I will confess a strange sort of fondness for the writings of G. K. Chesterton. A legendary English blowhard, he speaks with an authoritative, personal bombast about his attempts to get away from Christianity, only to end up all the more deeply invested in it. His book “Orthodoxy” describes how in rejecting the faith of his upbringing to try to discover something more authentic and satisfying, he tried to embrace a sort of fearless heresy.
Following his newfound religious freedom, he set himself about figuring out what, exactly, were the questions that he needed answered, and to meet head-on the struggles that so vexed him. Each time he stakes out a new plot of land in which to make his heretical home, he finds that someone else has been there before. Every unsettling answer and every satisfying question has, in fact, long been turned inside-out and upside-down by his predecessors, but they were not outliers on the fringes of Christian heresy, nor practitioners of some strange and better faith.
Where he set out to discover heresy, instead he rediscovered orthodoxy: that which had always been a part of the deposit of Tradition handed on through the Church, and which included the breadth and depth of Christian thought.
The faith of his upbringing was perhaps actually as paltry and spiritually impoverished as he found it, and may well have lacked the kind of brave, moral depth he wanted, but it turned out there was more to Christianity than that.
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We all have to leave the place we started from. We become different people. We are tested by different lives. To move through the world and arrive at the end unscathed and unchanged is not to live at all. The continuity that makes us who we are is not about stasis, about remaining frozen in time, but is something to do with a soul that can grow, can flourish.
I would, in the right circumstances, probably still find some enjoyment in the banana purée that was my favourite food in infancy, but it is not something I would seek out on most days. I could mark my teenage years by eating fried plantains, instead, at a little Jamaican restaurant with my grandfather. In my mid-twenties, it was plátanos fritos at a Salvadoran restaurant on Sunday afternoons after church with Corvi.
When I was very young, I was fascinated by keys of all kinds, and I’ve gone on to work in cryptography and to teach teenagers how to pick locks for fun.
Those early things which nourish us undoubtedly shape us, but we change, and so do they.
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I don’t think Chesterton was necessarily right about the inadequacy of the faith of his childhood, not quite. It’s the faith of childhood that was inadequate. The fullness of what was going on among his spiritual parents was no more obvious and accessible than the full depth of his spiritual ancestry which he would later so eagerly reclaim. We accept provisional answers for questions that will stay with us until we are ready to live into them more deeply, and then at every stage of life we will find we need to answer them anew, and that the old answers now mean something different to us than they once did.
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Jesus speaks in our Gospel this morning about the limits of understanding. The mind yearns for answers and clarity, but the real answers can’t just be handed over, they are not a matter of knowledge to be accepted at face value. There is no amount of explanation or demonstration that will do, only experience, recognition, and resonance will work. Belief is not just a matter of being told what is right, some part of us internally must be able to give our assent to its claims. There must be some sense in which it seems real to us.
Chesterton writes this about how we make sense of the world, or, rather, how we fail to:
The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait. (G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, ch. VI)
This is where we find ourselves with Jesus in the Gospel this morning, and perhaps where we find ourselves in our personal and collective efforts to make sense of our world, our faith, and our own lives. The answers all seem to leave something out, but they also aren’t entirely inadequate. We do hear the voice of Jesus, something we can recognize, something that seems true even if we can’t put it exactly into words, perhaps precisely because we can’t put it exactly into words. This familiarity, this recognition which goes beyond language, beyond argumentation, beyond proof: this is the country of faith, and this is the place of hope.
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This relational way of being, this connection which happens in the company of words but not because of them, we hear this resonate in the reading from Acts, too. Peter does not provide some explanatory framework that will raise Tabitha, nor some magical recipe, some necromantic formula that works by rote, he simply prays and then speaks to her. She hears his voice.
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We all linger at the edges of distraction, despondency, and death. There is something that calls to us that keeps us from collapsing into the abyss entirely. We may think that it is some specific set of beliefs, some thoughts, some cognitions that sustain us, but these things come after or alongside the experiences that really shape us, and the relationships in which we know the texture of what it is to really live.
This faith we come together to practice, this Tradition into which we dip our toes, is a vast collection of everything that has come before us, and our additions enrich those who will follow where we have gone. This is a container in which we can wrestle with the answers that most disturb us, and venture out into the questions that just might set us free. There is no static set of truths, but everything is always changing, as we are always changing. We wander out far into the unknown of our lives, and find ourselves back so very close to where we began, but just a little different for the journey we have made.
May you listen to the voice which speaks to your deepest longings. May yours be the voice which calls those around you to come, get up, and live. May your beliefs never be a burden, nor keep you from life, and may you find yourself deeply at home and fully alive with all those who have gone before you in the journey of faith.