Finding Your Faith

"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections
and the truth of the imagination."
—Keats

The First Reading

What is the meaning of life when life disappoints you?  Where does faith come from when you are all out of strength? How could I accept the false romanticism of religion when faced with the harsh disappointment of facts? 

I had always believed that the search for truth would be the best way to live my life.  But the night I heard that Hank had died, my body went into shock, a tension invaded my shoulders and locked my muscles like a straightjacket. 

What could I learn from this except that grief comes as periodically as the waves of the ocean?  Was truth now only to disappoint me?  Make me afraid to go on living?

A few days later, still worried and confused, I had stopped at a church on Carmine Street on the way home from work.  I don’t know what I had expected to find within that dank, musty air or that dark, hallowed out room.  Certainly not God.  Certainly not the truth.  All I know is that I started to cry, my anger and anguish directed at some force far beyond myself.  Was that from faith, or from the lack of it?  Was it fear that made me reach out to something beyond myself or the belief that faith could provide me with a sense of strength?  Who heard me that night I do not know.

 Faith, I decided, does not save you from life.  And life, I learned over the years, takes you through too, too many changes.

From “Where The Rainbow Ends” by Jameson Currier.

The Second Reading

I want to write about faith:

About the way the moon rises over cold snow,
Night after night
Faithful
Even in its fading from fullness
Slowly becoming that last curling and impossible
Sliver of light before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself.
I do not give it the smallest entry.

Let this, then, my small poem
Like a new moon, slender and barely open
Be the first prayer
That opens me to faith.

By David Whyte, “Close To Home”

The Sermon:

Where do we place our trust?

Once, there was an old man who lived in a village.  He had lived a good life, and had been very loyal to the chief.  In appreciation for all he had contributed to the life of the village, one day the chief of the village gives him a horse, a prize stallion.  The neighbors gather round: “Such good news!” they proclaim.  The old man replies: Good news, bad news—who can say?

The next day, the prize horse runs away.  The neighbors gather round: “Such bad news!” they proclaim.  The old man replies: Good news, bad news—who can say?

The next day, the horse returns, bringing with him a whole herd of beautiful, wild horses.  The neighbors gather round: “Such good news!” they proclaim.  The old man replies: Good news, bad news—who can say?

The next day, when the old man’s young son tries to tame the biggest and most beautiful wild horse, he is thrown and breaks his leg in several places.  The neighbors gather round: “Such bad news!” they proclaim.  The old man replies: Good news, bad news—who can say?

The next day, the army of a powerful War Lord marches through the village, pressing all the young men in the village into service.  They march off to a bloody battle from which none are expected to return.  Only the young son of the old man is spared, because of his broken leg.   The neighbors gather round: “Such good news!” they proclaim.  The old man replies: Good news, bad news—who can say?

Now, I don’t know this old man’s religion.  I don’t know this old man’s beliefs.  But I do know this old man in this old story is full of unfathomable faith.

Faith.  Faith.  What is faith?  Where does faith come from?

James W. Fowler, a noted theologian and human development theorist, suggests that faith is perhaps very different from what we usually assume it to be.

First, Fowler makes a distinction between religion, belief, and faith.  They are three different things entirely.

According to Fowler, religion is “cumulative tradition.”  Religion is the shared shape and form of our deepest questionings.  Religion is the stories, and songs, and community rituals we create together to make meaning out of life.  Lighting the chalice, repeating our chalice lighting words each week, sharing our time of Joys and Concerns, praying together, meditating together, singing our hymns and chants—this is religion.  Religion is about what we do.

Belief is different from religion.  Belief is the holding of certain ideas about something— such as believing in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, the importance of a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, the goal of world community with peace and justice for all, and respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.  Whereas religion is communal ritual, belief is an individual decision.  Although what we may choose to believe can simply be a parroting of what we’ve been taught in religion, we still claim it as our own.  Belief is head centered, and engages the mind.  Belief is about intellectual concepts.  Belief is what we think.

But faith reaches beyond concepts.  Faith is an experience that goes beyond the mind.  Faith engages all the senses.  Faith involves relationships—between ourselves and others, ourselves and our world, ourselves and that which is greater than us.  Faith is our relationship with life itself. 

