Place Your Hope in the Healer by Douglas C. MacLeod Jr.

When Faith Disappoints:
The Gap Between What We Believe
and What We Experience
By Lisa Victoria Fields
Multnomah, 2024
$16.99   192 pp.

During a sermon at St. Peter’s Basilica in 2022, Pope Francis asked his flock to think about this question: “How is the journey of my faith going?” Lisa Victoria Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project and author of When Faith Disappoints: The Gap Between What We Believe and What We Experience, starts her newest work with her faith waning while in the seminary after she hears of innocent children being murdered by terrorists in the Middle East. “Why do You protect some and not others?” she pleads. “How can I trust You?” Fields agonizes over these questions for weeks before deciding to seek guidance from a mentor, Dr. Leo Percer. He responds to her inquiries, “I struggle with that too.”

Dr. Percer’s admission opens Fields’s eyes to the fact that all people of faith wrestle with it at some point. It is an inevitability, and it is up to those questioning their faith to lean into those queries rather than run away from them or run away from God, because it is then that faith can grow and thrive. It is this central idea that makes When Faith Disappoints a compelling work about the struggles and tribulations humans have when faced with pain and strife, and how faith can be questioned but ultimately needs to be embraced in order to move forward.

Once Fields lays this foundation, it is up to her to prove her thesis. She begins with what she calls “pain points,” or complaints, and how they relate to apologetics. According to Fields, there are seven common pain points associated with Christianity: personhood, peace, provision, pleasure, purpose, protection, and power. If one asks questions associated with any of these pain points, a struggle with faith is bound to take place. It is up to the individual not to reframe how they see Christianity to suit their needs or leave the faith completely; instead, one must reframe the pain points, and to do that one must rethink their perceptions about God and Scripture. The way to accomplish this includes reading, listening, praying, and making affirmations. 

Each of the book’s chapters is devoted to a particular pain point and how to use it to ensure that one’s faith is not faltering. Much of Fields’s work in these chapters is devoted to narratives that are related to the pain point in question, how humans normally face it, and how humans should face it with spiritual perceptiveness. The beauty of When Faith Disappoints is its truthful recognition of the human condition; Fields is empathic to the feelings of her readers, because she too has confronted these issues. We all are weak as we are strong. We all are fragile as we are resilient. We all are inquisitive as we are naïve. We all want to figure out what our purpose is and how our faith, no matter what it may be, fits into a better understanding of ourselves and our connection with God. Yes, we should have joy and peace. Yes, we should have a better understanding of who we are, and we should all be in control over own identities. Yes, we should be protected from the harms that surround us day by day. But all of this is impossible without God, who is fundamentally connected to the pain points and the solutions to each.

What one can appreciate about Fields is that she is both an empath and a realist, and that comes across throughout When Faith Disappoints. Her personal experience and her experiences with others through the Jude 3 Project have given her clarity about the horrible things human beings are capable of doing to one another, and which can lead to withdrawal, self-loathing, fear, and a variety of other negative emotions. Much of her work stems from her perspective as a Black woman and as a member of the Black Christian community; however, When Faith Disappoints looks at all forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, hatred, anger, and xenophobia. The book is about how we not only have agency over our faith but also over the way we treat others. I found myself wondering if there is a correlation between our phobias and our odium and the diminishing of discipleship: Who wants to be part of a faith that is judgmental, intolerant, hurtful, and non-inclusive? Who wants to be part of a faith where the deity to whom believers pray shares these same negative qualities? Do we not have free will that allows us to choose to love our neighbor?

Fields seems to think so, and she makes sure to let her readers know that God, instead of perpetuating vitriol, shuns injustice and loathing. In the eyes of God, we are valuable; we can be forgiven; we are deserving of peace, protection, and happiness; and we all have purpose. God is just, loving, and healing. One of the more profound moments in When Faith Disappoints is when Fields opines: “Place your hope in the Healer, not in power.” God is love, and it is up to us to step forward and be embraced by God. This is the way we reframe our pain, and Fields’s book shows us the way in that process of reframing. As she writes: “Friend, your pain is only a comma, not a period. You may be walking through the valley of the shadow of death, but you don’t live there. God gives hope. Your hurt is a portal to new life, not just in the life to come but in this one so you can live it more abundantly.”

Fields makes clear that pain is inevitable, but God is not the perpetrator of pain, and we should not turn away from him. Rather, God is there to answer our questions if we trust enough to ask them, and to let him embrace us after he answers. As James Allen says in The Way of Peace: “To reach this Love, to understand and experience it, one must work with great persistency and diligence upon his heart and mind, must ever renew his patience and keep strong his faith, for there will be much to remove, much to accomplish before the Divine Image is revealed in all its glorious beauty.” ♦

Dr. Douglas C. MacLeod Jr. is an associate professor of composition and communication at SUNY Cobleskill. He has written multiple book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles, and book reviews throughout his almost 20-year career as an academic and teacher. Recently, he has had essays published in Childhood and Innocence in American Culture: Heartaches and Nightmares (Lexington Books); Holocaust vs. Popular Culture: Interrogating Incompatibility and Universalization (Routledge); and Film as an Expression of Spirituality: The Arts and Faith Top 100 Films (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). He lives in Upstate New York with his wife, Patty, and his dog, Cocoa Love.

Image: El Greco, Christ Healing the Blind, c. 1570