Joan and I went this past Tuesday afternoon over to Mill Creek Friends Meeting graveyard southwest of Danville to meet with the cemetery trustee to pick out our gravesites. We’re not hoping to fill them anytime soon, but we intend to engage in riotous living after we retire, so it pays to be prepared. We’ll be buried very near my freshman algebra teacher, Rosemary Helton, whose funeral I conducted back in 1998. Mrs. Helton inspired me to become a writer after I nearly flunked her algebra class. She met me one day after class and asked what I wanted to be and I said maybe an engineer, which is why I had taken her algebra class, and she said, “Have you thought about writing?”
While walking through the graveyard, I saw the gravestone of my childhood nemesis, a bully who used to punch me in the shoulder whenever he passed me in the hallway. Fortunately, I’ll be all the way across the cemetery from him, and to get to me, he’ll have to get past Rosemary Helton, so I think I’ll be safe. Rosemary was a strong Quaker woman who didn’t tolerate any nonsense, and kept a close eye on things. If he does get past Rosemary, if she lets down her guard, he’ll have to get past Joan, and that won’t happen.
I explained all of this to Joan.
She said, “You do realize you won’t be aware of any of this, don’t you?”
I said, “I don’t know what might happen. I’ve never died. But why risk it?”
Most Christians think that when you die you either go to heaven or hell, but as you are probably aware, I’m not a big fan of orthodoxy, so have my doubts about heaven and hell, and am picking my gravesite with the understanding that I might be there awhile. It’s quiet and peaceful out that way, next to a sheep pasture, reminiscent of the 23rd Psalm and “The Lord is my shepherd.” It seems somehow fitting for a minister, even a skeptical one like myself.
Faith has never been my strong suit. I’ve always struggled to believe the things I were told I must believe. When I was a child, my mother would take us to church, while my father, whose religion was the Sunday newspaper, would stay home. We’d come home from church, and my father would ask me, “What did you learn today?” and I would say, “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.” So I’ve always been a doubter, which is an odd confession for a pastor. I’m like Thomas. I’ve always asked to put my finger in the wounds of Jesus before I believed. And Jesus has always said, “Sure, go ahead.”
But even then, I’ve struggled with faith, which I’ve always been honest about that. I was fired from my first church after expressing doubts about hell. We were driving to that church one morning and I mentioned to Joan that I was going to mention not believing in hell. Joan said, “I wouldn’t do that.” I said, “What can they do? Fire me?” Yes, as it turns out, they could and did.
I’m the Thomas who has always asked to put my fingers in the wound before I believed. I realize this isn’t ideal. Jesus did say, after all, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Which, of course, is all of us. I’ve always wanted to believe without seeing, without having to touch the wounds, but it’s not been easy for me.
I guess I was around 20 years old when I went to a revival a friend had urged me to attend. It was at his Pentecostal church, and was unlike anything I had ever experienced at my Quaker meeting. People praying out loud and whooping and crying. We Quakers prefer the slow steady race, not the sprint. We don’t leap forward from the starting blocks in a blaze of speed. That is not who we are. But my friend had invited me, and what could I do, but go. When it came time for the pastor to preach, he spoke about the joy of Jesus and the gift of faith, and it sounded so lovely I wanted such a faith for myself, so I went forward, then for several years afterward kept waiting for the gift of faith to illumine my life, thinking faith would be like a bonfire, with flames leaping into the air. But now I realize I have only known faith as a flickering candle, struggling to catch hold and stay lit.
While I don’t always have faith, I do know faith when I see it. So when I heard Robert Jeffress, the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas and an ally of Donald Trump, say that God has given Donald Trump permission to use nuclear weapons in Iran, I knew that wasn’t faith, even though Robert Jeffress said it was.
When I heard Micah Beckwith, Indiana’s lieutenant governor, champion Christian Nationalism, I knew that wasn’t faith, even though he said it was. I may not have faith myself, but I know faith when I see it. And I know this. The Spirit blows where it will. Beautiful things happen because of us. Beautiful things happen in spite of us. The Spirit blows where it will. So if you’re like me and struggle with faith, you should at least develop the ability to see which way the wind is blowing.
I think I must have been a junior or senior in high school, when I noticed my mother slipping away each evening to be gone for a couple of hours. She never told us where she was going and we didn’t ask, but then my curiosity got the better of me and I asked her where she was going. It turns out she was going to the house of a woman who was elderly and feeble and poor, and couldn’t take care of herself, but had no family to help. So my mother would take her leftovers from our supper, bathe her, and get her ready for bed.
My father was the president of the town board and when this woman needed help, she had phoned Dad to see if the town could send someone to help. Dad mentioned it to Mom, and off she went to help this lady she’d never met. I finally asked my mom, “Why are you doing that? You don’t even know that lady.”
And my mother said, “If I don’t do it, who will?”
That is as fine a statement of faith as I have ever heard. If I don’t do it, who will? Faith isn’t something we have, not something we think or believe. It’s something we do. Faith isn’t our verbal assent to a creed; it is our commitment to a way of life. If we choose our company well, we will see faith in action. But we must choose our company well. If we hang around with Robert Jeffress and Micah Beckwith, we won’t see it, because faith can never be found where vanity prevails. It is found in humble service.
The Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore, said that faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark. So Friends, in this time of national darkness, when dawn has not yet come, it is possible to feel the light of faith. Even if we cannot have faith, we can at least know it when we see it.