In her book: “Faith, Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience,” celebrated Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg expands on this understanding of faith.  She writes:

One day a friend called to ask if we could meet for tea.  Knowing that I was writing a book on faith from the Buddhist perspective, she was confused and wanted to talk.  “How can you possibly be writing a book on faith without focusing on God?” she demanded.  “Isn’t that the whole point?”  Her concern spoke to the common understanding we have of faith—that it is synonymous with religious adherence.  But the tendency to equate faith with doctrine, and then argue about terminology and concepts, distracts us from what faith is actually about.  In my understanding, whether faith is connected to a deity or not, its essence lies in trusting ourselves to discover the deepest truths on which we can rely.  This faith is not a commodity we either have or don’t have—it is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience.

Faith is trusting our own deepest experience. 

Poet David Whyte writes:

It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
Or many gods.
It want to know if you belong or feel
Abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world
With its harsh need
To change you.  If you can look back
With firm eyes
Saying this is where I stand.  I want to know
If you know
How to melt into that fierce heat of living
Falling toward
The center of your longing.  I want to know
If you are willing
To live, day by day with the consequence of love
And the bitter
Unwanted passion of your . . .  defeat.

This journey of faith, this learning how to unfold into our experience, this slow melting into the fierce heat of living, is inherent in our Unitarian Universalist heritage.

Permit me a little bit of history to illustrate this.  In order to do so, we need to turn back the clock almost 300 years.  In 1734 an amazing thing happened in the American colonies.  Churches in Massachusetts and up and down the East Coast were gripped by an explosive, charismatic, fundamentalist religious revival called The Great Awakening.  This Great Awakening was induced by a dynamic and fiery preacher named Jonathan Edwards.  Edwards was a gifted orator, and he preached hell, damnation and the fear-induced conversion of souls as few had before him (or since).  So great was his personal power, so inspiring was his style of services and sermons, that it seemed to many as if the Spirit of God poured from his church in North Hampton, Massuchusetts to inspire hundred of ministers to take to the open road throughout the colonies in an effort to spread salvation to as many as could be reached.

This Great Awakening turned into a mass religious experience, a mass religious panic.  Thousands upon thousands of women, children, and men flocked to churches, tents, and open fields.  There they would hear itinerant preachers rant and rave about the need to believe, the need to be saved, the need to be washed in the blood of the lamb, the need to allow the Spirit of Jesus Christ to take control of their lives “here and now and forever more.”  These ministers, these preachers, stirred up passions, whipped up emotional excesses, and fed on the kind of fervor that only occurs in group hysteria.  The goal was to generate a moment of ecstatic conversion.  In an instant, the Holy Spirit would descend, the heart would be broken open, the grip of sin would be snapped, and the person would be one of the faithful.  In an instant, all would be well.

There were a group of liberal Christian ministers in Massachusetts who looked at this madness, this raw emotion, this instant gratification by grace, and said: “This is not faith that these preachers teach.”  And so, ministers such as Ebenezer Gay, Charles Chauncey, and Jonathan Mayhew began to quietly speak out against the emotionalism raging around them.  They began to model another way of experiencing faith.  From their pulpits they taught that faith wasn’t something that descends from on high in a moment of heightened emotion to instantly and forever change a person.  Faith isn’t about conversion.  Faith isn’t even something given to a person by God.  Faith isn’t an instantaneous transformation that then makes everything clear and sure.  Faith isn’t blind allegiance.  No, no, they said.  Faith is a journey, a slow unfolding.  A soul isn’t saved; it is cultivated carefully over time.  A soul is shaped through practice, education, life experience, the arts, and the sciences.  Reason and consideration are all necessary ingredients in which a soul slowly grows into maturation.  And so, Ebenezer Gay, Charles Chauncey, Jonathan Mayhew, and many other liberal ministers in Massachusetts laid the foundation for our Unitarian Universalist belief in faith development, in spiritual formation, in the slow unfolding of our human potential.

Today, the sciences of psychology and human development confirm what these deep thinking liberal Christian ministers of 18th century Massachusetts were teaching.

One of the leaders in our current understanding of faith development—of where we put our trust and confidence—is James Fowler.  James Fowler outlines six stages of faith development.  I share them this morning as an invitation to meditate upon where we might be on our faith journey.  In doing so, we can ask ourselves, where do we place our trust?  For the placement of our trust is the definition of our faith.

Stage One: The Self-Absorbing Mirror—usually ages 2-7.  Trust is placed in what a child sees and hears from parents or guardians.  A child in this stage is absorbing all the taboos and beliefs from the family around them.  A child mirrors back the beliefs they see or hear, all the while assuming that everyone understands things exactly as they do.  The transition from this stage begins as cognitive thinking develops, and the world expands beyond parents and family.

