Feeling the Searcher's Heart

[HKHaugan]

The following thoughts are written to get us as disciples of Jesus to empathize with someone who doesn’t believe. We want to let them know we feel what they feel, have thought what they thought and questioned what they’ve questioned. The last thing people want is religion. They are looking for something much deeper, a relationship and relationships with someone and some others they can trust, share personal depth and simply be friends rather than just acquaintances. It takes time and a willingness to follow up what we start. This will be continued by another set of thoughts later.

Many times we ask questions like, “Why do good people suffer?” “Why is there so much division in the world?” “Why can’t we all just get along?” What ‘we all’ may be asking is “Why can’t all the people in the world be just like me, wanting to live without conflict, without pain, without worry?” The first thing I have to recognize is that I’m the one asking the questions. The key to those questions is the phrase “like me.” Therein is the root of the problem. It’s my frustration with the world that most likely arises out of my own self-frustration. It’s our common human problem. I don’t have myself resolved. Neither does anyone else. I know inside there is worse, worser and worsest but also good, better and best. I’m somewhere in there floundering about knowing that I want to be good whatever that is and not bad whatever that is. Neither I nor anyone can escape the fact that we are moral in our gut. Frustration itself arises from an imbalance within.

Not only that, I am curious about just being in the world. I find myself utterly alone in a body that is a kind of wall between me and the rest of the world. I want answers to why I am here, where I’m headed and how I’m going to get there. So many books, plays, movies, educational and religious endeavors are wrapped around this core self-interrogation and search. Much of this inner turmoil some call suffering but it’s much deeper than that. It is a symptom of being separated from the source of our creation, God our Creator. That separation into aloneness is a negative spiritual reality called sin. The grasping imbalance within each of us is the result of sin, that nagging part of “I” that keeps me unsettled, the spiritual throne upon which our egos rest. No wonder Paul, after having found Jesus as his answer, bemoans the fact that when he wants to do good only evil counsels his behavior. While he is so thankful he found Jesus, the perfect complement to his inner quest, that imbalance never seemed to leave. So what about that? Read on.

There is a process sin introduces in man’s heart and that is negating self, self-negation, self-pity, guilt and remorse causing a withdrawal into the smoking parlor of indifference, apathy and withdrawal. These are sin’s tools. So I play the game the world’s way, the secular way, the safe way. The conflict sin brings is that I know I’m more than that but I can’t seem to do anything about it. Somehow and in some way I have a better side that wants to accomplish something but the question remains, how? The frustrating side, which I believe is the contrary positive part, has allowed others to define who and what I am and I don’t like that.

Now we can write it off to pride, ego, or whatever you want to call it. What is really showing here is my natural resistance to others squeezing me into their comfort zones. In the process of trying to answer the questions about life I let others define those answers for me. I lose self in conformity to the world around me, letting others shape me according to their standards of inclusion, acceptance and success. The world is larger, much larger, than I am. I kind of just give in. So I drown who I am by the choices I make to satisfy what I perceive are my real needs like relational and emotional satisfaction, economic stability and what the world around me considers achievement. It’s a slippery slope where fear of not having these needs met is what motivates me. That’s the state of a person trapped in sin, the isolating self-crippling malaise of lonely fear that besets us from birth.

Its only solution? I’ve got to figure out where I came from, where everyone comes from and just how I fit in to what I find around me. How else can we move but to return to the Creator who put everything together in the first place?

Our problem is not physical, external or even psychological. It’s personal, it’s spiritual and therefore it’s spiritually personal. It’s a problem of the mind, the heart and the spirit being out of balance and it takes a person whose balance is perfect to help us readjust our inner being. We’ll get to that in a moment.

There are any number of ways we can respond to this inner tumult. They boil down to two categories, internal and external search. Immediately we have to admit that if we look at what we’ve already done, external influence played the greatest role in shaping our internal sense of being a person. The reason is that we are by nature relational people. We don’t do very well all by ourselves. We are mutually interdependent by nature. We need others and others need us. The question is about why and how we best relate to be productive for ourselves and one another.

One of fear’s slippery slopes is religion. Institutional forms can be false idols marketing themselves as the only means to fulfillment. They take different forms. There are those that meet us with ritualistic impressiveness and structures that seem well thought out with attractive presenters bringing us future promises if we yield to their format. Each works its exclusiveness through denominational forms whether flying under well-known banners such as Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim or whatever is out there. Some people will say they belong to a non-denominational church but as soon as a structure for group thought is put in place, leadership organized to promote it and meetings held, it becomes a denomination, an organized religion by default.

Religion takes many forms. From atheism, which simply believes in not believing, to polytheism, believing in many gods, to monotheism, believing in one God, to autotheism, belief in self alone, mankind organizes a belief structure to deal with what he can’t see. The one common connection in all of them is the individual willingness to become involved. Everyone exercises out of some kind of belief system. That’s called faith. Faith is a built in part of our uniqueness that enables us to act out what our mind and heart believe and trust.

While engineering these givens as we grow in time and experience, our adjustment finds the need to make choices and decisions which are part of our human equipment from birth.

Every human by nature, just by existing, by being here, builds his own faith system either by choosing an already established one or building his own. Everyone is born with three capacities, a mind to believe, a heart to trust and a spirit to act out the first two.

Now what I have laid out here are some ponderings (there are many more) about the dynamics of human nature without God but yet a built-in plea to face what we have been given and that is being an image of God. Thinking, believing, trusting, faith, perception, individuality, personness, searching both externally and internally, being moral; all these are built into us from birth. The question is---what do we do with the equipment we’ve been given?

That’s what we want to deal with next.