Why Faith Requires Patience

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Due to time restraints caused by my moving out-of-state, Skeptical Faith blogs are, as they say in show biz, "encore presentations." This one was published in 2014.

It’s no secret that many people, believers and non-believers, struggle with faith.

Like non-believers, many believers have doubts and questions. Some have spent lifetimes of struggle with questions about God. For various reasons, believers have come down on the side of faith. Many of us, like the psalmist says, simply “cling to him in love.”

Today’s believers can’t bank on the artificial props of the past, however. They can’t depend on God as an answer to many questions about the natural world, or assume that most people (including family members) are like-minded or attend church regularly. And modern society, with all its advantages in prosperity (in many parts of the world) and advances in technology, has brought an unprecedented amount of anxiety, stress and “busyness,” all obstacles in the search for God.

The Desire to Be Truthful

Many believers also share with atheists and agnostics the desire to be truthful, to see things as they are. But it’s easy to confuse your own thoughts with those of the popular culture. Though it may be well below the surface, today’s apparent indifference about God beckons us to unbelief. It leans toward the idea that human life is meaningless and ends in nothingness. So, many believe that distracting oneself, today and the day after, and the day after that, is the best you can do.   

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I’ve often quoted Tomas Halik, a Czech priest, philosopher and sociologist who this year won the Templeton Prize. I’ve just started reading a second book by him called Patience with God: The Story of Zacchaeus Continuing in Us. Zacchaeus – the famous tax collector from Luke’s gospel who happened across Jesus – stood on the sideline, “curious but non-committal,” says the book’s promo.

Tomas Halik
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Being “vertically challenged,” Zacchaeus climbed a tree to get a better look, and probably would have stayed there for some time had Jesus not called to him and, risking association with a “known sinner,” asked to stay in his house.

 The world is full of Zacchaeuses, says Halik – people who may be curious about faith, feel some attraction to it but haven’t been able to commit. One of their most frequent questions (with which this blog has dealt frequently) is, “Where is this God of yours?”

“Hardly anything points toward God and calls as urgently for God as the experience of his absence,” says Halik. His prescription for such God searchers: Patience.  

“Yes, patience is what I consider to be the main difference between faith and atheism,” he writes. “What atheism, religious fundamentalism, and the enthusiasm of a too-facile faith have in common is how quickly they can ride roughshod over the mystery we call God – and that is why I find all three approaches equally unacceptable.

“If the signs of God’s presence lay within easy reach on the surface of the world as some religious zealots like to think, there would be no need for real faith.

Those Twilight Moments

“We need faith precisely at those twilight moments when our lives and the world are full of uncertainty, during the cold night of God’s silence. And its function is not to allay our thirst for certainty and safety, but to teach us to live with mystery. Faith and hope are expressions of our patience at just such moments – and so is love.”

So, why does God require faith? If he/she exists, why not plainly show him/herself? The only honest answer is that we don’t know.

We can speculate, however, that if he/she were “on the surface” of the world, we would have no freedom. How would we be free to reject God? And like any good parent, God evidently doesn’t consider coercion a good basis for a relationship.

So, how to live with uncertainty? Patience, friend, patience!