THE WALK OF FAITH

Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minster

Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

December 4, 2011

Some time ago I clipped a full-page cartoon in the New Yorker that amused me. The cartoon was titled “Persons of Faith,” and below were various people represented on a street scene with thought bubbles coming out of their heads. “I won’t be late, because a taxi is going to pull up any second” read one. “Perhaps her answering machine is broken” read another. “Pilates will change my life” said another, and “my novel will be a best-seller, and then my parents will respect me.” You get the idea.

We all have these dialog boxes operating in our heads full of assumptions of how we feel the world works. We don’t necessarily articulate those assumptions, and in some cases we may not even be consciously aware of them. But that doesn’t mean they don’t still have a powerful impact on how we organize our lives. And the power they convey doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with their reliability. We are capable of all sorts of self delusions. For the man speculating about his girlfriend’s answering machine, it’s more likely that the answering machine is fine, and she’s just not into him anymore. The woman may find her Pilates class enjoyable, but the change she seeks in her life will likely take much more than adopting an exercise routine.

Everyone these days it seems, from Billy Graham to President Obama, is extolling the virtues of faith. But once you dig a little deeper you find that people are using that word in very different ways. For some, faith has a very specific content, framed perhaps in a catechism or creed. For others it is centered more generally in a set of beliefs around, say, the nature of God or the place of the Bible. But that’s not always the case. There are also those who argue for what they call “the faith of an atheist.” We, too, as Unitarian Universalists with our diverse theological perspectives, speak of ourselves as “people of faith” and “a faith community.”

You could hardly be blamed for scratching your head when the subject of faith comes up. What, exactly, are we talking about? And what does it mean for me? It needs to be said, after all, that for some people all this talk of “faith” sounds like a lot of hogwash: wishful thinking, at best, and delusional at worst: Happy words that may make some people feel good that seem to have little connection to the world of experience. So, it seems to me that if we are going to use this language, we who affirm the gift of reason and freedom of belief, we are pressed to make our case for how it might inform and guide our religious life.

I want to begin by confessing that for some time I had deep misgivings about using the language of faith to describe my own belief structure. Faith was a word for the predominant Christian culture, “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen,” according to the famous passage in Hebrews.

And where does this assurance and conviction come from? Well, the impression I was given was that one simply made the decision to give oneself over to it. But why? I never quite got that. Let’s face it, many of traditional claims of faith are pretty fantastical, and while the arguments on their behalf were often heart-felt and articulate, ultimately the rationale for believing in them seemed to come down to a simple conclusion: because we say so. That didn’t do it.

It wasn’t until well into my own training in ministry that I came upon a source that opened a door for me into a new way of thinking about faith. And it has helped me reframe my understanding of what the religious life might be about: not a climb to the pinnacle of some saved state of perfect faith, but a walk, a life-long journey through places rough and smooth, with bounty and scarcity, sorrow and joy.

The source I spoke of earlier was the liberal theologian Paul Tillich, writing in a book now more than a half-century old entitled Dynamics of Faith. “Almost all the struggles between faith and knowledge,” Tillich wrote, “are rooted in a wrong understanding of faith as a type of knowledge which has a low degree of evidence but is supported by religious authority.”

He identified two examples of this understanding.  The first, arising out of both Catholic and Protestant traditions, is the insistence that where one finds limited evidence in support of some doctrine, it is believer’s duty to make up for it with an act of will. The believer’s inability to affirm this doctrine then is seen as weakness, a failure of will. But Tillich pointed out that while this strategy may succeed in shaming the person at hand, it does nothing to create faith in any meaningful way.

The second misunderstanding, he said, is one that points to strong emotion as evidence of faith. If faith is to have significance in our lives we can expect it to touch our emotions, he said, but “emotion is not the source of faith.” Two hundred and fifty years ago our Unitarian forebears complained of how the tent gatherings of the Great Awakening were full of what they called “emotional exuberance” that seemed to them to have little to do with faith. They, like Tillich, felt that faith, if it was to have significance in our lives, must touch the whole personality, integrating head and heart.

So, what should we understand faith to be? Tillich offered a famously ambiguous and yet simple definition: the state of being ultimately concerned.

It is, in a sense, an orientation to the world that finds value in it. Being ultimately concerned means we look past all that divides us for the unity beyond. It is a perspective that leaves nothing out, that finds connections wherever we turn. There is the ultimacy. But it is not distant in that way. We are drawn to it; we are part of it; we are responsible to it. It elicits our concern. I’m speaking in abstract terms, yet if this understanding of faith has any meaning it registers with us in direct and visceral ways: in how we go about our lives, how we interact with others, how we engage with the natural world.

Tillich observed that faith is not something reserved for those who profess some religious perspective. It comes with being human. From our earliest days we learn to orient ourselves to the world. Our experiences shape a world picture that evolves in our heads as we grow and guides our understanding of how the world works and how we relate to it.

While he was a young man, the writer D.H. Lawrence speculated on what he felt this process must be like in a letter to the pastor of the church where he grew up.

