On Faith and Choice

Faith doesn’t come naturally to me. It never has, and I suspect it never will.[fn1]

And still I go, every week, and teach and learn and take part in ordinances and community and church culture and all the rest. And why?

Because I’ve chosen to believe.

Canonically, the church is amenable to a tremendous array of styles of belief. The Doctrine and Covenants recognizes this variation in styles of belief:

To some it is given by the Holy Ghost to know that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that he was crucified for the sins of the world. To others it is given to believe on their words, that they also might have eternal life if they continue faithful.

Note that the D&C doesn’t rank knowledge above belief on their words (or, for that matter, belief on their words over knowledge). Both can ultimately provide eternal life.

Now, just like scripture doesn’t seem to weight and rank different ways of believing, I’m not trying to. I have tremendous respect for people who are capable of straight-up faith. Moreover, I don’t think faith and choice are mutually exclusive; in fact, I suspect that every one of us internalizes some mixture of the two.

But in my life, the choice side of things presses more heavily on the scale than the faith side of things.

That’s not to say that I don’t have faith, or that I haven’t had (occassional) experiences with the divine. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that as those ineffable experiences fade into the past, they become more and more effable, the indelible experiences easier to dismiss or forget.

I don’t really have a point here, other than that it’s fine if part of our religious belief isn’t a perfect fit. Because it won’t be a perfect fit—there are things about the church that bug me, and I suspect that there are things that bug you, too. But those things notwithstanding, the church provides me with relationships, questions, answers, and dissonance than I need and, at least on good days, crave.

And even though faith may not come naturally, I’ve found it worth the effort of believing. And so I believe.

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[fn1] I was debating starting this with an extended metaphor about how I can’t keep houseplants alive, and tie that in to Alma 32, but the metaphor didn’t really do the work I wanted it to do; I do, in fact, grow my faith, unlike the multiple African violets I’ve managed to kill. So forget I even mentioned it. (The African violeticide, btw, is partly me, but it’s also partly that we have a limited number of windows in our apartment, and none of them get very good light. Also, subzero temperatures make windowsills cold places, even with a good heating system.)