The pursuit and maintenance of faith in God are among the great mysterious journeys of life — for Latter-day Saints and for every believer in every other religious sect, Christian or otherwise.
First is the recognition of faith’s usefulness and importance. If you’re the scripture-reading type, you know the numerous mentions of faith throughout the Bible and the Book of Mormon. Unless you have deity talking to and walking with you at every turn, faith is pretty much all you have to keep you connected. Belief and faith that God exists, that God is aware of your existence.
Some people say they know God is there. Not just there but there for them. I find that curious because if they know what they say they know, then the need to live by faith is diminished. It has been said that doubt isn’t the enemy of faith, certainty is.
The problem with religious certainty is that in the spiritual realm, when believers cross that threshold, humility can evaporate alongside the faith. They know what they know, or at least they say they do, and if others are left to rely on belief and faith, those who are certain expect the believers, the faithful, as they see it, to follow them because they’ve transcended from mere faith to absolute knowledge. In that process, the humility that’s attendant with faith can turn into hubris and pride.
It’s been my experience that humans who are so all-fired sure about spiritual matters, about spiritual principles are or can be somewhat delusional and, even worse, frightening. People who declare that they know this and that is true “beyond a shadow of a doubt” may, in their minds, really think they know. They might even know they know. Moses seems to have fit into that category. And if you’re like Moses and seen the Almighty, then good for you. If the spirit’s “still, small voice” has whispered truth to you, you probably remain in the “faith” category. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s all good, and that’s my point.
Humans who believe in Jesus generally want to hear and heed his words. They want to follow his example and hope that they are doing — or are trying to do — exactly that. Faith, by its very nature, places believers in a position of meekness and humbleness because they can’t rely on empirical data to prove their beliefs or to emphatically shove those beliefs upon others.
They are precisely that — beliefs.
The dangers of certainty
Certainty, on the other hand, separates the knowers from the believers. It divides. The knowers are more likely to let others know that they know, shedding the diffidence they might have held close before they knew. They also can be more likely to tell others what they should be doing and how they should be living in order to gain the same understanding that they supposedly have.
That may be important in the case of science, in the study of earthly realms, in the tracking of terrestrial truth, but not so much in the striving for the spiritual.
In Latter-day Saint theology, one of the reasons the children of God were placed on this planet, away from God’s immediate presence, was to develop belief and faith in him — or her — outside of that presence.
If you roll that way, living in faith, then, is a major purpose for our being here in the human condition. Even 12 of the church’s 13 Articles of Faith start with “we believe.” They do not begin with “we know.”
There have been heavy treatises written about faith, in many of its forms, outside and inside of scripture. According to the New Testament, Christ was impressed by those he encountered who demonstrated just particles of faith in him, that he was who he said he was. That’s good enough for me.
On the opposite end, some folks scoff at the notion of faith in any kind of God or in any religion, organized or otherwise. They are the flip side to the religious knowers. They think they know the faithful are rubes and fools, nonthinkers deceived by a load of fiction. What proof, after all, do these believers have that their faith is a worthwhile pursuit, that it has one drop of credibility? Uh-huh, faith is faith.
To each his or her own.
The path of faith
In spiritual matters, it’s left to every individual to decide what they believe or don’t believe. It’s notable how wide that spectrum really is.
The way I see it, almost nobody knows nothing about anything when it comes to specifics about God on high, what God wants, what God expects, what God requires, what God demands, what God is willing to look past, what God cries over, what God laughs at. Almost nobody. There might be a few who really do know, but not nearly as many as who say they know. The same goes for those who say they know this religious stuff is all a bunch of baloney.
Nobody knows nothing.
Faith, I believe, can be a noble, powerful thing as it pertains to connection with God. That’s the good part: discovering what works for you. Spiritual truth may not be relative, but it is up to each human to figure out what, if anything, is — and what, if anything, isn’t — gospel truth. And the best way, the real way, maybe the only way, to get there is via faith.
When it comes to tethers to heaven, let the believers believe what they will. Let the nonbelievers believe what they will. And, outside of general social decency, don’t pass judgment, don’t pass legislation, don’t pass laws that force nonbelievers to live as though they do believe.
Those who are certain what God is and isn’t, what God wants not just from them but from and for everyone else, those who have switched out their hard-earned belief for presumed knowledge, no longer have much use for the very thing, by my way of believing, that this whole spiritual endeavor was made and meant for.
Growing, deepening, heralding, celebrating faith.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Tribune columnist Gordon Monson.
