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.