FAITH AND LOVE IN CONFLICT
I spoke with my mother for several hours yesterday, time spent catching up and ruminating on the shifting sands of my spiritual landscape. When listening to her, it's obvious faith is the paragon of her value structure. By the time I was asking hard questions about religion, something else had taken its place. I was only capable of bending so much when it came to my understanding of love.
When my understanding of God came into irreconcilable conflict with love, as it inevitably had to in the form of Hell, I could no longer defer to faith to bridge the gap. There were many things in life I was willing to leave unresolved as mysteries I couldn't comprehend, but I needed divine love to be a bedrock - something I could depend on in the midst of life's storms and questions.
So when it came time to face the implications of Hell head on, whereupon it dawned on me that it couldn't be love, couldn't be right, could not possibly mesh with what I needed God to be, the primacy of love as I understood it eventually calmed the protracted cognitive dissonance and dismantled my faith.
Finally, she wondered why I questioned my religion in the first place. After all, if Hell does in fact exist, I was saved. The deep truth is I couldn't help it. I couldn't help but contemplate it on behalf of those who the church considers damned. If something's unjust, I would rather throw my lot in with the outcasts in opposition of that injustice than shelter myself under an umbrella of complicity. If it's not fair for them to be damned, it's not fair for me to be saved.
I will always regard Moses' actions on Mt. Sinai with deep and profound respect. When God offered to leave the Hebrews in the desert and start over with Moses, Moses refused. He replied that he was one of them and that he would share with them whatever destiny God saw fit to grant them. That required an uncommon courage. He stood in defiance of his Creator in solidarity with his own truth and, in my opinion, was right to do so. In my opinion, Moses was never more faithful to God than that very moment - irony sacred, boundless, and profound.