Holy Bewilderment

According to the most recent census data, taken in 2021 and published this year, only 46.2% of the English and Welsh population say they are Christian, a decline of 13.1 percentage points since the last census in 2011.  “No religion” was the second most common response, increasing by 12 percentage points to 37.2% since 2011.

The major reason for leaving their faith by those interviewed was being disillusioned in God when “life happened”

This Christmas message of Richard Rohr is more applicable than ever before:

Author Debie Thomas finds a worthy model of “holy bewilderment” in the faith of Mary, revealed at the Annunciation (Luke 1:26–38):

The second line I appreciate in the Annunciation story describes Mary’s confusion: “But she was much perplexed.”. . .

It is not that the Annunciation leads her out of doubt and into faith; it is that her encounter with the angel leads her out of certainty and into holy bewilderment. Out of familiar spiritual territory and into a lifetime of pondering, wondering, questioning, and wrestling. She was much perplexed. Or, as she puts it to Gabriel: “How can this be?”

Like Mary, I was raised with a fairly precise and comprehensive picture of who God is and how God operates in the world. If anyone had asked me to describe God when I was fifteen, twenty, or thirty years old, I would have rattled off a list of divine attributes as readily as a kindergartner recites the alphabet: “God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. God is Three and God is One. God is holy, perfect, loving, righteous, merciful, just, and sovereign.”. . .

What an interesting shock reality has been. Who knew that my life with God would actually be one long goodbye? That to know God is to unknow God? To shed my neat conceptions of the divine like so many old snakeskins and emerge into the world bare, vulnerable, and new, again and again?

This, of course, is what Mary has to do in the aftermath of Gabriel’s announcement. She has to consent to evolve. To wonder. To stretch. She has to learn that faith and doubt are not opposites—that beyond all the easy platitudes and pieties of religion, we serve a God who dwells in mystery. If we agree to embark on a journey with this God, we will face periods of bewilderment.

But this frightens us, so we compartmentalize our spiritual lives, trying to hold our relationships with God at a sanitized remove from our actual circumstances. We don’t realize that such efforts leave us with a faith that’s rigid, inflexible, and stale. In his wise and beautiful memoir, My Bright Abyss, poet Christian Wiman writes:  Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life—which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived—or have denied the reality of your life.