Another week, another borrowing of some profound insight I came across on the Internet…
Sarah Bessey is a favourite Canadian author of many in our community and if you haven’t heard of her or read anything by her, then do yourself a favour and check a Bessey book out of our library. You won’t be disappointed. I’m not sure if the below excerpt comes from some previously published work or if these are just thoughts off the top of her head but they were shared on her story and I was so captivated by them that I typed them out for you to read as well:
I used to hear preachers speak with disdain about “riding the coattails” of someone else’s faith. Like, “you have to make this thing your OWN.” Especially in those teen years, those years of acquiring the fire and manias and whatnot, we weren’t supposed to rely on our parents or grandparents or community’s faith. It had to be ours, our own, our little individual choices and passions and zealous love and revelations. Like it started and ended and depended on us. What a dangerous thing, a sad thing.
I can see the seed of what they meant by it, if I’m generous, but honestly, what does that even mean? How can you make any of *this* an individual exercise that depends entirely on your ability to keep faith and love and hope alive or healthy? Have you seen the world lately? I’ve had long seasons of doubt, of darkness, of despair. And then? That’s when I learned that this whole thing, our whole lives really, are meant to be the group project. As communal as a communal God. Then I finally relied on the ancient believers who left a trail of breadcrumbs that became a feast, as well as the pals with a holy hunch there is always more love available. I didn’t believe but I believed that they did and somehow that kept the light on long enough for something to flicker in me again.
Basically, I hope my kids find in my inexplicable faith a glimpse of Love that holds like this, too. I hope total strangers rest in the conviction that in the days they don’t believe, somewhere, out there, is someone like me up with the dawn and praying for them. I hope that when prayer makes no sense you can borrow words from the ancestors and the cloud of witnesses. I hope when you lose grip on hope that there is comfort in knowing someone still has a tail end of it. Somewhere. Maybe it was never meant to be just “our own.” That sounds as lonely as it is unhealthy. Maybe this experience of loving and being loved by God was always meant to be ours. Cling to the coattails like the gift they were meant to be.
If any are weary and tossed to and fro, you could set down shame and isolation at least and today simply stay awhile in the arms of your grandmother’s prayers and your dad’s old Bible and ancient prophets who know darkness and the end of days well and the remnant who holds and even stubborn strangers on the Internet who are thinking of you this morning, trying to weave a possibility, a seed, of faith still yours, too.
I don’t think Sarah is wrong here — in fact, I think she exposes how incomplete our earlier teaching sometimes was. We were told to “make our faith our own” as a kind of call to maturity — and that’s not without value. Faith can’t stay second-hand forever and when it does, we have a term that often fits: nominalism. Essentially, faith without teeth. Without passion. Without this obedience to the ultimate call of Jesus – to take up our cross and die to self. And this is why, at some point, our faith has to become lived, wrestled-with, embodied.
But the problem comes when that call turns into isolation — when “make it your own” becomes “make it alone.” What Bessey captures so well is that our faith, even when personal, is never private. It’s communal at its core. It’s upheld by a great cloud of witnesses — the saints, our parents, the friends, the strangers who still believe when we can’t.
We have a healthy generation of young people in our community these days – some 20ish teens coming out to GYG each week, which is beautiful. These are young people still figuring out their faith – how to own it, how to hold it, how to live it. The reality is, they might not be able to express it or even confess a faith of their own and may need to assume yours for the time being (when I say “yours” I’m referring to you as a parent, as a friend, as a fellow church member). I think this is okay. As a parent, I get the pressure to get my kids to own their faith and while I still believe there’s some relevance to this, maybe the more important thing we can do is show our young people what faithfulness to Jesus looks like in our every day lives, allowing them to assume our faith for the time being.
So maybe the real invitation here isn’t to abandon the call to make our faith our own, but to remember that faith owning was never meant to exclude faith belonging. We mature best when we’re rooted in a people — when our questions, prayers, and hopes are carried together. At its best, the Church is that place: a living network of “borrowed” belief, trust, dependency. My hope is that Grassroots would continue to be this kind of community — one where our kids in particular can safely cling to the coattails of others until their own faith is able to stand on its own.
That’s so true. I have drawn inspiration from many older, younger, wiser, crazier Christians than I, over the years. If following Jesus is like a marathon, we need those pacemakers a little ahead of us to give us the guts to keep going and to keep each other company.