Feelings, Faith and God

Spirituality Column #142
July 28, 2009
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current in Westfield (IN) newspaper

Feelings, Faith and God
By Bob Walters

“What’s the difference between feelings and faith?”

George, my scholar friend and neighbor, posed this seemingly simple question recently to an advanced Biblical studies group that included pastors, orthodox priests, teachers, a psychologist, a Biblical counselor (therapist), a couple of physicians and some other high-functioning lay people.

No one had a ready, sure answer. Nor did I, upon hearing the question later.

I’ve written about George before. He is a Bible translator, a renowned church historian with a PhD from Cambridge, an expert in classical languages and world religions, very nearly became a monk, is a former priest and longtime university lecturer, worked as a paramedic with the Red Cross during the Mideast civil wars of the 1970s, is a trained psychotherapist, and today lives a gentle, quiet life with his wife and their many friends in the northern suburbs of Indianapolis.

I recap George’s qualifications to underscore his credibility, and as an antecedent to presenting his elegantly simple parsing of “feelings” and “faith”.

Feelings begin in our ego and return to our ego.

Faith starts in our ego but finishes up somewhere outside ourselves.

“Ego” is one of those words that seems antithetical to Christianity. The ego is about “me,” the “self,” and aren’t I supposed to “die to self” to become an obedient Christian? Isn’t the ego the root of evil since it is the root of our innate, earthly, sinful self? How can the ego be the root of faith, when I want to “kill” my ego in order to be a better Christian? Hasn’t my ego caused the sin and shame of my past life?

Surveying the Cross, the Apostle Paul instructs (Romans 6:6) that our “old self” was crucified, not killed; freed from sin, not enslaved. “In this Christian sense, ‘to crucify’ is an act of love, while killing is an act of hate,” George explains. “The ego isn’t to be destroyed; it must be redeemed and made alive.”

What about killing our ego? “That’s more a Buddhist belief of emptiness, not a Christian belief of creativity,” George notes. “Christ created us, and The Holy Spirit gives the ego life so that we can discover our abilities and creativity. If we kill the ego, we can’t do that; we can’t be human.”

So, be careful what you try to kill. Without our self, we can’t reach out to God.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), for simplicity’s sake, will leave the Freudian id-ego-superego troika alone.

Seeing the Unseen

Spirituality Column #141
July 21, 2009
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current in Westfield (IN) newspaper

Seeing the Unseen
By Bob Walters

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
- 2 Corinthians 4:18 (NIV)

I spent three decades of my life – from my mid-teens to my mid-forties – not going to church.

I couldn’t see the value in an active faith life, couldn’t see the divine Light in the Bible, couldn’t see the Truth of Christ on the Cross, couldn’t see the point of going to church … and couldn’t see the point of view of people who did.

Oh, I knew the Jesus story and the general Christian doctrines. I’d grown up Episcopalian and was an Acolyte (altar boy) in my early teens. By seventh grade or so, I knew the Anglican Communion service by heart.

Then, I drifted away. My pastor retired, plus the Episcopal Church changed enormously in the late 1960s. It brought in a “New Liturgy” that pretty much killed what I knew about being an altar boy.

So the church changed and, being a teenager, I changed. Church and religion, for me, became a thing of the past.

My eyes, to paraphrase the verse above, were definitely fixed on things seen. Like too many people, I only believed what I could see.

And one thing I saw was how many different directions Christians seemed to be going. It was easy to criticize the appearance of Christian hypocrisy and the tangled mess of controversy that too-frequently visited preachers, churches and entire Christian denominations.

How easy it was to stay away from these imperfect Christians, and think better of myself for not being part of the “religion” problem. I would find my own truth, thank you very much. I could occasionally see love and grace and beauty in the world around me; all I had to do was figure out where that goodness came from.

What a surprise when I finally found it one Sunday morning in 2001, sitting in church with tears streaming down my face. “The eyes of my heart,” inexplicably, thankfully, opened to the Light, Truth and bigness of God’s eternity.

I’ve learned since then not to sweat the small, confusing temporal bits.

“Christian hypocrisy,” for example, emanates from the fact that while Christ is perfect and eternal, in this mortal coil none of us is. Controversy, however benign or horrible, generally amounts to failed human expectations.

So when what we see is not perfect, let’s thank God it is not eternal.

Hallelujah for the glimpses of eternal perfection God provides.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) was blind, but now can see.

