Faith & formation

Most of Us Are Not Avoiding God

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  5 min read

The picture of avoidance most people carry is a person walking away from faith.

That is not what this looks like. What this looks like is a person who is present, warm, involved, and doing something more precise than avoidance.

Most of us are not avoiding God. We are avoiding one particular thing He might say.

The arrangement

You do not have to leave to avoid a subject. You can stay, entirely sincerely, and steer.

The steering is made of small, respectable choices, and each one is defensible on its own:

• Prayer that stays on the topics where you are comfortable being examined — and there are usually plenty, so it does not feel evasive.
• Reading that is heavy on comfort and light on the passages that would raise it.
• Company chosen, without any conscious calculation, from people unlikely to ask about it.
• Service — genuine, useful service — occupying the hours in which the question might otherwise surface.

Every item is a good thing. That is what makes the arrangement so durable: it is built entirely out of things nobody would tell you to stop doing.

Why comfort without correction stops being comfort

The instinct behind it is not wicked. Correction is genuinely unpleasant, and most of us have had it delivered badly at some point — by a parent, a leader, somebody who used it to establish rank — and learned to brace.

But a relationship in which one party can only say approving things is not a relationship; it is an audience. And the strange result is that the comfort itself thins out. Assurance from someone who could not have told you otherwise is worth less than assurance from someone who could.

So the arrangement defeats its own purpose. It was built to protect the comfort, and it degrades the comfort, and it does that slowly enough that the connection is easy to miss.

Naming the subject

The way out is not more spiritual effort in general. General effort is precisely what the arrangement is made of.

It is specific: what is the subject I have been steering around?

Nearly everybody knows within a few seconds. It is not obscure. It is usually a relationship, a habit, a resentment, or a thing that was done to you that you have decided is settled.

You do not have to resolve it today. Naming it is the whole move, because a subject that has been named cannot go on being steered around unconsciously — and unconsciousness was the only thing keeping the arrangement running.