Drought and Drudgery

It's been quite a while since I've posted here. Not because there has been nothing worth commenting on, there most definitely has been, but because I don’t feel that I had anything particularly worth saying that wasn’t already being said by someone else. In writing this, I am now wondering whether that should actually matter. Sincerity is surely better than originality. I’m side-tracking myself before I’ve even got started, but it’s possibly something worth considering in a later post.

ANYWAY. I don’t feel like I’ve been doing very well lately, Christianity-wise. Worse, I don’t think that I’ve been trying especially hard. One has dry patches during which religious feeling seems hard to come by, and although I’ve at no point during this period questioned the philosophical or intellectual basis of my faith, I have not been doing very much to live it. They happen, and they do pass.

My parents are both very keen and very talented gardeners. My father has had an allotment for as long as I’ve been alive, and now he’s retired he grows fuchsias for competition. My mother had always grown flowers. Wherever we’ve lived we’ve had beautiful, productive, well-ordered gardens. I strongly suspect that it is a constant source of mild disappointment to both of them that I have never shown the slightest interest or aptitude towards gardening.

For me, Christianity is an awful lot like gardening. I love the idea of it, but the reality just seems far too much like hard work. I love the results, but at the moment the thing itself seems like far too much effort for far too little immediate result. The conception of it is wonderful, the purpose and the logic of it sound, but I am simply not the person to live my faith with the intensity and the outright dedication with which it ought to be lived.

Fear not, dear reader. This is not my recantation. Rather, it is the admission of a weakness. We are told that the first step to solving a problem is to admit to it being one. I’ve written before about my concerns that my faith is too intellectual. Now I wonder whether it isn’t too lazy. I read about the great preachers and missionaries of times gone by, the Wesleys, Booths, Spurgeons and so on, and all I can do is envy them the burning, obsessive driving faith that seems to sustain them from early rising to late bed. I don’t have that.

There are those who’ve had a sudden, transformative Damascene Road moment that has filled them with faith. I have not. I’ve come to my religion more slowly, more cautiously, piecemeal. I like to think that as a result it is rather deeper, firmer faith than the quickly gained and quickly lost fervour of the sudden convert, but perhaps I’m fooling myself. If it’s burnt longer and more steadily then it certainly burns cooler, and mostly under the surface.

If this whole post sounds like a self-indulgent and self-pitying moan, then I apologise, but it’s really not what I intend. Rather it’s an honest appraisal, an acknowledgement that there is plenty of room for improvement. More, it is an acknowledgement that improvement is possible. There is power in such things, I think. Perhaps, like the first Methodists, I simply need to be more organised and methodical in my faith. I need to make sure that I spend time on it more often and more regularly.

I said earlier that these dry patches happen. They do. Even the Pope and Archbishop Welby admit that they have periods, sometimes even extended periods during which they find their faith a struggle. The trick is in not mistaking them for an endless drought but recognising them as a mere temporary lull. They also tell you that perhaps something needs changing; in yourself, in your life, perhaps both. Christianity, like gardening, is not all flat lawns and beautiful flowers; it is also occasionally drought and drudgery and backache.

So then, I’ll keep on keeping on. I'll carry on trying to try. I’ll pray for help. I’ll pray for rain. My garden might be poorly kept and poorly mowed, with too many weeds and too few flowers, but I can see what it ought to look like and I’ve got the tools. It’s just a question of forcing myself to pick them up and do the work.