Biography
The Very Rev. ALAN JONES, a native of England, was awarded an Order of the British Empire in 2002. Formerly a Professor of Theology, he founded and became the first director of the Center for Christian Spirituality at General Theological Seminary in New York City. He has authored several books and, since 1985, has been Dean of Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"The Journey from Fear to Faith" 
I was struck by a sign outside a church in London: “We welcome all who worship, all who doubt and all who would move from fear to faith.” And I wondered, how do we move from fear to faith? We might begin by appreciating what faith isn’t. Faith isn’t believing 50 impossible things before breakfast. Faith isn’t believing that the mystery of God can be captured in words. Mature faith is risking your life, throwing yourself into it with abandon. An English monk used to say, “The opposite of faith isn’t doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty.” A lot of people confuse certainty with faith. When you’re absolutely certain you have nothing to learn, there’s no mystery; no risk, no real joy.

We cannot move from fear to faith without knowing who and what we are. “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” This is who we are fundamentally. We are ones made in the image of God. So, we are, fundamentally, artists (that’s image-makers) and works of art (images of God). But we tend to be frightened of art, just as we are afraid of the leap of faith, because of its openness.

Yet each of us was born to create. Many of us were told when we were young, “You’ve gotta make something of your life.” As if life were like a piece of wood, a lump of clay, a block of marble out of which might come a beautiful work of art.

And when our need to create is neglected, our imagination dries up and becomes dangerously vulnerable to negative images and thoughts which undermine and threaten our freedom. We so hunger and thirst for meaning that we’ll suck it up wherever we can find it no matter how mediocre or trashy. We then tend to get everything second hand, even our ideas and emotions and, of course, our religion.

Think of what follows if we really believe that, at the center of our understanding of what a human being is, is the affirmation that God is the Artist of the World. It means that God is present to us in endless forms of differentiation and variety. So, the world is an ever-changing, kaleidoscopic art exhibition in which we are both artists and works of art.

Think of that amazing verse in the opening chapter of the Fourth Gospel: “And the Word was made flesh and lived among us.” We are flesh-and-blood artists of our own lives. We are embodied spirits. When you hear, “And the Word was made flesh,” what picture comes to mind? Christmas? Mary with the baby Jesus? Christians believe that the Christ-child is a revelation of the character of God. But if you think about it, it’s distinctly odd! Jesus, we say, is the Word of God and Mary gives birth to the Word who cannot speak a word. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes, “Ask a baby about the ordination of women, about divorce...about violence on television, who will win the next election: it is not a fruitful experience.” We are met with silence. The Word does not speak. So imagine holding a baby in your arms and asking him or her “What do you think about stem cell research? It’s not that we are without resources or that we have nothing to say but that we begin with silence and a commitment to listen to one another as artists, co-creators with God of ourselves and our world.

When we get in touch with our own mystery, we lose our fear of paradox. We cease to be frightened of having to hold together two truths that seem incompatible. We learn that a lot in life is not a matter of either-or but of both-and. The Eastern Orthodox theologian, St. Gregory Palamas wrote: “the most venerable theologians...teach us two things. First they tell us that the divine essence is incommunicable: then, that it is in some way communicable. They tell us that we participate in the nature of God, and that we do not participate in it at all. We must, therefore,” he says, “hold both assertions, and set them together as the rules of the true faith." Two truths: one, God is inexhaustible and unknowable; and two, this inexhaustible and unknowable God has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Much of the violence in the world springs from our inability or unwillingness to hold contradictory truths together. Our fear sours our relationships and damages our ability to see just how lovely each person truly is.

Chief Leonard George of the First Nation people of British Columbia works with the disaffected youth of his tribe. He wishes for them one thing, that when they get up in the morning and see themselves in the mirror they love, honor and celebrate what they see. Think of all the disaffected youth in the world, in our world, in the Muslim world. When they look in the mirror in the morning they see hopelessness and despair out which suicide bombers are born. So, when you get up in the morning and look in the mirror, what do you see? Do you love, admire and celebrate what you see? Are you a work of art in progress!

We move from fear to faith when we wake up to who we are and begin to create—“make” something of our lives, in confidence that the most real thing about us is the Holy Spirit. We are the place where God chooses to dwell, the place where God happens. This gives us the confidence of faith to face everything else we may be, all our mistakes, sins, sillinesses, regrets, are put in proportion. We can face the truth about ourselves without being crippled by what we see. Forgiveness is part of God’s plan. And so is delight.

Thomas Traherne in the 17th century wrote, “Having been at the university...I saw that there were things in this world of which I never dreamed; glorious secrets, and glorious persons past imagination. Then I saw that Logic, Ethics, Physics, Metaphysics, Geometry, Astronomy, Poesy, Medicine. Grammar, Music, Rhetoric, all kinds of Arts, Trades, and Mechanisms that adorned the world pertained to felicity...There never was a tutor that did professly teach felicity, though that be the mistress of all other sciences...We studied to inform our knowledge, but knew not for what end we so studied. And for lack of aiming at a certain end we erred in the manner.”

Perhaps a better word for us is joy? C. S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy tells of his first seeing Arthur Rackham’s illustrations of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle. “There arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country...” There it is again. Faith is like a homecoming, accepting yourself as a mystery, as a work of God’s hand, a work of art with no need for self-justification, and no temptation to deny our fragility and mortality.

Doesn’t great art teach us that the journey of our lives, from fear to faith, is about our moving away from patterns of bondage and slavery—politics as lies, love as conquest, society as domination, and truth as expression of power—to a community of people universally recognizing each other as human, God’s handiwork? Works of art.

