting, the changing, the deconstruction, the reconstruction and re-engagement. I had worked hard at reimagining the faith of my childhood and early adulthood. It had seemed somehow deficient. It was lacking, watery, weak. All propped up by cheap certitude. I had engaged in insightful conversations with devoted lovers of Jesus. I had drawn upon a broad spectrum of Christian thinkers and theologians, mystics and writers. I felt part of an eclectic community — Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, Evangelical … all lovers and students of the Gospels. My spiritual formation was complete. Now I would coast. THEN, COVID HAPPENED! It happened for me and my community. It happened for you. Much of the certainty in my life evaporated in a 24-hour span. We isolated ourselves from family, friends, our church community … society in general. Like most, we experienced loss. Frankly, we crossed the threshold
ambrose university
