October faith

My frequency of posting here at The Perverse Lutheran has gone down from twice a week in the early days of the blog, many long years ago, to twice a month and lately to once a month. It's nearing the end of October -- gotta put something up here, especially since the weather is warm, the sky is blue and the maple tree over my head here in my backyard is green, gold and orange everywhere all at once. It's good day for sitting outside. There won't be many more.

I've just finished writing program notes for a Bach cantata (BWV 109, Ich glaube, lieber Herr; hilf meinem Unglauben!) that's about faith and doubt -- or better said, doubt and faith, since that's the direction everything is going in the cantata text: an opening chorus, a recitative and an area about unbelief, followed by reassurance.  It's the opposite of the man in the Bible story in Mark 9, the source of the text -- "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!" He confesses his faith first before acknowledging his doubts. 

Bach's text, by an unknown librettist, takes Luther's approach to doubt: the solution is to get closer to Christ and trust that God's promises are sure and certain. Luther also said that doubt and the struggles of his Anfechtung (look it up, or read this) were an important way in which God brought him to faith. The struggle strengthens.

I don't disagree with any of this exactly, but I am someone who was born in the 20th century and who lives in the 21st, a time where we doubt the existence not only of God but of absolute truth, where physics includes an Uncertainty Principle, but we as political tribes behave as if our way is the only way and denounce other ideas not just as wrong but as morally reprehensible. Working together to solve problems involves giving up some treasured beliefs here and there, or at least allowing for other ideas to come and out play too. But it's hard to do, worn down as we are by unsolvable conflicts, social media craziness, and everyday complexity. 

The red-orange leaves of the sugar maple against the blue sky remind me of a jigsaw puzzle photo: crisply delineated but made up of so many tiny irregular pieces. Birds are flying in and out of the canopy of the mature tree across the street, participating, perhaps, in some secret bird activity, perhaps a confab about migration. A robin directly overhead just now caught my attention by dropping a liquid gift, splat, on the cement next to my chair. Meanwhile a Monarch butterfly is enjoying the overgrown but miraculously still-blooming zinnias in the flower pot by the stairs. 

Two or three weeks from now the leaves will be on the ground, the flowers will be dead and headed for the  the compost bin. The Monarch might be in Mexico -- I'll never know if she makes it, and it will be time to move the patio furniture to the basement (after scrubbing off the bird poop). 

But spring will come again. I have that much faith.