Flexibility--The key to faith?





I live in Northern Virginia, so I am surrounded by lots and lots of trees. My house is in some woods that are quite dense, which means the trees are tall and the trunks are thin. We get some pretty exciting thunderstorms around here, and even the occasional hurricane, so I have seen these trees swaaaaaaay. Oh boy, have I seen them sway! Sometimes I fully expect their very tops to touch the ground and then slowly lift back up into the sky.

Can you imagine if these trees weren't flexible?  With their height, the slightest breeze would snap them all in half, halting their growth for good as they crashed to the ground. Indeed, they wouldn't even have survived long enough to grow to their current heights.



My natural tendencies are dangerously rigid, so it makes sense that my faith would be as well. You can see it in my teenage righteousness.  Some people look at my story (super Mormon girl turns agnostic after a run-of-the-mill life tragedy) and conclude that I must not have had a "real testimony" in the first place. After all, when my faith was tested, it couldn't stand up against the heartbreak, confusion, and questions.

I maintain that my faith was quite strong before tragedy crumbled it into a heap of hopelessness. My faith was very strong...but rigid. So when the winds of devastation and doubt came, my tree just snapped. It's roots were deep and well-nourished--it was a strong tree. But none of that mattered, because it couldn't sway with those winds.

I propose that the key to keeping your faith at all is keeping it flexible.

So what does flexible faith look like? 

Well, when something hurts, or doesn't make sense, or doesn't fit with new information or experiences, blind/simple/unthinking faith shrugs its shoulders and recites platitudes. "Everything happens for a reason." "He's in a better place." "Maybe God is just testing my faith." Unthinking faith doesn't like to feel too much. It's easier to just accept what he's been taught until his questions don't bother him anymore. Unthinking faith is like a perpetual sapling in the woods--wind can't possibly damage it, but it never grows or matures.

Rigid faith, when it can't answer the tough questions honestly, starts to believe that maybe faith doesn't have the answers. Maybe he was wrong all along.

But flexible faith shelves its unanswerable questions, or maybe even tweaks itself a little so that its possessor can keep a handle on it. He doesn't shrug off his confusion, but he doesn't toss his faith out the window. Not yet. It's just..."on hold" for the time being. Or perhaps the hoper learns to look at the question in a different way. Maybe this new information or experience can actually illuminate the gospel principle in question, rather than obliterating it altogether. Or maybe not.

Flexible faith doesn't take everything quite so literally, or even in the way things have always been taught. It considers other interpretations.

Flexible faith loves a good bargain. "Well, this principle makes little to no sense to me, but I'm going to keep practicing it because I value what I receive in exchange." Flexible faith chooses to obey the Word of Wisdom, even if it makes no sense to him and kinda cramps his style, because he values the opportunity to attend the temple with his wife. Flexible faith attends his meetings, even if he feels bored sometimes, because he values the sense of community he achieves by being consistent. Flexible faith teaches his children the principles of the gospel, even if he's not completely sure of them, because he believes that such teaching will make his children better people. Flexible faith hopes for unbelievable doctrines (like that of the atonement or eternal families) to be true, because he likes the idea of having a plan that will right his wrongs and fill in the gaps of his imperfection. He likes the idea of his family relationships continuing in another life--it's much better than the idea of being cut off from his loved ones at death. It doesn't make much sense in light of what he knows intellectually, but he hopes for it anyway, rather than rejecting it altogether.

Flexible faith remembers that, even though religion often makes no sense, science is wrong a lot, too. Science recants. Often. Flexible faith realizes that there is no way to definitively answer these big questions in the affirmative, but neither is there any way to definitively disprove them. So it keeps hoping. It shelves its questions and revisits them regularly, but it hopes. And it hangs on. It bends with the wind instead of rigidly resisting it.

And in so doing, it continues to grow.

I bore my testimony???



So, yesterday I bore my testimony at church for the first time in well over seven years. What compelled me to do such a thing? I don't really know. I do know that Elder Holland's conference talk really spoke to me (more on that later), which isn't shocking because I'm pretty sure he peers into the soul of every single person who hears him speak. It kind of inspired me. And I like to share my experiences and tell people what I think, so...what better platform, right? (Oh, right. A blog. A blog is a pretty good platform, too.)

