Agnostic

Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me?" 

"Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."

-John 20: 29

One of the great (and at the same time foolish) aspirations of the modern age was that one could make a rational case either for or against the existence of God. A good number of the people I know who describe themselves as either atheist or agnostic are actually rather perplexed (in the case of agnostics) or angry (in the case of atheists) about the frustrations inherent in this pursuit.  It is, quite frankly, because the pursuit itself is absurd. Belief is a tricky and slippery thing, it can help us rise to our highest levels of justice and kindness and it can lead us to sink deeply into evil.  There is nothing more beautiful than a human who apprehends a God who loves them and accepts them as a good creation.  And there is nothing more dangerous than a human who apprehends a god that tells them everything they do and think is divine truth.

You may notice that there is a slim, and often elusive, difference between those two statements.  Which is why God, even in the incarnation event, chooses to insist on faith as a core component of our relationship.  Many thousands of people saw Jesus of Nazareth in the flesh, only a few dozen believed he was the Christ.  Even one of his close followers, Thomas, chose not to believe in Jesus's bodily resurrection unless he saw and touched.  This is not, as is sometimes presented, a flaw in Thomas's character, it is rather a sign that he was not delusional. What happens to him in this moment is that he believes, what he does from that moment forward should be seen as faith, and faith is the real blessing, faith is the real gift.

In two thousand years since then, there really is no rhyme or reason to why certain people are given faith and others are not.  Faith, I would maintain, is not the same as belief, though those two things are often conflated. History tells us that some people did horrible things on account of their belief, and some people did horrible things because of their lack of it. Faith on the other hand requires something a little different.  It cannot be mere intellectual assent, and it cannot simply be a gut feeling.  Faith is participation in a relationship.  It is the key word in marriage vows, "I promise to be faithful." Living in faith is fidelity, not belief.  People can "believe" in God and have it make very little difference in their day to day lives, but to live in relationship, in faith, that's a different story. To live in faith is to always be ready, and indeed expect, that God is always asking you to be a little bit more than you are, even as She loves who you are, as you are.

In my experience, faithful people always have a bit of agnosticism in them, in other words a little sense that they just don't know.  If you couple the humility of "not knowing," with the love and grace that comes with trusting in God, which comes from being in relationship with the divine nature, you are on the way to spiritual maturity.

Faith is, therefore, not a matter of knowing, nor is it a matter of believing, it is a matter of trust in God's presence.  In one of his Sabbath Poems, Wendell Berry has written this stanza, which rings with the truth of the Gospel in my heart: 

For we are fallen like the trees, our peace

Broken, and so we must

Love where we cannot trust,

Trust where we cannot know,

And must await the wayward coming grace

That joins the living and the dead,

Taking us where we would not go -

Into the boundless dark.

When what was made has been unmade

The Maker comes to His work.

By the way, if you have not discovered Wendell Berry's poetry, you should.  Right now.  

I think that, as Paul said, "The creation is groaning as in labor pains until now;" (Romans 8:22) for us to grow into our faith.  The work seems slow, it takes generations in fact, for all the little corrections of our belief to mount up and actually change things.  It is an act of God's grace that She allows us to experience all the flashes of glory that are readily available to one with eyes to see and ears to hear. Just don't expect to ever be able to know it completely or for sure, because then you're giving up the promise of faith for the gnosticism of mere belief.