Living with Uncertainty

By Helen Watson White in All Sorts

reflections on life and the difference between faith and belief

LIVING WITH UNCERTAINTY
Five recent events came together for me in the word uncertainty.
1. One was Ginny Kitchingman's presentation of books to young people on their entering Year 9 -- a transition point in their lives. Choosing books of everyday wisdom, she added a few thoughts of her own. Faith, she said, is not about certainty. However there is one certainty you do carry with you, and that is the love and support you have from the family and community behind you.
2. Then there was a recognition brought me by an old friend, a former member of the Mental Health Commission. I'd once referred to a new friend by her condition, calling her a "bipolar" person -- as if that defined her -- and she pulled me up on that, saying that the proper phrase is "living with bipolar". I found just how wrong that sort of labelling can be, when the new friend revealed she'd been mis-diagnosed as bipolar and given inappropriate drugs that made her more ill. The label had had such a destructive effect she asked
that all reference to it be expunged from her hospital records. This kind of certainty benefitted only the drug companies.
3. John Spong's 1998 book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die begins with the idea of "Saying the Christian Creed with Honesty" -- always an issue for me. I was grateful that when I returned to church after a big gap, in 1987, the opening of the creed had changed from "I believe" to "We believe". This seemed to indicate that the church holds certain beliefs which an individual may not agree with in every particular. Even now, I'm not altogether certain what I believe. Spong, however, defines himself as a believer. (Incidentally, that's different from someone else putting the label on you). Does that mean he's certain about everything he believes? He writes:
"I am indeed a passionate believer. God is the ultimate reality in my life. I live in a constant and almost mystical awareness of the divine presence. I sometimes think of myself as one who breathes the very air of God or, to borrow an image from the East, as one who swims in the infinite depths of the sea of God. Like the psalmist of old, I have the sense of God's inescapableness. [Psalm 139] I am what I would call a God-intoxicated human being. Yet, when I seek to put my understanding of this God into human words, my certainty all but disappears. Human words always contract and diminish my God awareness. They never expand it." (Interesting, that last bit, when his previous words, and the Psalm, did in fact enlarge my sense of a divine dimension.) He continues: "The God I know is not concrete or specific. This God is rather shrouded in mystery, wonder, and awe. The deeper I journey into this divine presence, the less any literalized phrases, including the phrases of the Christian creed, seem relevant. The God I know can only be pointed to..."
I'd like to add, though, that the presence of mystery doesn't preclude certainty. It's a confidence, a faith different from that which wants to nail down every detail. Faith and belief(s) are not the same thing...
4. Back to earth. Last weekend saw a sizeable protest by concerned citizens about the zero-hour contracts offered by some employers in the fast-food industry. These, says March 14 ODT, are "agreements that do not guarantee the worker a set number of hours a week (or any hours at all, necessarily), but usually make it difficult or impossible for workers to seek alternative employment." The advantage for the government is that people floating around "on call" thus enter the statistics for "employed" and leave the dreaded unemployment list, the length of which no authority wants to admit to. A worker with no certain income is tied to the only employer who has the power to give them one. An anomaly that one critic calls a "permanent casual relationship", means that while employers "have their cake and eat it too", workers have no guarantee of BREAD.
5. In George Davis's Connections article last week, he wrote of the work of Mornington's Dr Henry McKinlay "in far-flung reaches of the world for humanitarian aid organizations". Always when there are disasters such as Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu, there's a photo of someone like Doug Clark in Monday's ODT ready to drop everything and go to help manage the emergency. There was uncertainty all over Oceania about which islands would be worst affected, but then there was also -- immediately -- the certainty that help would come.
On the BREAD theme: at Dr McKinlay's funeral, George got to sing one of his favourite hymns, Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah, which talks about the "bread of heaven." That is the bread of certainty, the bread - both physical and spiritual - that mysteriously appears when most needed. Will it be enough? As the human family behind those people, we are part of the answer to that uncertainty.
-- Helen Watson White