This week I had the pleasure of reading Glennon Melton’s Carry On, Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life. The book is series of short memoir essays that read similar to blog posts (unsurprisingly, since Melton blogs at Momastery.com). The book is a quick read and delightful — honest and wise and laugh-out-loud funny in places.

The book is also rather Christian. Melton makes many references to Jesus, to God, and to her faith — unorthodox as her faith may sometimes be. (Her position, I believe, is that as a recovering “ex-everything” she really has no right to judge). But her faith is very much front-and-center in this book and I was surprised by how triggering I found that.

Not because I was unaware that religion makes me uncomfortable, but simply by how much it bothered me to have someone be so candid about it. And so I think reading this book was really important for me (and I’m very glad I did!) because it forced me to reconsider a lot of my beliefs around religion and about faith.

I wasn’t raised in a religion or with a faith. If I was raised with a faith, it was probably “logic” or “science” or “reason” — and in retrospect these things make miserable faiths because they leave no room for our perfectly imperfect humanity. But I did not know this until I was much older and I never questioned these ideas of faith because organized religion does a terrible job of marketing itself and so I really thought that I was better off.

From where I stood, the advantages of a religious faith were invisible. In my admittedly limited experience, religion usually seems to do more to make people anxious and narrow-minded than to create space for more kindness and compassion in the world.

While I know that, in practice, this is not true, and that there are many people (perhaps even most) for whom faith is a comfort that increases their ability to extend kindness and compassion toward others (the “Christian feeling” of the 19th Century), the truth is that these days, from an outsider’s perspective, “Christian feeling” seems often to be more about hatred than kindness. (And I’m picking on the Christians here a little; I think the same is true of many of the world’s religions.)

So I don’t love religious doctrine or institutions, but what I realized in reading Carry On, Warrior is that Glennon Melton and I share a lot of the same ideas about faith.

Because as much as I don’t ever see myself participating in an organized religion — in the past few years I’ve been busy reinventing my idea of faith. And that idea doesn’t look much like Melton’s Jesus. But increasingly I think that faith is important, and a faith in Jesus seems to me no worse than any other.

My faith is not so well defined as any religious symbol — it is a faith in nature, in beauty, in goodness. I believe that nature is good and beautiful and that, as part of nature, we are good and beautiful, too. And perhaps this is not so different than what Jesus would have us believe — but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever worship in a church.

I prefer my worship out beneath the open skies or here, upon the altar of the empty page.

But I do believe we all need a little faith. Without faith we cannot trust or hope, and without hope we have no reason to act with kindness and compassion in the world.

If there is anything I feel certain of, it’s that the world today needs every drop of kindness and compassion we can bear to part with right now. We’ve spent the industrial era moving away from these ideals, I think.

The industrial era asked us to sacrifice our humanity in order to better play the part of the machine and we’ve done so. But now the machines are taking over and the only thing we’ll have left to call our own will be the strength our humanity. (Check out this article from The Atlantic if you want to know more.)

So I don’t know much about faith and nothing at all of God — but if I have to believe in something, I guess I choose to believe in the power of compassionate humanity to save the world. To believe in anything else seems just too dang scary right now.

 

I’d love for this to be a conversation, not a monologue! Do you have a faith? If so, how does your faith impact your experience living in the world? Let me know in the comments below.

 

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