I'm Back

I have not kept a journal in quite a while, much less blogged, but I decided that I wanted to give journaling a go again. I wrote this out today and decided that it might be worth giving blogging a go again as well. So despite the arrogance associated with keeping a record of my faith that is public for all to see, I feel that this accountability associated with sharing my journey is worthwhile. So I encourage you to share your thoughts if you choose to read. This time around it may be more random than previous entries, but feel free to challenge me or agree with me. Here is what I wrote in my journal this morning that spurred this back to life for me:

To state my crisis plainly, I feel as though I can no longer go back and forth believing in God and feeling a sense of identity (calling) in the ministry and rejecting God and pursuing more earthly pleasures and calling the struggle organic, real, or postmodern. The arguments I have heard for a belief in God feels more like a justification in God than I real reason to believe in God. But to reject God means to reject all forms of meaning and no atheist argument for meaning without God seem like anything more than justification for meaning without God. So for me, the argument is not about do I believe in God or not, but do I believe that this life has meaning or not. This is when then crisis turns to one of philosophy instead of theology. Meaning is inherently both subjective and objective. While meaning has an objective component in that we don’t have to be aware of the meaning and will always fall short of grasping the full extent of meaning, it also has a subject component in that it is affective and individual. To elaborate on the individual nature of meaning, that must account for true individual, experiential, and psychological creations of meaning and corporate meaning that is based in community, traditions, and sociological creations of meaning. To turn the argument away from theological and philosophical and into the realm of developmental, when one considers all the factors that attribute to our understanding of meaning a belief in God becomes a construct on a reality that is more determinant of our relationship to GOD than any objective reality. In other words, my evangelical and zealous understanding of God as a youth is radically different than my liberal and postmodern understanding of GOD today and therefore I relate to that GOD quite differently. The objective meaning of GOD is only the construct by which I relate my theology, philosophy, and identity to despite the fact that the same objective meaning is so radically different that it cannot accurately be called the same GOD. (However, based on the definition of objective reality that I have already selected, this can be the same God since objective reality extends beyond our understanding.)

The consequences of this crisis have left me both rejecting God and embracing God at the same time. For the past couple of years (as I have embraced a more postmodern-friendly concept of God) I have been able to live quite contently with this paradoxical spiritual development. It allowed me to experience God in new ways and deconstruct old, worn out ideas about God that worked against my development. I could see myself as an atheist and devout Christian at the same times. I have felt little need to resolve any inconsistencies and simply experience God as “He” chose to reveal “Himself” to me. This has not been disingenuous as GOD has been a significantly less person-like and possibly less bible-like entity. It has been a time of much greater integrity in my beliefs system as I have focused less on beliefs and more on meaning. However, even in this time of awakening, I have felt that my path has taken me further and further away from a life that love. And now I see that the duality within has moved to a place of new tension where I no longer believe in anything and have no tie to any world. I think that this lack of identity is natural to me as I often feel that I don’t ever belong wherever I am. This lack of identity, in other words, snuck up on me. And now I find myself feeling little sense of guilt, purpose, and passion.