Making Sense

I write as a Christian.  I value honesty.  That’s what I am, a Christian.  Others may question this, but I don’t.  And I find great joy and meaning in my Christian faith.  But I also write as one just trying to make sense of life and of the world in which we all live.  As things stand, our souls explode with questions.

What does the future hold, and what say do we have in this?  How do we know what we know, and how do we know that we know it?  What do we make of Jesus?  And what did Jesus really mean when he said he was the way and the truth and the life?  What do we make of Scripture?  Much of the evil that has happened in history and that still happens now comes from sacred texts being read in literalistic, legalistic ways; but then how are we to understand them?  [One clue: the title of this blog!]

And on and on. 

Why sickness, and disease, and suffering, and natural disasters, and personal tragedies?  What do we make of the faith of others – of profound spiritual works like the Tao Te Ching or the Bhagavad Gita?  How do we make sense of history, of the flow of history?  And what are we to make of a story that ends, according to tradition, with an allegedly loving God consigning hundreds of millions of people to excruciating agony for ever and ever and ever – not just for a minute or two, or an hour, or a day, or a week, but year after year, forever and ever?  How do we make sense of it all? 

And I go back to the question of why are more and more people, especially more and more young adults, unaffiliated with any community of faith?  What might we offer them?  How might we best serve them – the many people who have weighed religion in the scales and have found it wanting, who seek compassion, decency, common sense and inclusiveness but who cannot find it in churches, mosques and synagogues, who seek to make sense of a God they still believe in but whom they struggle to find in religion?

Several summers ago, my wife and I visited Atlantic Canada where I spent my pre-teen years.  I’d never been back.  We visited my hometown, Fredericton, and many other places I remembered from my childhood: the charming port city of Halifax, Port Royal, one of the great explorer Samuel Champlain’s early seventeenth-century settlements in the New World, and Grand Pré, Ground Zero for the eighteenth-century Acadian deportation immortalized by Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline.”  And we visited some of the most fascinating and breathtakingly beautiful spots on earth: the Hopewell Rocks, gigantic rocks now sculpted like towering flower pots by the fifty-foot tidal surges of the Bay of Fundy, and the spectacular Cabot Trail on Cape Breton Island.  And everywhere we went  there were these buildings, simple, classic, elegant structures called Interpretive Centers where visitors went and read up on what they were seeing, visited artful displays, and listened to audio-visual presentations that made sense of what they were experiencing.  And it dawned on me that maybe this is one thing that churches in our time need to be - INTERPRETIVE CENTERS, places people can come and make sense of their lives and our world. 

Today many people who have substantially given up on churches throng to interpretive centers, to interpretive channels, to interpretive blogs and websites, to places that make sense of life and origins and history and religion and doctrine, where word and art and music come together to make sense of the realm of the Spirit, places that allow for multiple perspectives, places that make sense of differences, that respect differences and see dignity in the differences. 

Ever since then I’ve been inspired by the dream of the contemporary church being a such a place, a place that doesn’t have all the answers (no place does) but that does honor all the questions, a place light on dogma and bright with insight.  I believe that if we keep our wits about us, if we stop and look and see, we’ll find truths together that are not that far from what we already intuitively knew to be true, truths that our hearts have long known though words have often eluded us.