Reflections 1: There's a crack

I wasn't a half bad young Christian man. I mean, I not only went to church. I gave of my time to transmit the love that I felt God had given me. Plus, I felt like this was fulfilling. I felt like I was making a difference or something. At the least I wasn't nominal. My belief infected the way I acted. I couldn't have thought of the world in much different terms. Not that I was overly dogmatic or anything. In fact, when I was on the brink of spending some time abroad I told several people that I was looking forward to having my world-view shattered.
I didn't know how much that would hurt.
You know, it's bizarre how much our lens effects the way we read things. Take the news; we can easily read that there are mass amounts of people who live in extremely different experiences in entirely different geographies, but for me, it took landing in the middle of Manila to take some of the romanticism off the news reports. The rational I had used to interpret my own society didn't work in my new context. I had to realize that there were very real individual experiences bumping into each other and going their way in response to social cues and motives born out of life experiences that I could barely understand, hardly expect to significantly influence, and certainly not discredit.
I was so far a minority, my presumptions entered a survival mode of transience. I couldn't assume I was right on any given point, and so was marked a crack in the wall of my belief system.

A real challenge came on when I started reading the Biblical gospels again. I had just finished reading the old Testament and had come to love the passionate metaphor of the prophets, the rich (and relatively abstract) symbolism of the law, the heartfeltness of psalms, and, I suppose, the sense of story and journey that the entire thing conveyed. For Christians, however, the climax comes in Jesus- and it was with his harsh words that I began to trip. Up to this point, they had been explained away by theologians or historians who used contextual renderings as a way to dumb the soliloquies down for a more temperate audience. My assumptions, however, were off their guard. I saw for the first time the yelling Jesus, the pre-modern Jewish Jesus, the Jesus who mentioned grace less often than the expectations God seemed to have for us. I held desperately to Jesus' words on mercy and non-judgementalism from Luke's account, to the story of the prodigal son. I imagined that all I needed was to work on Gods farm and I would be taken care of. It would be enough.
By standards in Canada I was righteous enough. Now i realized that if i really believed in social justice, my best efforts were pathetic in comparison to the generosity of paupers I met everyday. To him who much had been given much would be asked? I was surely damned for my pathetic life.
A little further and I found the inconsistencies of the epistles, the rambling of an old (and irate?) apostle and then quit before I began on his visions- feeling that if i began down that road I would be lost to the possibility that they were merely confused rantings. Why would they be more? These things which Christians held so dear to, these ramblings and hopes and delusions- if one of them was inconsistent, then what happened to the rest? Held up by a framework of societal norms, the faith of my Western church was falling down around my ankles like pants without a belt.
Was abandonment viable?