I don’t feel like I have a substantive faith. I’ve been let down by my expectations about God too many times. I know these expectations aren’t God, but they are my concept of God, and as such, dictate what I’m putting my faith in. When one of these flimsy expectations shatters and inevitably lets me down, I am forced to rethink my concept of God entirely, and with that reconfiguration of divinity comes the choice—and chance—to believe all over again.

Faith isn’t static. It’s not a once for all. Our expectations about God are in constant flux, constantly being affirmed—falsely it seems to me, since a moment later some paradox presents us with a challenge to our affirmations about God—and proven false, forcing us to do the dance of reconfiguration of our picture of God over and over as the day(s) progress. If the way we see and understand the object and source of our faith is in constant flux, then how can we expect our faith to not ebb and flow with these concepts and expectations we put on the ideas about God?

To have faith is to have your spiritual life woven with change. To have faith is to develop a nimble heart that can roll with the metaphysical punches. To have faith is to not hang all your hopes on what you know is just a concept, just an expectation, because you know that in a moment that “sure thing” you have been clinging to can unravel and leave you careening down the face of the mountain of spirituality we have been scaling towards the jagged rocks below.

Faith that is subject to change, to reorientation, is the only kind of faith we have, if we are honest. The problem is, As Christians, we are rarely spiritually honest. We hide our doubts, these cracks and fissures in our bulwark of theology, doctrine, and Christian culture. We want everyone to see the hegemony of our religion, so we keep our experiences of a splintering faith deep below the surface. But this experience is in our marrow. It has pierced us to the core. We are not sure about our faith, about who or what we have faith in, about if we even have faith worth speaking of.

So, we double down. We put up a stronger front and play in the church theater of certainty, putting on the appropriate mask, moving with the cues, speaking the correct lines fed to us by theologians and preachers from off stage left.  We are so dishonest with ourselves that we forget about the changeable nature of faith, the importance of that flexibility, the need to reexamine our suppositions about God at every turn. Instead, we create a façade so fully immersive that we forget it is a show. We lock away our nimble hearts and broken hopes.

And thus is born the Christian hypocrite, the fundamentalist, the one who must be right, who has to have theological understanding and spiritual belief locked down so tightly they can never breathe again. And that smothered doctrine grows further and further away from the living words of scripture and the living Word of God until finally we are performing a sort of spiritual necromancy on our Christianity, all so we can have an unchanging faith.

Where is the trust in a faith that refuses to change? If it ceases to be faith—all belief that refuses to breathe, to grow, to fade, to die cease to be faith—then we are saved by grace but have no access to the heavenly treasures of charism (“For it is by grace you have been saved through faith…”).

Certainty is just another word for control. When we are certain, we are convinced we are in control, that we know how God acts, what/who God is, and how we can access this tamed hurricane. But God is not what we think God is. God is where we think God is not. God is not confined by our mumbling and murmuring articulations of what is ineffable. The glory of the suffering one. The coronation of the crucified. The hell God descended into. These are not the pictures of some god we sing about on Sunday mornings to make ourselves feel good, the one that is powerful, mighty, majestic, even victorious. This suffering Christ isn’t the god of blessing and abundance, ready to prove his undying love for us with cars, mansions, five-hundred-dollar sneakers, and a good parking space. This crucified one especially isn’t the god of the United States, the Christian nationalist’s sycophant ready to exalt the U.S., crush foreign entities we deem unworthy, and establish a theocratic oligarchy from which capitalism and patriarchy can extend their long hand of terror. No the God that went to hell for the sake of our redemption is the god of weakness, the infant in the manger, the man up all night sweating blood at the knowledge of the ordeal that was about to befall him, the murdered by the state body that was laid in a borrowed tomb.

These pictured of a suffering Christ shatter what we think we know about God. They take that cocksure faith and burn it up in a fire of a holy love that suffers for, with, and because of us. Then they salt the ashes. These truths—here I come dangerously close to asserting something about God that will probably be changed by the time this essay is through—about God, the suffering, the dying, the entering into our hell, these are images that throw us off balance spiritually. How do we trust a dead God to not let us die?

But that’s just it, God bade us to come and die with Christ (“Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies…”). God doesn’t take away our sufferings, our hell. Instead, God enters into our torment, is tormented with us, has compassion—suffering with—for us, and helps us find the only exit from our troubles: through them (“When you walk through the waters, I will be with you…”).