Take Susan, desperate, suicidal, at the end of her rope. She knocks on the front door of her friend Stephanie. The door opens. Stephanie is covered with flour, sees her friend is in great distress and invites her into the kitchen, gives her a cup of coffee. And Susan pours out her heart as Stephanie goes on with her baking a triple batch of chocolate chip cookies. As Susan tells her story, she is slowly brought into the cookie project. She is crying as she gets her hands in the dough and shapes the cookies on the cookie-sheet. Once in the oven, the cookies make the kitchen smell delicious. Yes, the pain is still there. But she’s holding it in a different place in herself. There are things other than her pain—the kitchen, the cookies, her friend, and the noise of her friend’s children. She smiles as she recognizes the seed of hope. She moves slowly from fear to faith when she realizes something else is going on inside her. It is the stirring of her true self as a child of God.

Look in the mirror then. What do you see? Listen to Derek Wolcott’s wonderful poem, “Love After Love.”

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome.

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger that was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Look in the mirror. What do you see? If you look closely you will see someone beautiful, unique, unrepeatable, remarkable, lovely. You will be on the great journey from fear to faith. You’ll be one of those who hold the world together.

Interview with Alan Jones

Daniel Pawlus: Alan, I think I’d like to start with what you said early in your message, that was people confuse certainty and faith. It’s very provocative in a way, because in our current climate, a lot of us want an answer for our faith. Could you speak to that?

Alan Jones: I think there is a division in religion and they are both important, those who see religion as that which gives answers to questions and those of us who see religion as that which deepens questions. I don’t mean we are all floundering in ambiguity, but what unites us is a kind of silence before the mystery, the mystery of God. And the trouble with people who are absolutely certain is that there is no conversation. There’s nothing. I mean, if you are absolutely certain, what’s the point of having a conversation because you know it? The new isn’t possible. So we need a foundation of faith. That’s why we read the stories and we worship and we sing, but when it comes to the intellectual discussion of it, it’s never ending. The conversation never ends.

Delle Chatman: Isn’t there something else, in faith that is certain, that’s required from you for a relationship? Do you know what I mean? If you can have an attitude of faith, a belief in God and you have certain ideas about what that means and how you live a respectful, obedient life based on those ideas, you don’t have the vulnerability of working it out moment by moment with the Lord.

Jones: Exactly. I would hate to have a relationship with someone who had me figured out.

Chatman: There you go!

Jones: I hope I’m capable of the new and some surprises and so on. And how much more true that is, as you said, with a relationship with God, as if you have God figured out.

Chatman: Yes. And as if he doesn’t want to experience you moment by moment, be part of your unfolding on a daily, moment by moment basis. He really does want to take the ride of our lives.

Pawlus: It seems like a short cut around fear in a way, isn’t it, to want to arrive at a certain answer?

Jones: It’s a short cut to actual experience, of experiencing life. One theologian said, we talk about our experience of God. Have you ever thought what God’s experience of you is like if you’re closed off and not open?

Chatman: That’s right. I’m really captivated also by what you said about our lives being a work of art. I mean, obviously as a creative person it really resonates with me. And I’ve taken to believing that every day is a work of art and if we really lived it with that kind of vitality, that expectation of surprise, and that expectation of joy—which you also spoke about—we might really find ourselves taking a whale of a ride!

Jones: And it’s not morbid to say live every day as if it’s your last.

Chatman: No it isn’t!

Jones: It’s not morbid at all because, my goodness, I’ve got another day to experience what the world offers. As Mary Oliver, the poet, said: “The world offers itself to us everyday.” Offers it to our imaginations, so see that creativity. Bonaventure, the Franciscan saint, said: “Jesus is the art of God.” So he used the words, “word of God” and he shifted it a little bit and said the “art of God,” the expression of God. And that if we are made in the image of God, who is the artist, then we are artists and works of art ourselves. I think that opens, religion then becomes a work of the imagination rather than a set list of things you are supposed to believe.

Pawlus: That’s what I wanted to speak about, too. It resonates with me. You’ve probably heard about a book called The Artist’s Way, that was written by Julia Cameron.

Jones: Yes. It’s very good.

Pawlus: She talks about using our imagination to energize our connection with our God and I think that’s what you were alluding to in your speech about how important our creativity and our imagination is to our faith.

Jones: And what happens, if you think of our educational system, when programs in music and drama and the arts are being flattened out or obliterated? And it’s very important for children to get in touch with their creativity because, frankly, that’s the way they negotiate the anxieties and fears and all those emotions. And if you don’t have some artistic way to negotiate that, then it often comes out in, first, boredom and then violence.

Chatman: Interesting.

Jones: So it’s very important that creativity is part of our full educational system.

Chatman: And it’s, as you say, cored to our experience to be made in the image of God. God is the Creator, so we are really, truly meant to be creators and creative.

Jones: Exactly. Co-creators—with God—of the world and then you have that very dynamic thing, a very dynamic relationship. And if you encounter every other human being, even people we can’t work with...the rabbis told a story in the Middle Ages that if you could see every human being as proceeded by a legion of angels saying, “Make way for the image of God!” And the notion that you’re encountering God in another person, particularly in someone you might fear or you might not feel comfortable with, and saying what God is meeting me in that person, what is God trying to tell me about life.

Chatman: Alan, I’m going to take that one home and apply it. I’ve got a few places I can apply that one! Thank you so much.

Jones: Thank you. I’ve had a great time.

Chatman: Really, it’s been a very stimulating and galvanizing presentation and message.