2003-09-26 - 5:15 p.m.
May 24, 2003
So after spoiling all element of surprise for my blog topics in a conversation, here they are anyway.
After presenting my thesis someone asked me if it was sufficient for someone to believe in Christianity by ruling out the other options. In other words, is it faith if you come by faith through eliminating the other religions and philosophies as false?
I was not prepared for that question, and it’s bothered me ever since. On my way down the highway I came up with the following trope:
Let’s say you have a multiple-choice quiz before you. For the sake of illustration, pretend that (B) is the answer in any given scenario. The first question you know is (B). The second question you pause to consider. This time you do not know the right answer, but through process of elimination you discover the answer has to be (B). Does this make you any less wrong or any less certain? No.
What happens when you are given the option, “(E) None of the above”? This poses a whole new problem I don’t know how to answer with the above illustration.
Of all places for my answer—it seems—emerged from that dreadful Sunday School Class. Paul answers the question of motivation for us: “What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in this I rejoice, yes, and I will rejoice.” (Phil. 1:18) He preceeds this verse by admitting to the various motivations behind declaring and professing faith. While he certainly cares about the impure motivations, he cares more that in every way the truth of God is told. The effects are no less pure for impure causes.
Today, among sundry events I visited the Crazy Horse National Monument and Mt. Rushmore. Below the presidents’ faces I felt that stillness of awe (despite myself) that draws me to prayer. I say ‘despite myself’ to explain that I hesitated to praise the accomplishments of man that loomed above me. We forget ourselves, children of God, when we create great things like Mt. Rushmore and Crazy Horse National Monument. Yet, there I was, the audience of this art, praying.
I wondered what it would be like to stand beneath the face of the Virgin Mary with the Christ child in her arms. I wish. Then the picture as well as the effect of the art would be fantastic. I would faint from forgetting to breathe.
A walk through the historical center of the Crazy Horse National Monument and I realized that it took fifty years to create a face and the beginnings of an arm and armpit. There are still the hair and back and the whole horse to blast out of the mountain. That will take how many more years? This is not the first time man has created art out of a mountain. But it seems that the most impressive art structures that took generations to complete serve some function too, i.e. cathedrals and The Great Wall of China. We Americans have political monuments, that is all. We must always be political.
Besides those regrets across the Wyoming plains, I am fascinated that I have seen a piece of history in progress. Next time I see the Crazy Horse National Monument—and I will see it again—I will be seeing the monument a little further along.