The testimony I shared is exactly what I have written on this blog as my "hope testimony".

And then a strange thing happened. People stood up and said that their testimonies were basically the same thing, a hope that this stuff is true, not a knowledge of it. At least ten people approached me throughout the day and told me that my "testimony" was the most inspiring testimony they had heard in a long time.

Say what???

They said that the honesty was refreshing. A few people told me that they or their husband or their son really needed to hear it. What is happening here???

Anyway, this morning I read Alma 32 (obviously). "Faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true." Alma 32:21

Oh my gosh, I have faith? I think I do. That is exactly what my testimony is--hoping for things I don't see (with my eyes or my reason).

So then I started reading lots of hope scriptures.

Jacob 2:19--"And after ye have obtained a hope in Christ ye shall obtain riches, if ye seek them." Not after you obtain knowledge, but after you obtain hope.

Ether 12:4--"Wherefore, whoso believeth in God might with surety hope for a better world, yea, even a place at the right hand of God, which hope cometh of faith, maketh an anchor to the souls of men, which would make them sure and steadfast, always abounding in good works, being led to glorify God." Hope seems to be sufficient to anchor the soul, which then leads to all this other stuff.

Moroni 8:26--"and because of meekness and lowliness of heart cometh the visitation of the Holy Ghost, which Comforter filleth with hope and perfect love, which love endureth by diligence unto prayer, until the end shall come, when all the saints shall dwell with God." I like this one because we tend to view the Holy Ghost as a means to obtaining knowledge, but this is saying that his job is to fill us with hope and love, which appears to be sufficient.

13th Article of Faith: "We believe all things, we hope all things..." There is no claim that we know all things. We admit here, and indeed in all the other Articles of Faith as well, that we believe this stuff--we hope it.

I think it's interesting that our church--or at least the culture of it--places such a premium on knowing. We see kids being trained to say it from the very beginning. ("I'd like to bear my testimony. I know this church is true. I know Joseph Smith was a prophet." Yadah, yadah, yadah.) Why do we do this? The scriptures don't seem to indicate that knowledge is the stuff of righteousness or salvation. Faith is. Hope is. I mean, as Alma does go on to say, hope should compel us to "experiment upon the word", which means living the principles of the gospel, testing them to see if they do indeed bring us the happiness they promise. But I'm just not getting the message here that knowledge is the requirement, or even the goal.

I know you're probably thinking all of this is obvious, and wondering how I could have missed it all my life. Well, I did hear/read these scriptures over and over, and I did have a million lessons on Alma 32. Indeed, I delivered many of them myself. But they always seemed to end in the possibility of obtaining knowledge. You know, if you're righteous enough you might obtain that. And I'm sure that a lot of my faith problems have to do with my personality, with the way I processed this stuff. But I'm clearly not alone. For goodness' sake, in ONE ward, at least TEN people APPROACHED me! Who knows how many people feel the same way but didn't approach me? And who knows how many people there are in all the other wards? And how many other people weren't attending any ward at all yesterday BECAUSE they have these issues?

I blame "Moroni's promise" (Moroni 10:4-5). "And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere hear, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things."

Or rather, I blame our emphasis on Moroni's promise. We teach kids to seek this. As missionaries, our entire purpose is teaching investigators to seek this. We largely define a "testimony" as having received this witness. But what about all the people who never get this? Or what about those of us who think we have, but later realize maybe we haven't? This emphasis on knowledge and bearing "testimony" of knowledge makes the church a really hard place to be for people whose minds just don't work like this.

How about teaching people to hope for these things? Maybe for their entire lives. Maybe it's okay to just hope and experiment until you die. That's probably what I'll be doing. But I think Alma says it's enough in Alma 32:43--"Then, my brethren, ye shall reap the rewards of your faith, and your diligence, and patience, and long-suffereing, wating for the tree to bring forth fruit unto you."

We are rewarded for faith and diligence, not for knowledge.

I have a dream--a hope, if you will--that one day, in LDS congregations all over the world, people will honestly acknowledge their doubts. They will feel safe to say that they don't know. The church will be a place where people come because they're experimenting upon the word, they're hoping for something, together. They're helping each other sustain that hope and test the principles of the gospel in their lives. THAT is what I believe the church should be for. It shouldn't be a club for knowers. It should be a support group for hopers.