Though it might be applied to the spiritual but not religious crowd, I do not think it is limited to them. In every community is a group of Christians who are constantly searching for a better church and moving from one group to another. It seldom has much to do with the tenets of belief but almost always has to do with the feelings they get from the church -- or, more precisely, the worship. The actual faith or creed is nearly extraneous to the experience of the church and its worship or the feeling of believing that these serve or fail to serve. We love the idea of believing but we seldom want to be bothered by what Scripture says or the creed confesses or the catholic and apostolic faith has proclaimed through the ages. It is very easy for us today to believe in the idea of God while rejecting any particular deity of any particular faith. It is also very easy for us to insist we are Christian while rejecting much of what Christianity lives or dies upon and has throughout history.
I find it ever so curious that most Christians seem to give a higher weight to the experience or feelings of people than anything concrete or objective. How else can we so quickly adopt the idea of gender in opposition to the sexual characteristics of the body and the identity of the chromosomes? How else can we so readily jettison what sacred and secular cultures have known and valued in the marriage of one man to one woman? How else can adapt a spiritual idea of life after death that more resembles the circle of life than it does 1 Corinthians 15? Doctrine is so confining and belief so constricting. We want the feeling but we cannot stomach the surrender of our autonomy to anything -- not even to God!
Is there much of a difference between loving the feeling of belief and then leaving worship empty because we did not believe we were fed or we got nothing out of it all? Is there much of a difference between loving the feeling of faith but then insisting that no one and no church has the corner on truth and that each of us has some measure of the truth or that our truth is the only truth that matters?
Americans seem to be some of the last holdouts in love with the feeling of believing. Europe seems by and large to have reached some comfort level with the absolute rejection of the faith of their fathers. Sure, everyone rallies around a cultural icon like Notre Dame in its hour of need but does anyone really care about what is preached or taught within its walls? I am pretty sure the French people own the symbol but are not all that encumbered by doctrine and it often seems like Pope Francis is the same -- except with respect to what he thinks is important. On that even he is doctrinaire.
It is wonderful when our hearts burn with passion and fire for the Lord. Is it normal? I don't think so. I think the norm is not passion but emptiness, the constant and ongoing struggle to remain in faith when everything in your mind, heart, and body aches to abandon it. Like Peter of old, we have no where else to go. It is not that we don't want to go somewhere else -- we all do -- but we are held in the grasp of God's grace and the providence of His revealed will through the hearing of His Word and the nourishment of our Lord's body and blood. Lord, I believe; help my unbelief. Now that is normal. It does not always feel good and often feels lousy but it is the only real thing there is in a world and life that is passing away.
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