I Am With You Always, to the End of the Age

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
(Matthew 28:16-20, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

Do we believe the promise Jesus made to his disciples before he left?

We tend to remember Thomas’s skepticism, as depicted in John’s gospel, but Matthew’s account makes it clear that even those to whom Jesus appeared on the first Easter struggled to accept the reality of his resurrection. So it makes sense that, two millennia later, you or I, who have no direct experience of the Christ, might find all this difficult to believe.

Unless, of course, we have encountered the Living Christ and his Spirit in some way, as people have reportedly done throughout the centuries. George Fox’s account of his spiritual breakthrough, for example, has become a core text for Friends. Fox suffered through years of spiritual confusion and anguish, leading to his rejection of all human authority in matters of religion, “so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do.” In that bleakest moment, he wrote, he heard the voice that reminded him “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition,” and at this revelation “my heart did leap for joy.”

Such Christ-centered faith animated the Religious Society of Friends in its first three centuries; it remains the predominant form of Quakerism worldwide. Over the last century or so, however, a variety of cultural forces have guided some Friends, predominantly but not exclusively in the Anglo-American realm, into a more universalist spirituality. These Friends don’t necessarily reject Jesus—many of them acknowledge that he had many excellent insights into our relationships with God and with one another—but neither do they prioritize him as a subject of their faith. In some cases, they may find the resurrection too irrational, too outlandish, too… something to accept.

I get it. Honestly, I still go back and forth on the matter myself.

I recently began reading a new book by Christopher Beha, Why I Am Not an Atheist, and discovered some broad similarities with my own spiritual arc. Like me, Beha grew up in a Roman Catholic household (though his family seems a bit more actively fervent in their faith than mine). We both hit a wall in late adolescence, where the tenets of faith became incompatible with the conclusions of science, and we both gravitated toward science. 

At this point, our paths diverge more widely. As the title of his memoir suggests, Beha took inspiration from the twentieth-century philosopher Bertrand Russell, while I came across a translation of the Tao Te Ching. Eventually, we both seem to have reached a point at which we confronted the limitations of scientific materialism and landed on a sort of agnosticism. I’d sum up my version of that stage as “God may very well exist, but I don’t know if that has anything to do with me, so I’ll just focus on trying to live an ethical life.”

This actually worked in my favor when I had my first serious encounter with Quakers near the end of my twenties. I don’t recall that I heard anything explicitly “Christian” the entire year I came to that first meetinghouse. But it proved a good place to sit with my questions, without anyone putting any pressure on me to believe this or that about God. I had a similar experience at the next meetinghouse I visited after moving to the opposite coast. And I hung onto that feeling when I moved to another neighborhood, decided I liked sleeping in on Sundays, and stopped going to meetings for more than a decade.

Then, like George Fox, I came to know God “experimentally.”

I still retain enough rational skepticism that I can look at that experience and recognize clear, logical explanations, such as a willingness to read into random coincidence. But I chose to entertain the possibility of something beyond the merely material, and to the extent I maintain that belief from day to day, it remains a conscious choice. Not a firm one—I need plenty of help with my unbelief—but a conscious one.

I haven’t yet gotten to the part of Beha’s memoir where he dissects the arguments of the “New Atheists,” intellectuals like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens who attacked organized religion and its underlying mindsets with great vigor twenty-some years ago. I’m looking forward to seeing where we agree about their shortcomings, and what else I might learn from his analysis. 

I do know, because he mentions it right away in the introduction, that Beha has landed back with the Catholics; though I’ve been profoundly moved by the direction Pope Francis and his successor, Leo XIV, have taken the church on many issues, I could never re-embrace that faith fully myself. Instead, I’ve found spiritual foundation in Quaker faith and practice where, like George Fox and the Friends who came after him, I can see how Jesus’s promise to his disciples will unfold.