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Unitarian Universalist Church of
Ogden
A light in Utah
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Faith Seeks Understanding
Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
Delivered at UUCO (01/07/07)
Faith, religious faith, can be a wonderful thing. Those who have
it swear by it. The Bible says the person who has faith is
blessed. In addition it says the person with faith will have
prayers heard and will prosper, will be surrounded by loving-kindness
and will not be disappointed. Yet other Biblical references say a
person with faith is delivered and is kept in perfect peace, does not
remain in darkness but is radiant and has living water flowing from
him. How wonderful this all sounds! What beautiful
metaphors for the spiritual life! Who wouldn’t want these?
Bill Murry, president of Meadville Lombard Theological School while I
was in seminary there, puts the goals of faith in psychological
terms. He says the religious quest is to discover how to become
more fully human. This “involves the transformation of the mind
and heart from self-centeredness to a sense of oneself as part of a
larger sacred whole and to a deep commitment to the human and natural
worlds. It is about the transformation from a shallow life of
fear, greed, hedonism, and materialism to a meaningful life of love and
caring, gratitude and generosity, fairness and equity, joy and hope,
and a profound respect for others.”
Now, the Bible and Bill Murry each base their faith on a set of beliefs
or principles – not necessarily the same ones, but their desired
outcomes are very similar. They both hope that people’s faith
will guide them to live ethical lives, and that their lives will be
filled with awe and wonder at the magnificence of our world.
Because the results of faith can have such grand consequences, churches
help people to build it. Different religions, including our own,
have different ways to teach about faith. Each religion’s
interpretations of history and authoritative teachings define the
specifics. They institutionalize their teachings with
books, creeds, and dogma.
In a dogmatic church, faith means people put trust in the authorized
set of beliefs, beliefs they hope will sustain them in their daily
living. Unitarian Universalism maintains it is not a dogmatic
church, which means we have no one, agreed-upon creed, which all
Unitarian Universalists must profess. Upon first discovering this
church and being encouraged to expand my beliefs beyond those I learned
in my earlier years, I felt a great sense of freedom. I explored
several religious traditions and found new insights that helped me to
feel better about my life experiences. But my explorations
stopped short of complete conversion to another religion. I
resisted going all the way lest I would become entangled in another
dogma. I had left a dogmatic church and was even guilty of making
fun of it – I didn’t want to go back there.
Here’s a down-to-earth poem about faith from Lynn Ungar entitled “Crab
Grass.”
“Crab Grass”
We’ve all admired it
even as we’ve cursed
the matted roots, white fingers
pointing toward new frontiers,
the tangled tapestry stubbornly
weaving the world in place.
Imagine living that way.
Imagine knowing from the ground up
that you are tied to the whole,
that you are undefeatable,
that below the surface
undefinable discoveries
are always taking place.
Don’t you think there are
things worth holding on to
with a thousand arms,
ten thousand gripping toes?
Aren’t the undaunted
particularly blessed?
Before you deride the faithful
consider carefully
where you will put your roots.
Our spiritual way of life, with its freedom to explore many religious
sources as we expand our vision, has many benefits. However,
freedom to explore doesn’t mean we never hold on to the ideas we
discover. Don’t be too quick to leave the concept of faith in the
dust. Along with expanding our vision, UUs are encouraged to
deepen our understanding of faith. We must consider carefully what we
believe and then include the good in our own faith. We all need
something to cling to, something that will carry us through the night.
:::
I sometimes envy those who base their faith on a finite set of beliefs
– especially when those beliefs support them and make them happy.
We all know of people in our communities who follow a lifestyle
prescribed by their church, and who seem content with it. For
them, religious beliefs, faith, and daily life fit together well.