Stage Two: The Literalist—Age 8 to adolescence.  Trust is shifted from family and is now placed in stories and explanations that are understood literally.  What is written is what is true.  For example: Adam and Eve were the first humans, they actually did live in a historical garden called Eden, and they actually ate a forbidden apple.  These stories and explanations offer a sense of comfort, for they tell who we are in the world, and why things happen.  The deeper symbolism of the stories is not understood. The transition from this stage begins as contradictions in stories leads to reflection.

Stage Three: The Loyalist—Early Adulthood.  Trust is shifted from stories and explanations and is now placed in the need to belong to a group, and the need for approval.  Contradictions in stories and beliefs might be seen, but the need for approval and belonging deadens that insight. The need for safety, security, and answers is what can be trusted, and so questions are silenced and conformity wins. Religious authority figures are seen as bearers of truth.  Rules abound and are followed.  Most people stop their faith development here, and remain at this stage.  The transition from this way of thinking usually begins, if it ever comes, with some experience that shatters the individual’s trust in an authority figure, group, or set of beliefs.  A contradiction emerges that cannot be reconciled or ignored.  Self-reflection opens awareness that cannot be stifled.

Stage Four: The Searcher—Young Adulthood or into mid-thirties or forties, if ever.  The searcher no longer trusts the old authorities or the group.  Now, the searcher trusts their own need to search out new answers and create a new framework of meaning.  Searchers examine their own experience to discover what is true in their personal lives.  Discovering new insights and new answers are the goal. We become mostly concerned with the pursuit of what feels right and true for them.  We often see the world through only the lens of personal truth and meaning. Distrustful of authority and organization, we feel a tension between individuality and group membership (something many Unitarian Universalists struggle with constantly).  We place ultimate trust in the path, the search, and the questions.

Stage Five: The Seer—Midlife, if ever.  We stop the search for a new framework of meaning, and trusts instead paradox, ambiguity, and uncertainty.  We trust that clear answers can no longer be found.   The need for a new truth to replace the discarded ones dissolves, as does the need for the search itself.    On stops striving, and control is no longer an issue.  A person trusts the phrase: “Good news, bad news, who can say?”  Experiences and beliefs from all the religions no longer feel foreign, but are somehow part of one’s own experience.  Nothing is rejected. The old images, stories, and symbols we walked away from are revisited, re-interpreted, and renewed.  Symbolism rather than certainty is celebrated, and mystery is relished.  Peace is made with one’s past, and the unconscious is brought to light. There is a new openness to the strange and the other. (This is something that many long-term Unitarian Universalists are never able to accomplish—making peace with our religious past and, in fact, re-embracing old theological concepts and language and beliefs from a new symbolic perspective).  All this trust is not just held as thoughts or values, or as an ideal.  This trust is experienced and lived profoundly.

Last stage of all (that ends this strange, eventful history) is Stage Six: The Universal Spirit.  This person trusts completely the universality of all life.  They give themselves over completely to a force that attempts to unify the world.  They are propelled by an inclusiveness of community, a radical commitment to social justice, and a selfless passion for a transformed world.  Their insight is often not a choice, but a call from the Divine or from the demands of history.  And that call is trusted completely and fully, no matter where it takes them. Reaching this stage is rare: examples possibly include Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Mother Mira, Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, and Mother Theresa.

 “For some this will be a very different approach to faith,”  writes Sharon Salzberg.  And then she makes an interesting observation.  “ In Pali, the language of the original Buddhist texts, the word usually translated as faith, confidence, or trust is saddha.  Saddha literally means “to place the heart upon.”  To have faith is to offer one’s heart or give over one’s heart.  (12)  “In Pali, faith is a verb, an action, as it is also in Latin and Hebrew.  Faith is not a singular state that we either have or don’t have, but is something that we do.  We “faithe.”  Faith is the willingness to take the next step, to see the unknown as an adventure, to launch a journey.” (12)  “Faith is the animation of the heart that says, “I choose life, I align myself with the potential inherent in life, I give myself over to that potential.”  This spark of faith is ignited the moment we think, I’m going to go for it.  I’m going to try.”  (16)

J.F. Packer perhaps says it best when he writes: “Belief is a truth held in the mind.  Faith is a fire in the heart.”

And so I ask: “Is this good news, or is this bad news?”

Good news, bad news: who can say?

Blessed Be.  Amen.

Note: The six stages of faith development are fully explicated in James Fowler’s classic book “Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development.”  The summary of these stages included in this sermon was adapted in only the slightest manner from a source that is unknown to me, as the attribution page was missing from my summary sheet.  The source would be credited if I knew the author.