On Faith

A couple of weeks back Cecile asked the question "explain briefly how you are able to maintain your faith, what your faith is, or why you lack faith. "

Since then I have spent many hours pondering this question. I have considered it in the context of what I have been taught in church and I have tried to divorce my answer from the church, I have considered it as an intellectual question and as a personal one. I have had many, many thoughts on the subject and I have written , re-written and started over.

I'm not sure if I'm going to even come close to answering the question but I think I will tell you my story up to this point.

I was born and raised in the church and I accepted it's teaching and doctrine from the time I was tiny. As I developed more independent thought I asked the same questions that everyone else does. Why is there suffering? Is there really a God? Have I been conned?

I recognise truth and goodness in Christianity so even when I can't make it all fit properly I am determined not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. When faith and life seem to be contradictory and adequate answers seem thin on the ground I put the questions aside and focus on the bits I know to be good. I don't neccessarily think that this is a noble approach (more thought required here, methinks) but it's the way it works for me and the conundrums of faith seem to gradually iron themselves out.

A couple of ideas I have been working on lately have perhaps revolutionised my experience of a life of faith:

Some time ago I watched a doco where a group of women went to live for a time with an enclosed order of nuns. The part of the documentary that lives in my memory was where a nun said to one of these women "think of God as the love that you have in your life right now"
Read it slowly. It's the bumpersticker "God is love" reworked to remove the cliched feeling and give it back some meaning.

The second idea is incredibly basic but it took me a very long time to comprehend: it is a fundamental principle of Christianity that we exist in order to glorify God.

When I combine these two ideas I come up with a statement that says something like "Our purpose in life is to glorify the power of love/goodness" or maybe "Our reason for being is to expand the territory of the force for good"

When I express faith in that way it sounds so simple but it means so much.
For example, it immediately answers the question of why there is suffering: in the face of trouble and hardship we have infinitely more scope to exemplify goodness and love than what we have when things are easy and nice. To love in the face of difficulty is meaningful, to love in easy times is, well, easier.
To live for the expansion of good is a tall order if I am to be consistent about it.

So, how do I maintain faith? I can find no other way to make sense of life so even when faith is difficult there isn't really an alternative. My faith ultimately requires that I choose to see the great gifts of life as God's gifts and the small "strokes of luck" as God's gifts. It requires that I choose to see hardship as opportunity for good. It requires that I become a better person and sometimes it gives me enough hope to keep putting one foot in front of the other when I'd probably rather not bother.

I could have sworn I had more to say but it eludes me now so throw your comments at me and we'll see where we go from here.