Text of Tracey Cheun's Meditation, 1/4/2014 > 묵상 (Meditation)

Every Sunday, as a child, I would go to church with my family. I would dress well, listen intently to my pastors, socialize with friends, and replenish God’s presence in my life. Sundays were a unique ritual for me because I behaved differently from the 6 other days of the week. I became so used to attending church that everything became routine for me; I’d meet friends, walk in, sit in the back, listen to sermon, pray, eat food, and leave. Eventually, around middle school, I realized that church was a place I went to out of habit, not passion or need. It took me a few years to accept this, but it just so happened that a simple habit changed the way I saw my life, other people, and myself.

99.99% of things I learned at my old Presbyterian church were indisputable. Both God’s and Jesus’ nature were self-evident truths, so to speak; I was always told that people worshipping idols, like Buddhists, were automatically cast away to hell, and I started forming dangerous preconceived notions of who deserved to go to heaven and who deserved to go to hell. Everything was based on fear, not love. This, to me, was the premise of a Fundamentalist approach to Christianity, and I sensed something was wrong with this approach to faith. My pastors, and even my philosophy professor, would explain to me that God had specific characteristics: he was omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and most interestingly, immutable. He was incapable of suffering. This is what separated an immortal being like God from a mortal being like myself or anyone in this room. I found this characteristic quite fascinating but problematic. If God was incapable of suffering, how would he understand our experiences, especially the difficult and painful ones? Is he capable of empathy, and if he isn’t, how does he truly care about his children?

The answer is that we cannot truly understand God. It’s easier for people to believe in God’s existence and goodness the more we get what we want in life. We perceive getting our way as God rewarding us or being a “generous spirit.” But we can’t really say the same when life hits us hard. Throughout my personal experiences, especially after taking theology classes at school, I’ve been preoccupied more about what my faith in God means. Faith is very much an intuitive experience, feeling, tendency, gravitational force…it’s hard to define it but we do so by attributing characteristics to it.

God is not always meant to be understood, but there is a beauty in trying to understand him. I think faith can be an absolutely enriching and powerful force if we treat it like the happiness that Aristotle talks about— something we should always strive and work towards. Faith is not a natural spurt of joy that exists in lucky people that God chooses, it is something that needs to be fostered and taken care of, like a child. It’s easy for people to view their faith in God in a black-and-white manner: he is either rewarding or punishing, good or bad, forgiving or merciless, and present or absent. But like other significant yet abstract ideas that humans get preoccupied about, such as love, passion, and faith, God will always be somewhat of a double-edged sword. We must continue to focus on and foster our faith, work towards it, if we want to have a chance at understanding God and finding peace with him.