Faith and Resilience

Sunday, January 21, 2024

Father Richard defines resilience in the context of the Christian faith:

Resilience is really a secular word for what religion was trying to say with the word faith. Even Jesus emphasized faith more than love. Without a certain ability to let go, to trust, to allow, we won’t get to any new place. If we stay with order too long and we’re not resilient enough to allow a certain degree of disorder, we don’t get smarter, we just get rigid.

Unfortunately, this is what characterizes so many religious people. They’re not resilient at all. Then there’s another set of people who have settled down in disorder—believing there’s no pattern, there’s nothing always true. It’s a deep cynicism about reality, and that’s equally problematic. I think such faith in both good order and acceptable disorder—creating a new kind of creative reorder—is actually somewhat rare. [1]

To have faith, to grow toward love, union, salvation, or enlightenment, we must be moved from order to disorder and then ultimately to reorder.

Eventually our ideally ordered universe—our “personal salvation” project [2], as Thomas Merton called it—must and will disappoint us, if we are honest. Our spouse dies, we were rejected on the playground as a child, we find out we’re needy, we fail an exam for a coveted certification, or we finally realize that many people are excluded from our own well-deserved “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This is the disorder stage, or what Christians call from the Adam and Eve story the “fall.” It is necessary in some form if any real growth is to occur; but some of us find this stage so uncomfortable we try to flee back to our first created order—even if it is killing us and the very things we love.

There is no nonstop flight to reorder. Various systems call it “enlightenment,” “exodus,” “nirvana,” “heaven,” “springtime,” or even “resurrection.” Reorder is life on the other side of death, the victory on the other side of failure, the joy on the other side of the pains of childbirth. It is an insistence on going through—not under, over, or around. To arrive there, we must endure, learn from, and include disorder, transcending the first naïve order—but also still including it!

Happiness is the spiritual outcome and result of resilience, full growth, and maturity. This is why I am calling it “reorder.” Ultimately, we are taken to happiness—we cannot find our way there by willpower or cleverness. Yet we all try! We seem insistent on not recognizing the universal pattern of growth and change. Trees grow strong by reason of winds and storms. Boats are not meant to stay in permanent dry dock or harbor. Baby animals must be educated by their mothers in the hard ways of survival, or they almost always die young. It seems that each of us has to learn on our own what is well hidden but also in plain sight. [3]

Consecrating the Chaos

Dr. Otis Moss III considers difficulties we face as individuals and in community: 

A true crisis—a threat to yourself or someone you love—can sometimes do wonders to focus the mind. In the moment, if we have spiritual practices in place or we are blessed with inspiration, the noise and confusion may recede for a little while, and we may see again what matters. But … you don’t get that kind of clarity every time your blood pressure rises.…

In our darkest times, when the storm anxiety, worry, and chaos sweeps over an entire community, such feelings are everywhere. People who have children or elders worry they can’t keep them safe. Those blessed with jobs worry about losing them. Even following the news can be too much to take. People with mental health issues feel even more intensely challenged. People who self-medicate do it more and more. Activists who work in their communities start saying to themselves, “The more I do to fight back, the more the pressure builds. The dam is cracking, and every time I plug a hole with my finger, ten more holes show up.” The question haunts us: When will this end? …

Struggling in all that confusion, uncertainty, and violence, we become spiritually worn down. It’s too hard to keep believing.

We get tired. 

We think:

My road is too hard. 

The powerful will never treat people right. 

I’ve tried everything, there’s nothing to be done. 

It’s no use.

Moss believes faith can sustain us in chaos:

In the storm of chaos, lost in confusion and disorder, … the question is whether there might be some way to use the harsh, unpredictable winds and the relentless currents of our lives to get us moving to where we actually want to go. Do we have the spiritual audacity and the practical means to turn chaotic energy to our own purposes?

When you take on the confusion and the violence and you refine them, purify them into something new, you are doing what in the vocabulary of faith we call consecrating your chaos. To consecrate is to make holy, to put it into service for good. In consecrating chaos, you engage it, tame it, name it, take what seemed out of control and charge it with a duty.

The model here is the creation itself. We read in Genesis [1:2] that in the beginning, “The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep.” Scripture begins with a whole world of chaos. Then God begins to find the possibilities of design in that formless void, separating light from darkness, water from land…. God consecrates the chaos, giving it form. It is presented to us as an act of creativity and of choice. God works in the chaotic void until there is order and light, and it is good. The Genesis story reminds us that the void is not as empty as we think. Chaos is never as chaotic as we fear.

=================== Closing Thought

“We do not preach great things; we live them.“

– North African Christian Saying from the 3rd Century AD

What we do is more important than what we say.

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