After the last week of the course I have been away all week and I have now got loads to say about what has been going through my head. I am starting with what was leading me up to Thursday. I have really been able to make some progress yet feel I had made none. I have been reading the bible trying to understand bits of it and listen to the music and things still keep coming back to the same point. Things I can understand are still making perfect sense to me, such as Jesus telling people and being a really good preacher. I can see that because it is very easy to understand in my "real world perception".
However if you ask me to believe in something that is clearly going against all perception and knowledge that I have such as performing miracles such as feeding 5000, healing lepers etc well I know in my logical scientific head that is not possible.
This leads me therefore onto this thing called faith. How do people get it? I can't see how or where or when you can find it. You are being asked to believe in something that is not possible. Sometimes it feels so confusing like there is never going to be a way through it. I am beginning to wonder if I will be sat at the end of this journey believing in the bits I can understand and never getting to grips with the stuff I can't. Honestly it is extremely scary the idea I might never get to believing.
There are people of a similar mind set around me, scientists and mathematicians who can happily believe in God and the miracles and everything else. Grrrrrrr so frustrating to see there is something they have that I can't have. I feel I am missing out on something and spend time hoping I will be able to find it one day.
Anyway onto week 3... why did Jesus die. Well before Thursday I figured I had a pretty good idea, Jew's hated him,Romans treated him as a serious criminal hence crucifixtion. Seems straightforward enough. But then there is the thing that I have always know is that he died to take our sins away....(Can you guess where this is going yet!). I was intrigued and hopeful that there might be something in the evening that would provide me the answers to some of the questions or something of inspiration that would make this begin to make sense.
Anyway the evening was good. The video was extremely interesting. Nicky Gumbel explained about the cross and what he did for us and that God loved us all so much he sacrificed his only Son for the sin that we did or are yet to do, so does that mean if we say sorry we can do what we want...... but that wasn't where I was concerned anyway. Jesus could have at any time apparently said that he was not the Son of God and then he would not have been crucified upon a cross. I didn't know that. Why didn't he just do it. Within the group we were talking about the whole thing and there is a film directed my Mel Gibson which I forget the name of where they show how gruesome the crucifixtion is. Just talking about it made me feel sick becuase it is so horrific.
So we sat and talked about it and then began to talk about sin and forgiveness and there is a section within the book of Mark (I think) where it talks about sin and there is a list of sins which are all relevant today so the idea of sin and forgiveness certainly appear to be relevant in the world today, so guess what. I can easily understand that. So far so good.
Then came the bit where it all kind of went horribly wrong for me. Jesus was crucified for you and me apparently. He takes away the sin of the world... Right, now I have a bit of a scale as to how completely impossible an idea is from say 0 to 10, 0 being completely expected and 10 being totally crazy to me. Feeding 5000 people from a few fishes and loaves maybe a 5. Healing lepers, maybe a 6, but now lets go to taking the sin of the world... This is a whole different scale of impossible in my mind. This is the 10 and will be the one thing that I cannot even possibly get my head round and comprehend. In fact if I compare it to some of the other things they appear almost easy.
I am completely now out of my depth and I have to apologise to all at Alpha as I lost it and got completely overwhelmed by the whole thing and I started to explain how I was feeling. I am sure I overtook the conversation out of sheer frustration. Here I am thinking I was on a journey to understand God, Jesus and religion and I am getting more and more confused. More and more lost with the whole thing. I desperately want to make at least some sense of it and I can't. I am now really worried that I won't make sense of it and won't ever be able to find the answers to the questions I have. If there is God and I can't believe I think that leaves me with a second death... certainly not desireable. This whole thing feels like it is unravelling around me at the moment, not helping me find the answers I am searching for.
The common thing that people have told me is that I will not get all the answers, in fact I will never get all the answers. Somewhere along the journey I am going to need to have faith and that is ultimately that is what this has to come down to. How do you get faith in something that you cannot make even a comprehension of. Oh my word, this feels like it is going horribly wrong right now and it is certainly not the place I expected to be. I hope I find a way through this and soon because it is not very nice.
Hello Alex - I came across your blog this evening and found it of great interest. The reason behind this is because you relate doubts and confusions that remind me of the beginnings of my own spirtual journey so many years ago. So many questions and not enough answers! And any questions you do get answers to just open up a whole host of further questions. One great big mistake I made was that I wanted all the answers in one easy to comprehend sitting. Now don't take this the wrong way, but you'll soon discover that it doesn't work that way.....well, it didn't for me. It was a gradual process and all the pennies didn't drop immediately (and some are still yet to drop!) But as and when they do drop you'll soon come to realise that the faith you say you can't have in your latest post will not only have taken root, but will begin to grow and eventually bear fruit. That's where the fun really begins!
ReplyDeleteYou stick with the Alpha course and don't be afraid to go through it more than once because you'll forget more than you'll remember from each topic. I'll be keeping an eye on your blog as you work your way through the course.
The book of Hebrews isn't exactly the easiest book to comprehend for the beginner, but as a closing note for now, chapter 11 may give you some insight as to what faith is all about.
Cheers for now,
Ronnie James
Hi again. I felt like you when I was doing the alpha course two years ago, and I still have many doubts. But the thing that gets most in the way of having faith, real faith and not superficial faith, is some of the doctrine of the church. Reading out the Nicean Creed at church in a legalistic way is actually detrimental to my faith. Also, my own background doesn't help either. You come from a scientific background by the sound of it, whereas my background is in the New Age philosophies and I find it very hard to believe we have just one life, one chance to get things right with God. Many New Agers, buddhists and others believe we have many lives and therefore have the chance to evolve towards perfection. But in Christianity, or at least mainstream christianity, there is only one life and I find it very hard to justify if talking to others about Christianity because many people now, not just those in the New Age movement and Buddhists either, do believe in more than one life. I just find it hard to believe that a loving God could condemn someone forever because they have made mistakes in this life and have not put them right by confession and penance. So for me, this is my stumbling block to full faith and it holds me back. Although I am not now involved in New Age activities and now find some of their ideas wanting they do seem to care more about the state of nature than many of my fellow Christians appear to. But what really resonates with me in the Christian faith is the doctrine of the Fall, how it all went terribly wrong when humans tried to get above themselves and have been doing ever since! It is the Fall that makes sense of a world which is not the good world that God created, and it is this that enables me to remain a Christian even if my other ideas are 'unorthodox' and find that some of the church's doctrines go against the grain for me, for example, the attitude towards homosexuality, which is not even mentioned in the Gospels. You would think that if an issue like this was so important, Jesus would have mentioned it or would have been recorded as having mentioned it by the Gospel writers. Having said all this, there is a lot of good things about Christianity and yes, even the church. It is just that sometimes the church doesn't come over as being very loving. I am rambling on a bit so I shall end there, but look forward to reading more of your entries as you progress in the Alpha course.
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