For them faith is a strong and positive word with a venerable history
that dwells at the core of human life.” I am happy for them, but
this method hasn’t always worked for me. I was raised in a
religion which espoused a set of traditional family values that sounded
pretty good when I heard them at church. However, my family
couldn’t always practice them. Specifically, my Baptist church
was opposed to drinking, and my father was an alcoholic. The
difference between my church’s and my father’s values presented me with
many painful dilemmas. The fact that my father was not welcome in
my church forced me to question the church’s belief system. When
my father died, and the church said he was going to hell, I went into a
deep funk. I did not want to believe this about him, no matter
what he had done in life, no matter what my church said. I wish I
had known back then about Universalism, with its promise that all are
saved.
I am not the only person who has felt it necessary to question the
beliefs of his or her church. In fact, struggling with faith is a
universal human experience. The story of Jacob wrestling with God
at Peniel presents a classic image of the human struggle to understand
the ultimate source of existence. After sparring all night with
the core of his being, Jacob received a new name, Israel, which means
“One who strives with God.” Jacob received God’s blessing because
he dared to struggle with his faith. It was a mixed blessing;
because of his dislocated hip he would limp for the rest of his life,
but his family would become the foundation for the twelve tribes of
Israel. His name is the defining metaphor for the history of the
Hebrew people.
Because I have questioned the beliefs which make up my faith, I tend to
think others could benefit from questioning their beliefs, too.
However, when I have tried to discuss matters of faith with people who
have strongly defined religious beliefs, we often just get
frustrated. Some go so far as to assert their particular
beliefs fully interpret all experiences. And they sometimes try
to force others to adhere to their doctrines. A particularly
egregious example of this is the Christian Right’s efforts to keep
homosexual people from marrying. The abuse of human dignity by
fundamentalist churches has made faith a charged, negative word for
some UUs. UUism gives us the freedom to reject these kinds of
beliefs, but we don’t have to give up on the idea of faith. We
have all struggled with our beliefs, and it may be hard to talk with
our family and friends about them. Though the road may be
difficult, the end result of these struggles can be a progressive,
open-minded faith which will support us.
:::
We all live through our personal faiths even if we find it difficult to
say what we believe at times. There is something that sustains us
– it is in our hearts – it is grounded in our own personal
reality. Listen to this story told by a boy named Jacque:
“It was a great surprise to find myself blind, and being blind was not
at all as I imagined it. People around me seemed to think to be
blind meant not to see. Yet how was I to believe them when I saw?
Not in the days immediately after the operation. For at that time
I still wanted to use my eyes. I looked in the direction where I
was in the habit of seeing before the accident, and there was anguish,
a lack, something like a void which filled me with what grown-ups call
despair.
Finally, one day, I realized I was looking in the wrong way.
This was much more than a simple discovery, it was a revelation.
Some instinct made me change course. I began to look more
closely, not at things but at a world closer to myself, looking from an
inner place to one further within.
Immediately, the substance of the universe drew together,
redefined and peopled itself anew. I was aware of a radiance
emanating from a place I knew nothing about, a place which might as
well have been outside me as within. But radiance was there, or,
to put it more precisely, light. It was a fact, for light was
there.
I felt indescribable relief and happiness so great it almost made
me laugh. Confidence and gratitude came as if a prayer had been
answered. I found light and joy at the same moment, and I can say
without hesitation that from that time on light and joy have never been
separated in my experience.
I saw light and went on seeing it though I was blind. I said so,
but for many years I think I did not say it very loud. Until I
was nearly fourteen I remember calling the experience, which kept
renewing itself inside me, “my secret,” and speaking of it only to
my most intimate friends. The amazing thing was that this was not
magic for me at all, but reality. I could no more have denied it
than people with eyes can deny that they see. I saw the
whole world in light, existing through it and because of it.”
Jacque’s dramatic perception of light was at the core of his daily
experience of the world. This is what faith is like. For
most of us it is more intellectual than sensual, but faith comes from
within us and once understood can’t be denied. We put our faith
in things that are true for us for only such a faith can give us a
personal sense of well-being and security.
