Faith Floats
“The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”
“The God who made everything does not live in shrines made by human hands...though indeed he is not far from each of us. ‘For in him, we live and move and have our being.”
Not sure. Either the summer I was four or five, I went to ‘the ocean’ for the first time. Panama City Beach. Likely later, my parents explained the distinction between gulf and ocean. But at 40 pounds and with iffy eyes, it was plenty ocean for me. The red ducky float was not much help when the waves toppled me. Flanked by my parents, they quickly pulled me up, as I sputtered with the briny, stinging water in my mouth, eyes and nose.
The second day, I think, my mother began to teach me to float. You have to lie back and relax...Yeah, right... It won’t work if you fight it. Just lie back and the water will hold you up. When I began to flinch, her arms caught me up. It’s OK; I’ve got you.
Amazingly, I began to float, cradle rocked by the dippled-rippled waves.
I floated only a minute or two at a time. There were more over-washes. I was never fully sputter free those days. But I did it. Or better: the water did it. My role in a fledgling way was to let it, trust the water to hold me up.
I had not become my now over-thinker self at the time, but I guess I trusted my mother who coached me and had those safety-net arms. I learned that though the water was not necessarily my pal, it was not my enemy. And there was a thrill to riding the waves!
The renowned psychologist Erik Erikson observed that early in life a child’s first developmental task is to form a pre-conceptual Basic Trust. Based on the dependable care of the voices and arms around that hold, feed, and assure, the child begins a rudimentary faith and trust for life.
A number of us are in a learning group, led by Ron Martoia, seeking to detect how we came to the faith we have, the steps and stages that continue to unfold. By sharing our experience and observing the path(s) such takes in us and others, we hope to discern patterns that can be incorporated in the faith-disciple formation efforts of our congregations.
When Paul sought to connect with the intellects and theologues in highbrow Athens, Greece, he made a connection between their monument to ‘an unknown god’ and the great mystery, the God we know in/through Jesus. Paul quotes one of their philosophers... ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’
Frederick Buechner somewhere, says something like ‘humans questioning the existence of God is like birds flying through the sky questioning the existence of air, or fish swimming in the ocean wondering about the existence of water.’ Yet there is faith formation in the questions!
I get a kick out of the cartoon drawing of an older fish swimming by two young fish asking them how the water is...and the two perplexed fishlings looking at each other: ‘water, what’s water?’
So much of what we learn about what’s worth living and dying for...fathom about God, each other, and ourselves...‘kabongs’ in us in retrospect. More and more I realize how much of my basic faith was implanted by a myriad of people and events, yet is uniquely tied to the experience of my mother teaching me to float.
SPIRITUALITY AND THE AWAKENING SELF: THE SACRED JOURNEY OF TRANSFORMATION by David G. Benner is one of the books our group is reading. I am taking it slow: “God comes to us disguised as our life, and if we fail to be open to the flow of our life and the gifts it brings us, we cannot be genuinely open to God... That grace comes most regularly in people we normally do not notice but bring us the precious gift of God – the gift of our becoming.”
In the amniotic ocean of the life-giving/sustaining/taking mystery, the God we know in Jesus, we live and move and have our being. For sure, things are only at best occasionally smooth sailing. For sure, most all of us have a boatload of doubts, maybe even a few axes to grind with the mystery. But that we do as well as we do is attributable to something more than our dog paddling – no offense to dogs! Thanks to those conduits of grace who teach and model to us how to float.