God Will Use Even Our Fakery

“Fake it until you make it” sounds like bad advice. Pretending to something you do not have is bad, but I think the advice is sound if understood as this: carry on, do your duty, until your feelings match your actions.

Don’t pretend, because pretending is dangerous, but do carry on with virtuous deeds even when virtue seems foolish.

As always, however, God will use even our errors to bless us if He can. God chose to give us free will and chose to create a cosmos with natural laws. However, God does not watch as impassively, God loves us. He does all He can to give us more than we want, more than we know to ask, more than we deserve.

He never spoils us, but always does what is best for us and what is best for us is to come into right relationship with Him.

Devils encourage religious fakery, because it damns souls, increasing irrationality with impiety. When we pretend to knowledge (reasonable faith!) we do not have, then we often avoid the hard thinking, actual experience, and inner work that might produce faith. Yet it is dangerous to hang around God, because He is there, He loves us, and He is eager to bless us.

He sometimes takes us as better than we are when He can.

A man named Porphyrios, actor and mime (though not French!), was asked by a tyrant to mock Christianity. He was to act out baptism and pretend to be “saved.”  This turned out badly for the dictator as Porphyrios met God. Something in his heart responded to the words of the service and God came and saved his soul. He rebuked the tyrant’s presumption. Evidently, this did not happen just once. The actor Gennesus began his comedy routine by mocking the liturgy of the Church and ended by mocking the Empire. Nobody was sure what happened, but the critic became the convert and this cost him his life.

My new atheists friends spend a great deal of time mocking the faith, but sometimes that faith catches them.

Why?

God will let a man be unreasonable if he must, but still the image of God dwells in him. As the atheist uses reason, he is using God’s tools to attack God. This is perilous to his atheism. God is waiting to reveal Himself . . . not in anger, but in love! God will, if He can, receive even impiety as piety and the truth is so potent that mocking it by repeating it is very dangerous!

This is encouraging to me not because I should “fake it,” but because no matter how hard I try I am “faking it.” We mean to be sincere, but our motives are always mixed. Who can be sure that they love God sincerely? Who can be sure that they are not “faking?” Few of us are so holy, so just, so good that we know all our motives for anything we say or do.

We are mixed up as are our motives!

The good news is that God will take our mixed motives and do the best He can for us. We speak the best we can, but our words always contain some hedging, some duplicity, and much doubt. God takes us our best self and magnifies that above all the rest if we will let him. Reality, the Divine Word, is always coming to do what we say . . . if we will just allow Reality to make us mean what we have said!

God comes when called . . . even if we are not sure we want Him!

Thank God.