:::
How people shape meaning is a central feature of the experience of
faith. Unitarian Universalism encourages people to create their
own values through a process of free inquiry. Beliefs result when
something rings true for us. We don’t limit the sources of
information a person can explore, and we ask people to interpret
information for themselves – to make meaning for themselves from their
life experiences. When you determine for yourself what meaning to
take from the birth of a child in the family or from the death of a
loved one, those messages will ingrain themselves into the fabric of
your life. They become part of your faith, the values that you
truly live by.
It is a basic UU tenet that faith is not belief in something that
doesn't work for us. You do not have to hold on to the beliefs
you learned in a former stage of your life. Our faith is not
static - one limited to a set of narrowly defined beliefs; our search
for truth and meaning is a dynamic process. A rigid faith can
become superficial or irrelevant. As we grow spiritually and as
our environment changes, we repeatedly experience the insufficiency of
our cherished patterns of meaning. For example, it made sense for
the church to encourage people to have large families when the
population was low and the childhood death rate was high, but with the
population of the world outpacing our ability to sustain it, the
mandate to ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ is less necessary today. It
is time to re-interpret the moral from the Noah’s Ark story and tell
people to slow down having babies. We need to change our
worldview as the world changes.
UUs think an important part of the meaning making process is a
commitment to heed reason as we seek truth – that is, not to simply
accept things that don’t make sense to us. “Commitment to truth
requires a questioning curiosity and ongoing examination of our
assumptions.” Indeed devotion to truth may require us to change
some of our beliefs. For faith to become mature, it must be open
to skepticism. Spiritual development can be a highly
individualized process, but it can’t really be done all alone. We
need to bounce our ideas off other people. The process of seeking
our own truths must combine the power to question with openness to
being convinced by other’s ideas. We need to be able to talk to
each other about our personal philosophies of life. We need
chances to share our closely held beliefs. We need coffee
hour. We need Covenant Groups.
:::
We need other people who are safe to talk to about our ideas, but
hanging out with only people who think like we do isn’t all we need to
be able to survive in the real world. Out there, we encounter
folks who think quite differently from us. We must be able to
deal with ideas and events outside of our harmonious little
group. We need to feel some level of security when our political
party is out of power, or when people from another part of the world
say they hate Americans. A comprehensive faith must include a
sense of relatedness to a larger whole. We can’t just hide behind
our ideologies all of the time. At some point, we must attempt to
make sense of it all. We need to know, where do I fit into the
interdependent web of all existence, and am I welcome there?
We all compose a world view and dwell in some conviction of what is
ultimately true, real, and dependable in the largest frame
available. When that larger world is not so safe or dependable
for us, we must ask where will I find support? We need to know
that our communities, our environment, indeed creation itself will be
there for us when we need it. When we construct a belief system,
we need to include ideas which help us understand the wider world we
live in. One of life’s primal tasks is to continually
re-establish a basic sense of trust in our relationships to our
world. This sense of the word faith is meaning-making in its most
comprehensive dimension. Whatever we understand about the miracle
of creation, we need a faith that allows us stand in awe that it
somehow conspired to bring us into existence and that it sustains
us.
It is at this comprehensive level of faith where we connect with the
various world religions and spiritual systems. Whether we accept
any of them in total or not, we are often called upon to relate our
beliefs to those held by others who do. Today’s sermon is really
the first in a series I will give this year regarding different
approaches to faith. We all have faiths, but we construct them
using different frameworks. I will talk to you about three of the
ways of knowing many UUs practice: The first will be religious
naturalism, as we explore the spiritual power in the scientific story
of creation. In the second we’ll look at what it means to be
“spiritual but not religious” or "unchurched" spirituality of which
Transcendentalism was a major contributor. Third will be a view
of the divine Feminine or Knowledge of the Heart - the legacy of Mary
Magdalene that the DaVinci code should have been focusing on.
When you came to UUism, you may have left some of your old religious
support system behind, or you may never have had one. UUism
encourages you to go, explore, and come up with your own belief system,
but it does not leave you all alone, unsupported as you learn to build
and articulate your faith. We go together on the journey.
It really is the best way to travel.
Amen
©
Copyright UUCO, 2003-2007
©
Copyright Bruce Russell-Jayne, 2007
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