The Bible’s famous love chapter, 1 Corinthians 13, ends with the words, “Now three things abide: faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.”
The whole chapter is a stirring passage, and there is much in it that warrants our attention. I intend to address those things in the next few days. This last passage, though, is a little troublesome and I want to discuss it. I intend to examine these words, how they relate to our lives, and how they relate to each other. I hope I can add something interesting to the discussion.
Compared to my previous posts, today takes off in a different direction. If you read my “About” page, you’ll see that I want to discuss issues of faith and religion. This will be my first foray into that area. First, I want to let you know where I’m coming from. I used to be religious. I used to be a Christian of the flavor I suppose you could call Evangelical, bordering on Fundamentalist. I never bought the whole 6000 year-old earth, but I believed nonetheless that the whole Bible was true and the Gospel should be preached to all nations. (If you are not well versed in the assorted variations of Christianity, you should know that this is not considered as strange a contradictions as it might sound.) Let us say for now that I am no longer of that persuasion. I have had to leave a lot of my former beliefs behind, but I’ll save the reasons for later discussions.
I have a wall hanging that bears the three words highlighted in the final verse of 1 Corinthians 13. Faith, Hope, Love: hanging next to my door as I enter and leave every day. In my former life, these words brought me comfort and I used them to temper my thoughts as I set forth each morning, and as I settled into my home life each evening. Now, they are a reminder of how easy it is for good thinking to go bad; how subtle and enticing unreason can be. They are also a reminder of how easy it is to throw the good out with the bad.
I now spend a lot of time with people who, like me, have abandoned their former thinking. Many of them draw a harsh line between their past and current lives and I will not criticize them for that. Often, they have had to battle unpleasant people in order to maintain their integrity. I’ve been lucky that my world isn’t filled with as much opposition, so I can afford to be more of an explorer. I’ll investigate other traditions—or even the ones I was brought up in—and attempt to filter the good from the bad, the worthwhile from the harmful. Doing so can make it tricky to navigate relationships with both believers and non-believers, but my goal is to live richly in truth and not to be so concerned with how well I fit in with predefined group identities.
I’m not expecting to change a lot of minds here, but I’d like to inspire just a few brave souls to expand their reach and find truth in places they hadn’t thought to look.
Faith, Hope, and Love. They define our lives, our politics and our beliefs. They sound beautiful, but are they worthy of the honor that we bestow?