Faith—such as I understand and experience it—isn’t about the certainty that we will survive. Faith is a letting go of all that we expected God to be, to do, and accepting the reality of the situation we are in. Accepting doesn’t mean not changing, but it does mean honesty that this is where we are, this is what is going on, this is my now. Faith is the acceptance of the moment, coupled with the belief that God is here in the moment, no matter how tumultuous and just plain hard it is. Faith is accepting God’s presence in the here and now, no matter what the here and now is.

The faith I profess and the faith I experience—separating belief from experience is another surefire way into hypocrisy—isn’t of some substance. It’s not a firm foundation to stand on. Some days, I’m a functional atheist. A few days, a zealous believer. Most days I’m an agnostic that’s trying to believe. The fluctuations and radical oscillations I experience in my spiritual life don’t garner much hope that I have a substantive faith. The faith I do have is trust. Trust that God is here, right now, with you and me, no matter the heaven of hell we are in. Trust that Jesus has a way of never letting us go. Trust that there is nothing I can do to manipulate God, so God will continue to be Godself and always act accordingly.

This kind of faith in this kind of Christ removes not my doubt, but my anxiety. I’m no longer worried about getting it all right, about having doctrine to explain every facet of God, about a theology that can answer theodicy. I doubt so much, but I am free to doubt. There is no fear of hell if I doubt, because God is there too, still shattering my expectation of God, still challenging every concept of God I conjure.

It’s not as if some day all false notions—but O let the false notions fall away—will all be broken and I will finally understand God. Until the days of theosis, of the return to God from whence we came, I won’t ever know God. All I will know is my faith—lacking as it is—in God. Of God? I’m not even sure how to talk about faith and divinity anymore. In my uncertainty, though, lies a truth that the only way forward is through it. God is with me even—perhaps especially—in my doubt filled trusting of the reality of God that I cannot perceive.

That reality is what I can stand on, even though I cannot see it. I can trust the reality that God who is reality can hold the weight of all my doubt, my false certainty, my desperation, my unbelief, and that reality is most clearly seen in the crucified one, where on the cross the fullness of God met the full suffering of a doubt filled humanity, and God stayed. God remained with humanity through the suffering, the anguish, the death, the hell. God still remains.

That is the solid rock of a foundation on which life can be built. It doesn’t assuage the consciousness of the suffering, but it lets us go through it without the isolation of spirit that is so deadly to the human condition. We are not alone in our suffering, our death, our hell. God remains, and in remaining gathers us, knits us together to be together, to be the presence of God manifest physically to each other. This is part of the experience of faith: our presence is the presence of God even when we doubt, unbelieve, and ourselves are shattered.

The is the truth of the Eucharist: Christ remains close to us so that we may be Christ in close proximity to each other (“Behold what you are; become what you receive”). We are the bread baked in the fires of hell that nourishes the soul, spiritually feeding our neighbor. We are the wine spilled from the side of the crucified God, reviving, cleansing and healing the weary soul. We are the essence of the suffering Christ to each other. The God who remains, remains through you and I to you and I.

I think faith is dependent on community. We need each other to trust Christ precisely because it’s only in each other we experience Christ. I don’t mean to suggest that there is no God in nature or that private transcendent experiences don’t happen. However, Christ is a person. Christ is the way God comes to us personally, and that personal touch can’t be embodied by anything other than another person. We need, are dependent on, each other to experience the Christ we trust in.

My expectations about God might be broken by my experiences of Christ, but the commitment of Christ to remain is embodied in the person who chooses to remain with me in my suffering. It’s then that I see God. The concepts I have of God will all melt away at the end by the sheer unmetered experience of the presence of God, but the shape that presence takes in the meantime, in the here and now—the time before theosis—is the shape of my neighbor. In them I love Christ and from them I receive the love of Christ. We believe together, and that way no one is left to suffer alone as the expectations and concepts of God inevitably let us down, crash out from under us, and shatter against the all too real truth of pain, suffering, and death. When we sit with compassion with each other in our pain, we are proving that God chooses to remain in the suffering, pain, and hell of humanity, willfully drawing close to each of us, even when our faith falls away.