Week 44: Does Faith Have to Feel Like Something?
The bit where I introduce:
There is a phrase I have heard and read just this week in fact, so many times
“Christianity is not a religion. It is a relationship.”
I understand what people mean. Christianity is not supposed to be simply attending church, following rules and agreeing with doctrines. Faith should somehow involve God.
I have started wondering whether the word “relationship” can create…well, an alternative problem. What exactly is your relationship with God supposed to look like? But perhaps, more importantly, and more commonly heard is what is it supposed to feel like?
For some Christians, the answer seems obvious. Simplistically put, you talk to God. God speaks to you. You feel God’s presence. You sense God guiding you. God feels like a close friend walking beside you.
If that is genuinely someone’s experience, don’t get me wrong I’m not telling them it is not real.
But…Are you the one who prays and hears nothing? Are you the Christian who has spent years waiting for that intimate relationship everyone else seems to describe? Am I doing something wrong?
The bit where we refer to the bible and ask a few rhetorical questions:
The strange thing is that the Bible contains plenty of people who do not seem to experience God as a constantly reassuring companion. I know I haven’t always.
The Psalms are where I find most examples. Read some of these whole chapters…
“How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?” (Psalm 13)
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22)
“Why, Lord, do you reject me and hide your face from me?” (Psalm 88)
Honestly, these are not people enjoying an easy conversation with God. You won’t find these verses on Sunday school colouring sheets!
They are people wrestling with a God who seems silent, distant or absent. And yet they keep bringing that experience to God, like praying into silence. Sometimes painful silence. And apparently those prayers were considered faithful enough to be included in the Bible.
I reckon that seems important.
If feeling close to God were the measure of spiritual maturity, some of the Psalms would look like examples of spiritual failure. Yet the Bible preserves them as prayer. Even Jesus knows something about this: One of the most confronting moments in the Gospels is Jesus on the cross crying: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
I’ve heard in churches over the years Christians have developed all kinds of theology around those words. But whatever else they mean, they tell us something important. The experience of feeling abandoned by God is not foreign to Christianity. It sits right near the centre of the story.
So perhaps the friend or family member who says,
“I pray, but I do not feel God” isn’t necessarily failing at faith.
Perhaps they are standing in surprisingly biblical company. Maybe that’s you? Have we made one kind of spiritual experience into the standard?
Some Christian communities speak about God in incredibly intimate ways. “God told me this. Jesus put this on my heart. I felt God holding me. God whispered to me. I could feel his presence.”
I know people genuinely experience faith that way. But in my experience in churches of all denominations, I have come to realise something changes when experience becomes expectation.
If everyone around me seems to hear God and I do not, eventually I start wondering what is wrong with me? Maybe my faith is weak? Maybe I am too sinful? Maybe God is disappointed with me? Maybe everyone else has discovered something I somehow missed?
And after a while, language intended to communicate intimacy produces anxiety instead.
Perhaps personal does not always mean interpersonal: There are aspects of my faith in life that are deeply personal without me behaving like another person. Music can move me profoundly. A mountain can leave me speechless. Grief can reshape how I understand life. Beauty can interrupt me. Silence can expose things I have been avoiding.
None of these things speaks to me like another human being. Yet the experience can still be deeply personal. Perhaps some of our experiences of God can be like that too. Deeply personal and profoundly significant, without necessarily feeling like a conversation with another person.
This is not me saying God is impersonal. Not at all. It is me simply saying relationship with God might not always resemble friendship like with another human being.
I have long thought and still do believe that God is encountered through people. Through creation. Through compassion. Through silence. Through the bible. Through grief. Through beauty. Through those strange moments when life suddenly feels deeper than the things we normally spend our time worrying about.
But isn’t God personal? Christianity certainly speaks about God relationally. God loves. God calls. God listens. God forgives. Jesus calls God Father.
I don’t think the answer is simply to replace a personal God with some abstract force called “the universe”. But perhaps we also need to remember that God is not simply another person like us! Obviously…
God is not a very large human somewhere beyond the clouds. Our language about God is always reaching towards something greater than our language can contain.
Father. Shepherd. Rock. Fire. Spirit. Light. All revealing something. None describing everything. Perhaps ‘friend’ belongs in that category too. Helpful. Beautiful for some people. But still not the only way God can be known.
What if God is closer to us than the experience, we are trying at times so hard to manufacture?
Sometimes I wonder whether we spend so much energy “trying to feel God” that we miss the places where God might already be encountered.
Quick reframe: (as a counsellor we love a good reframe)
Perhaps I do not hear a voice. But someone sits beside me when life falls apart.
Perhaps I do not feel supernatural warmth during worship. But something changes in me when I forgive someone I would rather resent.
Perhaps prayer feels mostly like silence. But in that silence, I become more honest about myself.
Maybe, just maybe those things count.
Jesus repeatedly directs attention towards ordinary human encounters. The hungry. The thirsty. The stranger. The sick. The prisoner.
“Whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me.”
Perhaps encountering Jesus was never supposed to depend entirely on developing an invisible friendship inside our heads. Here’s a radical thought, maybe sometimes we encounter Jesus in one another.
So, what do I think now? (purely my opinion, you may think differently)
I still think Christianity is relational. But I’m less convinced these days that everyone’s relationship with God needs to look or feel the same.
For some people, God feels close and conversational. For others, God is encountered more through silence, wonder, community, service or contemplation. And… sometimes God simply feels absent.
I think we need to stop putting pressure on ourselves to experience faith in a particular way or use one person’s experience, or something that’s said from up the front in faith communities as the measuring stick for everyone else.
For me spiritual maturity isn’t about learning to manufacture a particular feeling of intimacy with God. It is about becoming increasingly open to love.
To truth.
To compassion.
To wonder.
To the needs of another person.
To the sacredness hidden within ordinary life.
And perhaps, even when we don’t feel close to God, it’s striving to continuously try to make room for God in our lives. Perhaps the question is not always:
Do I feel close to God? Maybe sometimes the better question is:
Is the way I am living making me more open to God, to other people and to the life happening around me?
The bit where you get to think about stuff: Questions for the week.
Have I ever judged my own faith because I do not experience God the way someone else describes?
When I think about having a “relationship with God”, what am I actually expecting that relationship to feel like?
What might I notice differently if I stopped trying to manufacture a particular spiritual experience and became more attentive to where God might already be at work in my everyday life?
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