Sabbath Devotional :: Living Faith

I have been reading the book “My Bright Abyss” by Christian Wiman. Wiman is a contemporary poet and through this volume of essays he explores his faith and belief and how these have ebbed and flowed during his life. He writes and describes faith as a living and changing thing and this has really resonated with me. Wiman writes “[E]very single expression of faith is provisional — because life carries us always forward to a place where the faith we’d fought so hard to articulate to ourselves must now be reformulated, and because faith in God is, finally, faith in change.”

As a reader, I have always taken to heart and believe in the wisdom of the Doctrine and Covenants’ charge to “seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom” (D&C 88:118). When it comes to subjects such as religion and faith, it can be difficult to know how to navigate a spiritually oriented personal narrative or text, but my usual approach is to open myself to what I can learn from it, and to see what resonates with me, and what doesn’t — when I encounter something that doesn’t resonate or sit right, it usually allows me to ponder it to a deeper degree and through that process to better articulate something about my own thoughts and beliefs. Wiman’s quote may not resonate with you, and I wanted to acknowledge that we may differ in that, and there is nothing wrong with that; either way, I hope reading and thinking about his meaning will illuminate something about your own particular journey of faith.

Wiman’s notion of faith as a living, changing thing has also resonated with my doctrinal and scriptural understanding of faith — Alma (in Alma 32) writes of faith as a seed, and although a seed possesses a certain degree of potential and self-determination, its processes of germination and growth are also contingent on a number of other factors, both those within and outside of our control. Temperature fluctuations or ranges, moisture, light, pests, competition from other species — these are all factors impacting germination. Some of them we may be able to control or direct, but depending on the growing conditions, some may be outside of our control. To apply this analogy to the contexts in which our faith operates, there are similarly things in and out of our control — some of the things outside of our control might be the cultural mores shaping a global church, the geographical boundaries dictating the makeup of our local congregations, and cultural values and beliefs that have seeped into and shaped our spiritual environments, even if these do not have a strict doctrinal basis. These can all be complicating factors as we navigate our faith, but may in similar fashion allow us to think more deeply on our beliefs and to more clearly articulate those beliefs to ourselves and others.

I have also taken comfort in this notion of the ebbs and flows of faith. President Nelson has reinforced this when he said “The Lord does not require perfect faith for us to have access to His perfect power. But He does ask us to believe.” And in the New Testament we read of the man who said to the Savior, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:24). At the end of the quote I shared in the first paragraph, Christian Wiman writes “because faith in God is, finally, faith in change.” Taken at face value, this may seem at odds with our idea of God as a constant force and presence, and I had to spend a little more time parsing out what meaning I wanted to take from this. I may be stretching Wiman’s meaning a bit, but this is where I have landed with it: one of the principles of the restored gospel is that we have a prophet who receives continuing revelation for the church. Similar to faith, the Church is not stagnant and we can recommit ourselves to living the gospel each time we renew our covenants. But God and His gospel are steady — I love the description of Sara in Hebrews 11, who acted in faith “because she judged him faithful who had promised.” We can have faith and reassurance in the constancy and devotion of our God, whose perfect power is accessible to us, in spite of and often because of our (maybe at times imperfect) faith.

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Elizabeth VanDerwerken is the proactive root director at Mormon Women for Ethical Government.

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