i BElieve

there have been quite a few conversations about belief going on recently. part of the ikon service on fundamentalism at greenbelt featured a ritual where everyone was offered a piece of rice paper with the words 'i beLIEve' written onto it in food colouring. people were invited to swap their scrap of paper and, symbolically, a belief that they hold, with someone else in the room. in inviting people to participate in the ritual padraig used these wonderful words: 'this piece of paper will not poison your body, but it just might open your mind.' contained within the idea of belief, therefore, was the admission of deception, if a willing self-deception. we choose our beliefs. we choose the stories we tell ourselves. i suppose the idea of the lie within a belief suggests that a belief is always already partial - both one-sided and incomplete. perhaps fundamentalism is simply the absence of an acknowledgement of this partiality; the refusal to recognise the often intensely private and transitional nature of belief; the assumption that this quietly held story about the way the world is is worthy of becoming universal.

i blogged about belief earlier (see creed and credo). i always want to hold my beliefs in an open palm, where they can co-exist with the beliefs of others, enter into dialogue with others, and remain subject to change. eight years ago i could have articulated what i believe. it would have been a fairly standard list. the kind you'd expect from any matt redman-listening, charismatic church-going, philip yancey-reading teenager. (though truthfully, while my friends were reading him, i was wondering what's so amazing about yancey?, reading my first coupland novel and beginning to ponder a different kind of grace... the kind you offer to yourself, as well as to others.) it would have featured jesus, words like way, truth, life, death and, the piece de resistance, heaven. because these beliefs existed partly due to fear. the fear of death. or, perhaps even more so, the fear of getting it wrong, of believing the 'wrong' things and fucking up my whole life by my own misguided understanding.

these days sometimes it feels like even a misguided understanding of how the world is would be nice....with wars and climate change and poverty and the arms trade and...

i had been saturated in evangelicalism, part of which is deeply concerned with the idea of witnessing. paying verbal assent to the presence of god in one's life. and of course protestantism is all about the word - of god and of the faithful in backing up the bible's claims. saying what you believe seemed to be as good as believing it. for someone with even a smidgen of capacity for articulation, this works out pretty well. and i like words. as you know. but as i have dandered down the aisle of church and out the door, into a kaleidoscopic universe which sometimes feels like heaven and sometimes feels like hell, i have let go of many things along the way. and my ability - or at least my readiness - to articulate my beliefs is one of them.


writers like john o'donohue, who has enriched my life in unspeakable ways, have awakened in me an awareness of life beyond words... of the unconscious, the body, the environment woven around me. and deeply poetic words have been his medium. i still believe in words. but also in the warp and woof. where beliefs shimmy and stay and shine and sail away. where i am given the grace to be.