A Message to My Children: Choose Faith
When I was 16 years old, between my junior and senior years of high school, I spent six weeks at a sort of intellectual summer camp at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. As a very naive Mormon teenager I was completely bowled over by culture shock. It was my first experience with an Ivy League university-level seminar (existentialist lyric poetry and a great deal of big-word-dropping), and my first experience with “liberated” American teenagers (smoking, drinking, casual sex).
One of our university student “mentors” was a philosophy major who took the common juvenile undergraduate delight in logically deconstructing everything I said, especially about my faith. I came home depressed and shaken. For the first time I realized that my spiritual experiences could never “prove” the truth of what I believed in.
After some months of thinking things over, I came to understand two important truths, and then made the most important decision of my life. Here are the truths:
- You can’t prove God exists, and you can’t prove He doesn’t exist, either. You choose to believe or not by choosing which of your experiences you will accept, how you interpret them, and which people you believe. Faith in God is a choice, a premise upon which you build your world view.
- I wanted to believe. Faith in a personal, loving God looked to me like choosing light, goodness, and joy over cynicism and emptiness. I wanted to base my life on the richness of all my experiences, including not just the evidence of my senses but also my intuitions, emotions, and transcendental spiritual moments.
So then I made my decision. I chose faith. In choosing faith, I chose also to nurture it through prayer, study, church attendance, and service to others. I chose to interpret my experiences through a spiritual lens. I chose to see the wonder of creation as evidence of a vast intelligence manipulating the universe, not just chance. I chose to distinguish between how something happens (temporal lobe visions, anyone? Evolution?) and why it happens, what it means. I chose light, goodness, and joy. As life went on I gradually discovered that I have also chosen peace, love, and a life-line in troubled times.
Terryl and Fiona Givens have written a short book, “The God Who Weeps,” that details the attributes of the God I believe in. In their preface they explain the choice to believe much better than I can. They also describe the story of a donkey who starved to death because, presented with two identically enticing and accessible piles of hay, was unable to choose one over the other.
Choose, my children. Recognize that faith is a choice. Read the preface to “The God Who Weeps”--give faith equal time (you can borrow the book from me). Consider carefully the consequences you can see in the lives of those who have chosen one way or the other. Understand that your choice will affect everyone who loves you, especially the generations of your children after you.
“O, be wise; what can I say more?” (Jacob 6:12, from The Book of Mormon)
