So I was eager to pick up her memoir (if you can in fact write a memoir at 27!), entitled Evolving in Monkey Town. As Evans herself would describe it, Evolving tells the story of her journey from fundamentalist (like the southern kind) certainty to faith. Along the way, the reader gets a glimpse into her process of evolving from being someone with all the answers to someone who learns both how to ask good questions and sit with ambiguity in terms of response.
For me Evans' journey in some ways mirrors my own. I've found that as I've gotten older the world has become more complex, not less. So too with faith. And at times that feels counter-intuitive; after all, wouldn't you expect that with maturity comes clarity? I guess what I'm saying is that I see a lot more gray as I go along; black and white was something that was easier to see in my 20s. Sheesh, I'm sounding like Bob Green!
And so with that as backdrop, you'll understand that Evans' comfort with living with unanswered questions was a helpful handle for me as I think about my own experience. And yet I left Evolving with a somewhat hollow feeling as well. Call it the last vestiges of modernity's hold on me if you will, but I found myself muttering things like "OK, I'm good living with tensions and uncertainty, but, at some point, don't you have to land somewhere?!?" Should our faith be ever-growing (evolving)? Yes. But don't there need to be some bedrock, stable truths as well. I think yes.
All of this said, I commend Evans' commitment to never settling, for never having arrived at an understanding. Because Jesus warns us to watch out for what we think we know, doesn't he? After all, look at how he engaged the fundamentalists of his day, the Pharisees.
1 comment:
So then the thing to figure out is which issues need to be stable and bedrock. I've asked all the same things you're asking - but with a conversion to Catholicism, of all things!!!
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