L’Abri…take two

Well, tomorrow morning at 5:44 a.m., I will be getting on a flight to Boston to go back to the community at the lovely white house called L’Abri.

http://www.labri.org/mass/index.html 

I spent two weeks at L’Abri last summer, and I can honestly say that it changed my life forever. Last summer, my time at L’Abri opened me up to a new worldview, one in which I genuinely for the first time became open to the idea of God, albeit a concept of God that is very different than that to which I had previously held. These experiences at L’Abri became the starting point upon which a wonderful past year at Vanderbilt, including challenging courses and enriching friends and communities of faith, sent me into a new direction on my spiritual journey.

Thus, I am at a very different place in the journey than I was this time last year as I was heading out to L’Abri– I have different questions, a different worldview, and a different attitude. Largely, I think that much of this stems from a different concept of God. The thing about atheism is that it is totally dependent upon theism. Atheism is parasitic upon theism for its negation of the latter. Last year, I went to L’Abri struggling largely with the issue of atheism vs. theism, while largely leaning towards the former. Today, I am still an atheist with regards to the concept of God that I had last year. For so long, I had been trying to muster faith in some kind of being who existed somewhere ‘out there,’ much like an angry, and sometimes loving, old man in the sky. I couldn’t find that faith. I had been trying to understand why believing specific dogma about Jesus dying for our sins somehow enabled us to escape a literal Hell and enter into Heaven one day. I couldn’t understand. I was struggling to find any good reasons to believe that the Bible is so-called ’inerrant’ and ‘infallible’. I couldn’t find any such reasons. And I thought this meant that I had to chuck it all. Indeed, I still haven’t found that faith, that understanding, or those reasons. In some sense, then, I am an atheist…but only with regard to this kind of theism.

Apart from this particular model of theism for which I was trying to force myself into faith, I cannot today call myself an atheist…at least I don’t think I can. That’s actually one of the main reasons why I am heading back to L’Abri– to get ‘unstuck’ in every possible sense of the word. Perhaps the question that I was asking last year about the ‘existence of God’ is itself a contradiction. Perhaps God isn’t a being that either exists or doesn’t exist; rather perhaps God is the Ground of all Being, the Ground of existence itself. If the latter is the case, then God doesn’t exist. God is.

The second related question is that of revelation and how we know this God, the Ground of all Existence. I find a struggle between the literal and symbolic readings of many stories in the Bible. I can see how many of the stories are ‘true’ in that they speak to the human condition and perhaps symbolically point to a deeper reality. However, I simply cannot take many of them as literally and historically true. Thus, I must ask, are they ‘true’ at all?

And there is much, much more…but I am tired from a wonderful yet exhausting 5 week job as a counselor at the TN Governor’s School for high schoolers…and, I have to be at the airport in about 5 hours…so I am going to stop here. 

However, in final words, I will say that I have been trying to avoid putting too much pressure upon what must happen during these next 3 weeks. But that is very hard to do. Despite my efforts, I feel as though these nexts few weeks are going to serve as either a breakthrough or a breakdown of faith…without begging into the question, I already feel as though it is the former. I find myself being drawn more and more to the foot of the cross of the crucified and resurrected Christ— and more than that, to the Reality to which this cross itself points. While doubts often take over, something about the cross as well as our human condition, consumes the doubts into itself– and I am liberated, affirmed, reconciled, and Known. Through the cross, we are shown the image of a totally self-giving God, a totally selfless, personal, loving, and affirming core and Ground of all Existence. In all of this, we are called into a new Reality, a new way of Being, a new future all within the framework of promise and hope.

It’s a beautiful picture, and I think it’s true– but I don’t even know what it means to say that it’s true.

So, I’m going to L’Abri. Throughout all of this, I keep in mind the words of my friend, Ben: ‘the most we can do is throw ourselves on the infinite mercy of a God whose wisdom is made perfect in foolishness.’ I shall try. But I’m not sure that I really have any choice.

(I will be away from the internet while at L’Abri…however, I shall blog about my experiences when I return.)