My Christian uncle posed this question to me during his visit for Thanksgiving, and I have been turning myself inside out for three weeks now trying to come up with a response. I want so badly to write it out and, through the act of writing, find some answer, something to show to my uncle to say "Look! I know what I stand for! I know what I believe!" But it's just not that easy.
Take my uncle, for example. His faith is hard-fought and hard-won. He started wrestling with his existence at a young age, asking and actively looking for answers to the Big Questions: Why are we here? What's true? What really matters? He rejected the rigid conformity of the organized church and undertook his own independent self-study of Scripture, interpreting what he found there through the lense of his own autonomous conscience and intellect. Overtime, he developed a Christian religious life theme that felt real and true to him, resounding with his 60+ years of concrete experience. My uncle very much knows what he believes and why.
I on the other hand, like most of my peers, have avoided the Big Questions altogether. We are overeducated and overstimulated, prowling around big cities with money to spend and endless ways to spend it. We dull away our existential angst with alcohol and drugs, or distract ourselves from it entirely with constant social interaction and entertainment. We call ourselves atheists or agnostics, but we all worship...wealth, beauty, power, intellect... all the things David Foster Wallace listed in his 2005 Kenyon Commencement Speech. We live in blissful ignorance of the truth he laid bare: "There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship."
My uncle made a choice, and I respect him for it. But he can't spare me the journey with words. I need to ask, look and live as he did, struggling with and against the explanations of others. Overtime, I can begin to develop my own spiritual/philosophical life theme that resounds with my experience.
There is no shortcut. Were I to simply take my uncle's word for it and start calling myself a Christian, I would be no closer to finding my truth than if I had kept on in my drug-addled, social media-crazed stupor. And taking on that sort of a fixed identity this early in the game would only limit my possibilities. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi put it this way: "At best, the spirit of the true believer resembles that of a crystal, strong and beautifully structured but slow to grow."
It is the growing that I am interested in at this stage--that perspective-shifting exposure and discovery that happens when we go off in search of our own truth. If and when I do arrive at a set of answers, I hope it is rich and complex and multi-colored. I hope it doesn't ask me to forget what I've learned in a science classroom or in conversation with a person from another culture or faith. I hope it doesn't require that I declare an identity out of my beliefs, creating instant separation between myself and anyone who thinks or sees differently than I do.
So I accept my uncle's challenge to start asking the Big Questions and looking for answers, but for at least for a while longer, I will do so unaffiliated and undefined. Like Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I will remain "elusive of social or religious orders," determined to "learn my own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others myself wandering among the snares of the world."
I'll let you know what I find.
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