Free to Make Mistakes

Spirituality Column #140
July 14, 2009
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current in Westfield (IN) newspaper

Free to Make Mistakes
By Bob Walters

Occasionally we don’t field a fact cleanly.

I recently noted in print that the word "freedom" is not in the Declaration of Independence, and that the word "liberty" is not in the Bible.

Right on the first point; wrong on the second.

An alert reader pointed out that every day the top of the front page of the Indianapolis Star – the banner – has the verse from II Cor 3:17, “… where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”

That’s the King James Version (KJV); I did my look-up in the New International Version (NIV). Whoops. “Liberty,” which appears a couple dozen times in the KJV, is translated as “freedom” in the NIV.

On further review, the word “liberty” does appear in the NIV, but only once and it’s buried in the Old Testament, Leviticus 25:10, in a verse regarding the 50-year jubilee of debt forgiveness and property return.

As penance for the mistake, I went to ScriptureText.com and looked up the Greek words for “liberty” and “freedom.” It turns out they are mostly interchangeable – though subtly distinct – variations of “eleutheria.”

With 13 variations of “eleutheria” sprinkled in 39 New Testament verses, it’s easy to drop in “liberty” for “freedom,” and vice versa.

And if you ever wondered why Greek Bible scholars are a breed apart, they have to know exact grammatical construction to even come close to bringing Ancient Greek into modern English. For example, the grammatical tense of “eleutherothentes” (“being made free” in Romans 6:18, 22) is Aorist Passive Participle Nominative Plural Masculine.

“Aorist,” if you’re curious, refers to an action that happened but doesn’t have an end, like gaining one’s freedom. The rest of it – Passive Participle, etc. – is taught in eighth grade English on a day most students probably take a nap.

Grammatically perfect Classical Greek notwithstanding, my overall point is that liberty, as we understand personal liberty and “rights,” is a humanist concept, not a Biblical concept. And freedom’s author is not the Declaration of Independence … or the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, for that matter.

Jesus Christ is the author of our freedom. We are free in Christ, and we are free of our sin, because Christ died to give us freedom.

He died so that we would know the Father, and so that our faith would overcome any mistakes we might make along the way.

Mea culpa.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) suggests going outside ourselves to find right and wrong. God gives us the freedom to search; we pray for the wisdom to find.

Richness in Short Bursts

Spirituality Column #139
July 7, 2009
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current in Westfield (IN) newspaper

Richness in Short Bursts
By Bob Walters

We worry when we don’t pray enough.

My pastor friend Dave told me of a life-long, vigorous churchgoer – steeped in his Christian walk – who came to him in a panic because he, the churchgoer, didn’t think he was praying enough.

Knowing the man’s deep and active faith, Dave advised him to write down – with the time – every thought he had about God. Dave got a call the next day. The man’s panic had been allayed within hours when he realized he was thinking about and talking with God all the time.

When we are serious about our faith, we discover God is rarely far from our thoughts, even if we aren’t on our knees.

There is no substitute, of course, for a block of uninterrupted quiet time in prayer, meditation, Scripture study or contemplation. Contemplation is the deep “prayer without words” where we focus on the glory of God, the sacrifice of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. This is when it is easiest for us to hear the Creator God – the Holy Trinity – talking to us.

My scholar friend George was mentored by a monk named Philemon at a monastery in the Egyptian desert. Philemon would sit in his cell for days or weeks in isolation, listening for his Lord’s voice to bring light to the most deep, difficult or confusing elements of Scripture, the Cosmos, human life, relationships, even God’s Existence and Being.

George’s faith and teaching are unusually rich in the fruits of his encounters with Philemon’s dedication to and depth of prayer life.

It’s important – critically important – to note that Christian prayer is directed outwardly, to the Creator of the Universe, to the Godhead. That’s the source and place of the Trinity in the Christian faith. Even as the Holy Spirit dwells within us, Christian prayer reaches out to the community of the Holy Trinity.

Be aware that a “Mantra,” popular in some faith systems, is not an outward, God-directed prayer; it points inward, only to our consciousness.

And don’t just talk endlessly … Matthew 6:7 makes that very clear.

It is the relationship each of us has with God the Father through Christ the Son in the Holy Spirit – and the relationship that exists within the Trinity – that is unique to the Christian faith.

Only our prayer life – even in short bursts – can capture the richness, peace and joy of that relationship.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) was reminded that Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication (ACTS) is a terrific prayer mnemonic.