Faith Journey

Isn't it something that these stories matter? That my story and his story and your story intertwine and meet, and that God makes something lovely and beautiful and meaningful out of our wretched, halting words? (Renee Altson)

It does amaze me that my story matters. But maybe it's not so amazing after all, when we consider that our existences themselves are miraculous, and that by speaking to them and of them, we speak of and to the life and person God is renewing/making within us. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Olivia Butz. I'm a senior humanities major and theology minor. I'm a bit afraid, I confess, that my story may be too rough around the edges; that I haven't allowed enough space in it for the grace of God, and the love that God offers and hopes His children will accept. But I hope that in some way, my sharing this story will enable you to experience the grace and peace of the Risen Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Here is the basic chronology of my story: I was born on April 26, 1989, to JoAnne Adams and Karl Butz, and became the younger sister to Vanessa Butz (Now Janes) (Cue Slide #4). I was raised in a tiny coastal california town, Half Moon Bay, a place of unusual beauty and unique tradition. I was dedicated, with my sister, to the Lord, in 1995, when I was 6, and my sister 9, in a non-denomational community church. I asked Jesus 'into my heart' in 1997, at the exhortation of my Sunday School teacher, and was eventually baptized, after a form of catechesis, in 1999/2000 (Cue Slide #5). In 2001, at the age of twelve and following my sixth grade year, my life changed drastically. After a year of separation from my father, my mother, sister, and I made the cross-country trek from California to Pennsylvania, and settled in the hamlet of State College, home to Penn State University. This radical re-shifting of relationships and locations taught me to cry out to God and to know the comfort of the Holy Spirit in a way I hadn't ever before. A member of the nazarene church I attended At this time, Patricia Lloyd, took me and a close friend under her wing, committing to eat and pray and study with us. To this day, we remain close; she is an ever faithful supporter and advocate in prayer, and constantly encourages me to probe the Scriptures and the riches of the mind, and most specifically, the knowledge of the Holy. In 2003 I Joined a ministry team, and participated on it until 2006. Along with my experience on this team, playing games and sharing faith with the youth of our nazarene district and ministering to congregations in song and skit and scripture, I excitedly explored Scripture and sought out communion with the God I was learning to trust ever more. However, Church conflict, the stress of moving locations and schools on a frequent basis, a strained relationship with my father, continued academic pressures, my typically brooding and pensive personality, and my stubborn irrational insistence that caused me to fall into a deep depression, a depression I continue to wrestle with on a day to day basis. This is such a pervasive part of my journey that I cannot help but mention it and probe its relation to my journey of faith. It is certainly not the whole of my story, but it has very much influenced the way I have interacted with our God in Christ, with fellow believers, friends, family members, and, of course, myself.

In 2007, I was accepted into Houghton and began my collegiate life that fall. What made this transition all the more terrifying and exciting was the fact that I was chosen to go to London in the spring semester of my freshman year to participate in the First Year Honors Program (Cue Slide #6). While in the program, I was challenged, really, for the first time--to love the Lord our God with all of my mind. I was pulled beyond what I thought was my academic potential and excitedly explored the bounty of art and religious history that England had to offer and that my professors so excitedly illumined for us. In the 2009-2010 academic year, as a junior, I began attending Holy Communion (in the Episcopal tradition) and mass (in the catholic tradition) on a regular Basis. This was following a challenging semester of Systematic Theology in which my theological and philosophical and biblical concerns and presuppositions were shaken, and caused me to re-evaluate what I believed the Church to be and who I believed God to be. I've remained anchored in the Christian life by participation in these traditional liturgies, and in the cries of the Psalms, and in the words of skilled poets. I've also learned, ever more and perhaps most importantly, of my fundamental inability to make myself worthy before the Lord, particularly by and because of regular participation in the Lord's Supper.

