Confessions of an Amateur Believer

So I was at Barnes and Noble tonight, looking for Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott, hoping to get a start on my book list. Unfortunately, it wasn't in stock, so I just browsed the shelves, looking for others on my list. I really wanted to start with Traveling Mercies though, since it's been on my "to read" list for years, so it was the sort of apathetic looking that comes from not being able to find the one thing that you were on a mission to find.

The title of one book jumped out at me, however, and I picked it up right away to look it over. "Confessions of an Amateur Believer" is an intriguing title, particularly in light of what I've been thinking about lately. I figured it was worth a look.

I opened the introduction, and read the following words (slightly abridged by me), which sold me on the book:

Often, when people speak about their faith, they describe it as a settled thing. A thing acquired, sometimes on a certain date, and utterly static. Not merely "once saved, always saved," as my husband liked to hope when he met me as an atheist who had once believed, but "once saved, always the same," having the same exact faith as what they started out with their entire lives. Part of me envies that sort of certainty. Such faith journeys from conversion to death, as I envision them, follow a clean, sure trajectory reminiscent of the lives and deaths of Catholic martyrs in a book I had as a child. Never faltering in the faith. Never questioning. Always obedient. Their eyes cast ever skyward in the woodcut illustrations that accompanied the text.

Other faithful men and women of scripture, though, seem just the opposite. Peter. John the Baptist in prison, about to be beheaded. Mary and Martha when their brother dies. Most heroes of faith, it seems to me, spend as much time wandering away from God as they do returning to him. And many great believers balk at the crucial moment, often late in their lives, when one would think their faith as mature and large as it will ever be. Theirs is a jagged faith trajectory at best. Like Jacob--like me--they must wrestle with God and with themselves for a long time before they can receive their blessing.

And later in the introduction:

Unbelief comes later. Beset by troubles, or else blinded to our fundamental need and dependence by ease and by our increasing ability to take care of ourselves, some of us lose sight of God. Or we forget to look for him. As we do when a loved one dies, we eventually become accustomed to days and nights without the one we loved and gradually forget the contours of a face we once knew with our eyes closed. Soon, mourning itself is a distant memory, replaced by the more urgent activities of daily life. As time passes, we struggle to remember the person at all and carry with us only a vague sense of loss.

That is unbelief, I think. The nagging absence of a remembered face. Unbelief, in my experience, is much less a conscious rejection of God than a sense of abandonment and loss. The prayer of the unbeliever--Lord, help my unbelief!--is the voice of hope from beneath our loneliness and self-made comforts. It is the seed out of which true faith grows.

But the faith of many of our spiritual heroes--Moses, Jonah, Mary, Peter--does not always arc upward from that first moment of belief to godliness. Often, we progress only to fall back, and our biggest spiritual steps 'higher up and deeper in," in the words of C. S. Lewis, are often out of pits into which we have fallen, again and again, along the way. That's progress. Falling back into moments of unbelief to rediscover God, then picking oneself up and proceeding forward, ever forward to the safety of his fatherly arms and into the genuine rest he promises his beloved children.

I think this book is right up my alley.

I'll let you know what my thoughts are about the book as I go along.