IN FAVOR OF WRESTLING WITH GOD

For some time, these thoughts have been taking shape, helped by this memory, this quotation, this idea and that notion.
Within the bounds of those who are, or claim to be, ‘spiritual’ people there’s a division which cuts across traditional religious lines. On one side are those for whom, like myself, faith is a process which works through doubt and is thereby deepened and strengthened. This is sometimes a quiet, but always a robust, faith as measured by these criteria: such a robust, living faith welcomes questions, can answer criticisms cogently, gives mockery a pitying smile and spurns any state’s efforts to ‘strengthen’ it.
On the other side are those whose ‘faith’ seems to be chiefly based on the denigration of others on any basis handy, be it ‘race’, ethnicity, recited creed, sex or sexual orientation, not to mention economic class. This in and of itself is enough to mark such a ‘faith’ as dry, brittle and moribund. It seeks with desperation to squelch questions, criticisms and mockeries even to the point of begging the state to help shore up its shell.
Their adherents seem to associate bliss with not having to think a whole lot — or at least are told to believe this by their clerics, whether imams or priests. This by itself flies in God’s Face — the God which we are commanded to love with all our mind as well as heart, soul and strength. Switching off one’s mind is the opposite of this and leads in turn to walling off one’s heart to be shared only within Our Group, by whatever other name it may be called.
As a Christian myself, I am instructed to use the life of Jesus as…