7/50: Conversational Christianity is a Healthy Christianity
Finding a faith that tells the story of our lives.
“When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
We need a new way to hold our faith. A way that doesn’t feel like we have to choose between unquestioning belief or total rejection. Neither one of those does the totality of Christianity nor the totality of our lives justice. Neither one allows us to be the bride married to amazement that Mary Oliver speaks of in her poem.
What if Christianity doesn’t offer a formula for belief but a living conversation that carries us across our lives and traditions?
What if it is the conversation that saves you and not the confession?
This is such a digression from how Christianity has been given to most of us and yet a conversational approach to faith seems to be more consistent with what we recognize as a truly vital faith, and what makes for a full and wholehearted life. Rigidity is a sign of death, fluidity a sign of life. If we are listening, learning, responding, engaging and changing, we can be assured of healthy psyche and a robust faith. So many people have felt they had to reject Christianity because it has been presented to them as an open/shut case, but the normal and healthy growth and change over the course of a lifetime means that we are always opening to new ways of thinking.