Love (III)
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,/Guilty of dust and sin./But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack/From my first entrance in,/Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning/If I lacked anything./"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here":/Love said, "You shall be he."/"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,/I cannot look on thee."/"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."/So I did sit and eat.
(George Herbert)

Perhaps this is an helpful overview of my journey until now? It would be extremely challenging (and most likely tedious!) to pick apart and elucidate all of the aspects of my story. I confess, also, my fear of my ability to tell stories, themselves. My mind rapidly jumps to abstractions.

It has been, for several years now, a season of merry and desperate drought in my journey of faith (to paraphrase Singer/songwriter Vienna Teng). I have found it challenging to pray, difficult to spend any sustained length of time with and studying the word of God, and hard to move towards the Lord as much as I may be able, to reclaim my identity as that which has been buried with Christ in His death (that is, the sinful nature) and united with Him in His resurrection. But, perhaps, there is a very real sense in which I have been praying furiously all along. A blogger I follow, Sarah Clarkson (www.thoroughlyalive.com), writes that "there are times in life when fear becomes your breath, when need is an ache in your stomach, and suddenly, there are no extra words to be had for a prayer. Your whole body, the strain of mind, the ache of heart, becomes its own prayer."

Perhaps what is at the root of all of this is my inability to receive reality in all of its fullness and messiness, especially the reality of pain. As much as I have treasured my years of learning and friendship at Houghton, these years have not been easy. It is difficult in itself to be a college student, but it is especially difficult when you're not even sure, some days, that you want to get up and face the world. Jane Kenyon, a 20th century American poet, has accurately probed the experience of depression in her portrayal of the individual as: "A piece of burned meat/ [who] wears my clothes, speaks in my voice, dispatches obligations haltingly, or not at all./ It is tired of trying to be stouthearted, tired beyond measure."

It is perhaps my love for the things of the mind that has kept me here in good academic standing; it is certainly also due to the un-ending encouragements and reassurances and affirmations and prayers my friends have offered to me, and offered on my behalf. (Cue slide #7) My friends and mentors have held out faith for me; they have lived lives imbued with the grace of of the Lord Jesus Christ. Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it like this in his 'Life Together' (I've modified a few pronouns here to better illustrate the point):[I] need [my] brother man [and sister woman] as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation[...] The Christ in my own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of [my] brother [or sister]; [my] own heart is uncertain; [my] brother's is sure. I would be remiss not to mention the patience with which my friends and family and Lord have had with me and to thank them for it, as I have struggled, often times slowly and awkwardly to live a life fully alive to the glory of God, one that honors the love that God offers. I hope that my experience grants me the grace to, in the words of Emily Dickinson, " measure every Grief I meet/With narrow, probing, Eyes – [to] wonder if It weighs like Mine – Or has an Easier size. (to) wonder if it hurts to live " Jane Kenyon writes that "seeking God is the first thing and the last, and in between, such trouble, and such pain."

Yet, in the midst of such trouble and such pain, I find myself ever more grateful for the beauty and strange wonder of the earth and the way in which God, in the Holy Spirit, uses His creation to bring delight and to remind those who trust in Him already, of his faithfulness, and of our great and most ultimate hope--the kind of hope that we have in Jesus, that all things shall be well in Him, and that He has promised to raise our sin-sick persons to life again. Perhaps what I'm trying to refer to is a readiness to receive reality, a reality that is laced with mystery, pain, the ordinary (in the words of Mary Oliver). Yet, as real as our sensory experience of creation is, and how it can remind us of the Lord. The most real activity and presence in our lives is that of the God in Three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In words much more eloquent than I can seem to put together, blogger Sarah Clarkson describes this phenomenon: "His beauty reaches down to me and His love in my heart helps me to reach up and grasp it. It is that that keeps me trudging after Him every day of my life. With such a hope, I will never stop."

Sometimes I am surprised by the Holy Spirit. I have been, in so many ways, offered space and time to voice my fears and distorted (and sometimes sinful) ways of thinking and acting, and becoming assured that despite all this, I am loved; I am redeemed by the blood of Christ. This sin in my life is primarily that of an inverted, and awkward pride, a pride that discounts my fundamental dignity as made in the image of God, broken yet in the process of being transformed.

