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There is a lot of visual pollution on Facebook, much of it spiritual. It's well-meaning and I don't question anyone's faith or sincerity in sharing it. But we've all seen it and probably been annoyed by it: crude, blurry images of slogans such as "If you LOVE JESUS pass this on. If you are ASHAMED OF HIM keep scrolling," or "SHARE if you are proud to be BAPTIZED IN CHRIST." They are the social networking equivalent of Precious Moments figurines or black velvet Jesus paintings sold on the roadside by shirtless men in biker vests: rustic, crude attempts to personalize the transcendent sincere in their tackiness, defiant of their own ugliness.
Today I saw one I haven't been able to stop thinking about. It bugged me. The visual quality was better than most. The slogan read, "Faith is believing in God more than your own feelings, thoughts, and experiences."
It bothered me. And I can't say why it bothers me because it's not all that inaccurate. Faith is, after all, believing in something when rational experience tells you not to. It is the belief that everything will be alright and that someone is looking out for you when you've no reason to think that at all. But this slogan today just sat with me wrong. Perhaps its wording is simply even clumsier than most, but it struck me too much as a call to unthinking obedience rather than to faith. It seems to me not so much a message of "do not despair" as one of "do not trust."
There is a common thread in both Western and Eastern spiritual traditions of not trusting one's own senses and feelings because they will lead you again and again to behaviors that are destructive. And I think that's something we can say is true and does happen. But is faith truly believing in God more than our feelings, thoughts and experiences? How can it be if you believe He (she, they, I don't really care about the pronouns here,) endowed you with those attributes and finds them worthy of exalting among the attributes of lesser animals?
I would like to believe that faith is not the complete mistrust of all human instinct, logic, and emotion, but rather a matter of learning when not to trust it and recognize when there may be greater forces at work. To me faith should be the fulfillment of feeling, thought, and experience rather than the abdication of them. Maybe I am just reading too much into a poorly-conceived tacky proverb.
Thoughts?
Today I saw one I haven't been able to stop thinking about. It bugged me. The visual quality was better than most. The slogan read, "Faith is believing in God more than your own feelings, thoughts, and experiences."
It bothered me. And I can't say why it bothers me because it's not all that inaccurate. Faith is, after all, believing in something when rational experience tells you not to. It is the belief that everything will be alright and that someone is looking out for you when you've no reason to think that at all. But this slogan today just sat with me wrong. Perhaps its wording is simply even clumsier than most, but it struck me too much as a call to unthinking obedience rather than to faith. It seems to me not so much a message of "do not despair" as one of "do not trust."
There is a common thread in both Western and Eastern spiritual traditions of not trusting one's own senses and feelings because they will lead you again and again to behaviors that are destructive. And I think that's something we can say is true and does happen. But is faith truly believing in God more than our feelings, thoughts and experiences? How can it be if you believe He (she, they, I don't really care about the pronouns here,) endowed you with those attributes and finds them worthy of exalting among the attributes of lesser animals?
I would like to believe that faith is not the complete mistrust of all human instinct, logic, and emotion, but rather a matter of learning when not to trust it and recognize when there may be greater forces at work. To me faith should be the fulfillment of feeling, thought, and experience rather than the abdication of them. Maybe I am just reading too much into a poorly-conceived tacky proverb.
Thoughts?
