Faith From A Jar

Not everyone has the time or skill necessary to make Italian tomato sauce from scratch. Most of us eat sauce from a jar most of the time. But you can certainly improve even store-bought sauce with relatively little effort. Grow your own basil in your garden, or if necessary in a pot or box on a window sill. Add fresh basil to your sauce from a jar, and you’ll be amazed at how much it improves the flavor – and thus your dining experience.

I think that our worldviews have a lot in common with this. I don’t think anyone can ever put together a worldview entirely from scratch. But few of us have the time or skill even to put together our view on a particular subject from scratch. And as in cooking, what “from scratch” means is debatable. Do you have to grow your own tomatoes? Can you say you researched a subject yourself when you are dependent on “data in a can”?

Nevertheless, everyone should try to broaden their experience from “faith in a jar” – by which I mean a viewpoint, whether it is belief in God, or belief that you are skeptical enough to know there is no God, or anything else, which you have largely taken over in its details from other people, whether they be family, friends, or people on the internet whom you hardly know. Take some detail about which you have nagging doubts or puzzling unanswered questions, and take the time to slow cook your own viewpoint. Don’t take any shortcuts. Don’t even rely too much on someone else’s “recipe.”

You may never have the time to cook your own perspective entirely from scratch. Let’s be honest: no one does. But you can add some fresh ingredients. And what you’ll discover as a result is perhaps more important than being able to cook your own sauce, or faith, from home-grown raw ingredients. You’ll find out from your own experience that jarred faith, like jarred sauce, is something you settle for. It provides convenience at the expense of taste. It sacrifices richness and authenticity for expediency.

Few if any of us can ever attain a “fully farm fresh faith.” But I like to think that everyone can expand their horizons by adding a few fresh ingredients. Because if nothing else, you’ll realize as a result of doing so that the arguments you’ve been having about which jarred worldview is better are missing a much bigger picture. You may have both been arguing over the difference between two mass-produced imitations, without ever having tasted anything close to the “real thing.”

Buon appetito!