Making Sense: Arriving at Integrity

One of those important difficult conversations.

SP Magazine for which I write regularly.

It was a rainy day in Mission Bay…have no fear! I had my paws wrapped around a hot cup of tea and was awaiting the arrival of a timid, but curious acquaintance. She had expressed discomfort with the traditional views of faith, religion and God, and with the institutional trappings in which that is oft bundled. I didn’t blame her at all. I’m often uncomfortable with the packaging and systems too, but my mission on the day was not to dismantle the system, but help her find her way ahead in spite of it.

I’m a chaplain, an archaic old-school name for someone who helps people make sense of life in terms of faith and spirituality. We often are there just after disaster has struck, but we much prefer being called early if disaster can at all be averted.  I’ve met people in hospitals, at police stations, and on the curb outside of pubs. I much prefer meeting students and young adults in cafes when no immediate crisis is looming.

Eventually she arrived, a bit late, but apologetic so all my imaginings were tamed immediately. You know, the things that can run through the mind, “She’s stood me up, the little…” or “So she wasn’t serious about needing to talk.”  or “Slept in, got a better offer, forgot, oh whatever!” After realising I was being an idiot and that she seemed to be in a bit of turmoil, I started listening, not just with my ears, but with my heart, my spirit and with prayers for wisdom.

There was a pattern to our conversation. She would lay out an accepted belief or fact, and then follow it with, “But what about…?” Then would come another familiar statement, followed by, “But what if ...?” and then another “but . . .”

These are altogether different questions from “What about …?” or “What if…?” Questions that begin with a “but” are countering what came before. They are defensive, confrontational or contentious, and I heard them all as a sincere effort to get behind and under what she’d always been taught. She wanted to know how to refute those who challenged her statements of belief, long held beliefs that she may have inherited, not birthed for herself.

Jill on the Routeburn Track

Having walked on Franz Joseph Glacier and done three of the South Island Great walks, I know there is a huge difference between being dropped at the top by helicopter and making the journey on foot. The view may be great from the helicopter, but I can say I know the Routeburn Track. I walked it. I got blisters, twisted my knee, shared rehydrated mush with strangers and felt the exhilaration of bursting out of the treeline into an alpine wilderness that took my breath away. I made the journey myself. I own it, though DOC might be surprised at that.

I find similar truth in the realms of spirituality, faith and sense-making. Stuff in life happens. Others control parts of it. We control some of it. We are left to make sense of much of it in our own ways. We each have to arrive at answers in our own way. My answers do not necessarily fit your questions. My journey reveals truths to me, but you don’t hold those in the same way I do, nor should you.

An unexamined position either way, 

as with an unexamined life, is not worth much.

The God I serve is big enough and clever enough to be uniquely revealed to each of us. The Bible is not so much a rule book or map as it is a diary through which we can see God’s heart and intent.

Religion, on the other hand, is systematised and codified as a way of protecting the powers and institutions. That’s not God’s fault, but it’s often enough to frustrate us just enough to throw the baby out with the bath water. I think I just called God "baby".

My friend had been challenged by friends who did not believe in the God she had grown up with. She was trying to make sense of what she’d always thought and what wasn’t common to her new circle of friends. She was going through the hard part of developing integrity in her faith.

Many people do not have integrity in such things, whichever place in the circle they choose to stand. They don’t necessarily know why they don’t believe, or do believe, or even what they believe. They’ve chucked everything aside because it was just all too hard. An unexamined position either way, as with an unexamined life, is not worth much. Integrity in seeking your own answers is worth heaps and will earn you the respect, even of those with whom you disagree.

Jill Shaw is on the Chaplaincy Services team at Massey University in Albany. As such, she is often in that space between the religious types who are sceptical of reason and the rational types who are sceptical of faith.

           This article was first published in SP Magazine, 2010