“I believe that one is converted when first one hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling one’s hitherto unconscious self. I believe one is born first unto oneself – for the happy developing of oneself, while the world is a nursery. . . But most are born again on entering maturity. Then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitude of brothers and sisters. Then, it appears to me, one gradually formulates one’s religion.”

But, as Tillich noted, depending on one’s experience that “religion” can take limited and even unhealthy forms. Having spent his adult life in Europe during the tumultuous first half of the 20th century, he identified nationalism as an example: an orientation to the world that puts the country of one’s origin as the highest value, the source of one’s fulfillment, something it could never be.

It was Ralph Waldo Emerson, after all, who observed, “That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship.”

And yet, the fact remains that we are forever attaching our hopes for fulfillment to ideas, institutions, even people in ways that far exceed what they are capable of carrying. Some of the most important moments in the walk of faith, then, are opportunities for letting go. The Buddhist path to enlightenment is centered on letting go of these attachments, things we cling to that we think bring us happiness but instead bring us suffering.

“Neti, Neti, Neti,” they chant. Not this, not this, not this, allowing each attachment to fall away as they seek deeper clarity. Even those things that are dearest to us we can cling to in ways that serve neither them or us.

Sharon Olds speaks to this poignant process in her poem, 35/10:

Brushing out our daughter's brown silken hair before the mirror
I see the grey gleaming on my head,

the silver-haired servant behind her.

Why is it just as we begin to go they begin to arrive,

the fold in my neck clarifying as the fine bones of her hips sharpen?

As my skin shows its dry pitting,

she opens like a moist precise flower on the tip of a cactus;
as my last chances to bear a child are falling through my body,

the duds among them,

her full purse of eggs, round and firm as hard-boiled yolks,

is about to snap its clasp.

I brush her tangled fragrant hair at bedtime.

It's an old story—the oldest we have on our planet—
the story of replacement.   

Neti, neti, neti.  Not this, not this, not this. Even with those we care for most, we grasp and clutch for what we cannot have.

The walk of faith invites us to step back, let go, and yet stay in relationship. We find that as we age we are increasingly able to reduce the pile of objects with which we surround ourselves. Our living space shrinks, too. But that release also gives us the freedom to focus, to attend to that which really matters.

Faith continues to draw us outward: out of ourselves, away from our complaints and nagging limitations, toward a wider and deeper relationship with all that is. Ultimacy is not some vague philosophical notion; it is a view from the widest possible vantage with ourselves deep in the midst of the action.

We remember, after all, that the word faith has its origins in the notion of trust: fides, fidelity. The search for faith is the search for that in which we can have trust. It projects outward beyond what we can know, driven not by will but by our hearts.

The Unitarian Universalist minister Victoria Safford tells a story that to my mind reflects the center of what faith is about. “I have a friend,” Safford writes, “who traffics in words. She’s not a minister, but a psychiatrist in the health clinic at a prestigious women’s college. We were sitting once not long ago after a student she had known, and counseled, committed suicide in the dormitory there. My friend, the doctor, the healer, held the loss very closely those first few days, not unprofessionally, but deeply, fully – as you or I would have, had this been someone in our care.

“At one point (with tears streaming down her face) she looked up in defiance (this is the only word for it) and spoke explicitly of her vocation, as if out of the ashes of that day she were renewing a vow or making a new covenant (and I think she was). She spoke explicitly of her vocation, and of yours and mine.

“She said, ‘You know, I cannot save them. I am not here to save anybody, or to save the world. All I can do – what I am called to do – is to plant myself at the gates of Hope. Sometimes they come in, sometimes they walk by. But I stand there every day, and I call out till my lungs are sore with calling, and beckon and urge them in toward beautiful life and love.”

Ultimately, the walk of faith is one that pushes us each into such a place, that urges us to step out of our narrow self-concern, past our fears and misgivings, out to the gates of Hope. We are each called in different ways but called all the same to live in a larger context.

Doing so, we put ourselves at risk of being discouraged or distracted, needing to make course corrections. We are each capable of our little idolatries, the thought bubbles that pop up, the attachments that distract us for a time. Our specific beliefs will shift and change. There are so many ways we humans have struggled to name what lifts us up and helps us see the larger truth in which we are living, our vast interconnections, the beauty and infinite worth of the world and each other.

Like Wendell Berry, we are each on our own walk, finding moments when we can let our tasks lie in their places like sleeping cattle and come into the sight of our deepest truths. Berry invites us to think of these as presences of a sort – that which fears me and that which I fear. I think of that which fears me as those subtle and fragile things that my occasional thrashing about prevents me from knowing. Heedless and single-minded I drive them away. That which I fear I know well: that which reminds me of my own weakness, my vulnerability, my death.

And it does indeed take some days of labor and no little consternation to come to terms with all that. Part of what I look forward to on this upcoming period of sabbatical that you have generously granted me is to dedicate some time and energy to that work.

And it is work worth doing: centering, deepening, clearing, refining, releasing. For, in the end we are left, as Wendell Berry suggests, with song: our own song that blends with a larger song that in time leaves the whole world singing.