Rector’s Blog, Unprovable - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

I have a dear friend from college who belongs to a different religious tradition. Though we believe different things and practice different religions, we've always liked each other, in part I think, because we respected that the other took their faith seriously. It's been over 20 years and we are still talking about our faith with each other, and recently we were talking about the difficulty of being faithful in this hard world. He asked me if there was anything that kept me coming back, and I said, "Well, I mean, I heard God speak." His response was similar: I love that that happened to you. I wish it would happen to me.I don't know why these things have happened to me, and not everyone else. Those who have confessed to similar experiences have been comforting in the moment, but it's the people who have not had them that rattle me. Because I know these people and I am not better or smarter or stronger or more faithful than them. What's more, it's this sort of inconsistency to which skeptics point when they are saying why they don't believe: Any person can add 1 to 1 and get 2. Anyone can put water in a freezer and make it into ice. Anyone can recognize life is life and death is death. These things are consistent and reproducible. But you say God spoke to you and nobody else heard it? And you can't make God speak again by going the same place and doing the same thing? Unprovable. You say you spoke with a deceased relative in a dream? Unreasonable.It is strange what we feel the need to prove.When we think about why someone loves us, we feel the need to prove we've earned it. We haven't. You can't earn love. But we want to prove it just the same.