If Not Christian, Then What?

In my reading, I am daily plunged into the ineffable otherness of God by C.S. Lewis, Brennan Manning, Henri Nouwen, and countless other authors, both current and ancient.  In my prayers every morning, I strain to listen for some response to my sacrifice of all the filth and muck I have in me, to ask to remove it.  I know, from existing on the Earth, that all that we know is too perfect, too complex, too engineered to be purely the result of chance and the natural laws by which all things abide. Who designed those natural laws, after all?  Are we on this planet a statistical improbability in a womb so finely tuned to our existence - that we would never have occurred without it, just a hopeless chance aggregation of dust and the laws that govern us?

And with all of this, I have to ask, is what I believe real?  Do my prayers fall on deaf ears?  I have come to believe in my heart that God is in fact, real.  There is a point at which the evidence so saturates the human brain that there is no more room save to move it to the heart. Though no religion created by man (even with the help of God), can contain him.  Not Judaism, not Islam, not Christianity, not the Native American religions.  All have views of God that are horribly inadequate approximations constructed by the limited mind of man.

I did not pick Christianity.  It picked me.  I attended church because people I know and love introduced me to it. The story of Jesus only came to sink into my soul after some 22 years of reading the scriptures.  And the more I read Paul’s letters and extra-biblical literature, the more I am impressed by the amazing interconnectedness and interdependence of the concepts of the faith: the disciplines, the reliance on God, the loving others and loving yourself, because you were first loved.  But when it comes down to it, I have a nominal faith that Jesus was the son of God.  Oh, I know all the arguments and the evidence, but the reality has not reached the threshold where it has been committed to the memory of the heart.

So where does this leave me?  In a cold calculating way, it is at the door of Christianity because that is the best approximation of the God I know, the God I have experienced in prayer and in the natural world and in the events of my life.  It is a tender, self-sacrificing, and intimately involved in your life God who you can depend on and with whom you can share your deepest needs, successes and failures.  But he is at the same time wholly other, unattainable and infinite, but yearning to be discovered by his Creation. Who would want to try going existence just with flawed human beings who consistently fail to return the love that you so desperately need to survive?  But while I am impressed with Jesus and I think he is the best thing to happen to man in the history of the short blip of man’s existence, the question of his divinity is only settled from time to time, to be reopened like a wound repeatedly even in the course of a single day. And so, the best I can do, is during my prayers in the morning, between requests to remove the deficits in my character, is to pray to God to settle the question in my heart. And to read the scriptures to find the holiness in Jesus. “Lord, I believe,” said the epileptic boy’s father to Jesus, “help me with my unbelief.”