Sloth is both a part of and separate from my experience with depression. It is a challenging relationship to tease out, and one that lies somewhere between choice and paralysis. As author Kathleen Norris puts it: "The boundaries between depression and acedia (another word for sloth) are notoriously fluid; at the risk of oversimplifying, I would suggest that while depression is an illness treatable by counseling and medication, acedia is a vice that is best countered by spiritual practice and the disciplineof prayer." (Acedia and Me 3)

Sloth is a term that is probably unfamiliar with you; in any case, it's definition goes far beyond that of mere laziness. If you'll allow, I'd like to share a couple of short definitions of the term, that will hopefully illuminate this term and consider its relation to my and your journeys of faith (Continued quotation from Kathleen Norris' Acedia and Me): "It may spring from physical weariness, but ultimately it is the spiritual phenomenon of 'aversion of the appetite from its own good,' specifically an 'aversion against God himself...It is the opposite of the joy in the divine good that [we] should experience." This 'refusal of joy' is well reflected in the poetry of author Madeleine L'Engle, most well known, perhaps for her 'Wrinkle in time' series: Has joy been frozen, too?/I blow upon my hands/Stiff from the biting wind./My heart beats slow, beats slow./What has become of joy?/If joy’s gone from my heart/Then it is closed to You/Who made it, gave it life./If I protect myself/I’m hiding, Lord, from you.

"The person afflicted with acedia, even if she knows what is spiritually good for her, is tempted to deny that her inner beauty and spiritual strength are at her disposal, as gifts from God." Thomas Merton describes sloth/acedia as, "rather the sadness, the disgust with life, which comes from a much deeper source--our inability to get along with ourselves, and our disunion with God." Sloth is symptomatic of and also a cause of despair.

Robert Jenson has defined sin as despair; sin as believing God's right hand is incapable of reaching down and saving us, of lifting us up into Him and uniting us with him and bringing us into His joy. Isaiah, in chapter 61, juxtaposes praise and despair: To all who mourn in Israel, he will give beauty for ashes, joy instead of mourning, praise instead of despair. For the Lord has planted them like strong and graceful oaks for his own glory. Yes! The Lord has planted all of us, myself included, if we can accept this, as a strong and graceful oak for His glory, made strong, granted grace, made able to praise by the lord who is the help of our countenance and our primary source of hope and joy. Let us trust in this God's unfailing love, shall we?

There are many other earthly and very present sources of hope and joy in our lives, that I want to affirm as coming from God, the giver of all good things, the one who has given His self completely to us to bring us back to relationship with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This hope I've been speaking of is specifically rooted in the risen Christ, and is not a mere abstract future wish, though it does involve the sense and knowledge that the redemptive work of God is not yet complete.

A uthor Renee Altson believes that 'Hope is love and grace and light even in the middle of the shadow of death. ' Hope is clinging to the resurrection of Christ Jesus our Lord, and a trust that this God-Man is really good, beyond all measure, and that He will complete and heal all when He comes again. The poet T.S. Eliot does well to remind us that "there is yet faith but the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. A poem that has stayed rooted in my heart through these past several years, and that has communicated the truth of Scripture to me, are these verses penned by Emily Dickinson. Hope is the thing with feathers/that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words/ and never stops at all/. This hope really hasn't ever ceased perching in my soul, though it's chirping has grown faint, often.

The often obvious culprit of fear is what often keeps us in despair: "I am afraid : to believe that you are good though I long for it even in this land of the living and in the dead places in my own soul. I am afraid: to rip open my heart to offer the contents to you to believe that you will be gentle with them and with me." (Renee Altson, Stumbling toward Faith)

Yet, "I see the ways in which something divine and sacred is squirming itself into my soul, and it frightens me but it exhilarates me at the same time, and I think: Yes! I might be loved. Yes! I might matter. Yes! There is something bigger than me, wiser than me, and yes! I am caught in its grip."(Renee Altson, Stumbling toward Faith)

And now please receive the words and truth of this benediction, that these words root themselves in your heart and give you hope.

Romans 15:13
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.