(This article comes from the text of a Quiet Day. It has 5 sections and many parts. We may be finished by Christmas!)
Introduction. Part 1: My personal journey
I have reached an interesting point in my life.
I have absolutely no doubt at all about the value of my spiritual life, or that a life of faith in God is supremely precious, and that my experience of God’s presence enriches my life beyond all measure and is what life is ultimately all about – it is the pinnacle of fulfilment in life.
Yet I have no certain foundation on which my spirituality, my faith, and my experience of God rests.
Remarkably, I have come to the conclusion that I don’t really care about that – it doesn’t matter. That’s because the value of what I find through my faith in God is so supremely precious that whatever it is, and wherever it comes from, I feel certain at the very core of my being that this is the most that life can offer.
But, I have to admit, that throughout large periods of my life, it did bother me intensely that I should have a certain foundation for my faith that I did not doubt. It has now become my quest to investigate what is actually going on in my life of faith; and I really want to demonstrate to people who don’t have faith that it is entirely reasonably justified to believe in God.
For, it’s all well and good for me to be happy in my faith. I have only reached this position through a long, convoluted life history, in which I could have given up on faith several times, and it’s a journey that I might not have embarked on if I had known when I was 20 what I had come to understand when I was 40. By the time I was 60, I was fully content with my faith, but it’s a journey I started because of the generation of faith that I was born into, which simply does not exist in the UK anymore.
So, how can I trace links from my faith to make connections with what atheists hold to be true, so that I can say, “Look, if you believe what you do as an atheist, then there are no obstacles to you believing in God and committing to a life of faith”. I’ve always argued that a life of faith is the best life possible, but now I want to show that anyone can follow it. Atheists may have thought that they can’t accept the peace and joy of a spiritual life because they reject relying on “faith”, as though it is some mysterious “zapping” that some people get “infected” by. I say that living by faith is an entirely reasonable thing to do.
Spiritual Devotion 