Belief

I’ve been reading another smart and literate atheist arguing the absurdity of belief in God.  Someone asked me once if I was threatened by the recent self-assertiveness of atheists and, surprisingly, I could offer a confident “no.”  The fact is that I am heartened by the resurgence of atheism because I agree with almost all of it.  The kind of shallow, or at least, immature systems of belief that atheism attacks, should be debunked and I feel like I play my own part in debunking them from the pulpit most Sunday mornings.  But the arguments of the atheists never get to the real point or even address the heart of real faith.

Atheists generally make the mistake of assuming that belief in God is an assertion of fact or truth about the world.  They think of it as a claim of truth that can be examined, debated, argued and then affirmed or found wanting.  And of course it is always found wanting.  But of course, real faith is not some intellectual assertion about the world at all.  What one believes (in the modern sense of the word) has got very little to do with the heart of religion.  As a person of faith, I certainly don’t believe in some kind of a super “being” who lives beyond the stars and controls things here on earth.  I don’t believe in a vast white-bearded person with super-powers.  For that matter, I don’t believe in any virgin births, any water-top walking, any dead bodies escaping from graves or anybody or anything coming into the world riding on the clouds.  But I am still a person of faith nonetheless and even still a Christian.

The atheists make the same mistake of literalism that the fundamentalists make.  They seem unable to understand the metaphoric nature of myth or the role of scripture as a narrative that conveys meaning rather than a factual literalism.  It’s as if they are criticizing poetry for being bad science or condemning Shakespeare’s tragedies for being faulty history.  They regularly lampoon the ideas of God popular in third grade Sunday schools but never seem to wrestle with more abstract conceptions of God or more profound levels of religious understanding.   

But most importantly atheism doesn’t seem to understand that what you believe in your head is beside the point and not really the religious issue at all.  Once, when the English language was younger, the word belief was a pretty good synonym for faith.  It comes from the German word “belieben” which originally meant, “to give one’s heart to.”  Our way of using belief today is very different and this gets to the real distinction.   Faith is about what we choose to live for and live with.  It is about commitment. It is about what it is that we value in an ultimate way—what we give our heart to.  In that sense, of course, there is no such thing as atheism.  Everyone gives their life to something.  Everyone holds something to be of more value to them than anything else.  We all get up in the morning and choose to live one way rather than another because of what we feel is important and what we see as the purpose of our living.  In that sense, everyone has a god even if they would never choose to call it by that name.  We now use the word belief about what intellectual propositions we think to be true.  That sense of the word is not the heart of the issue of faith at all.  Tillich called faith one’s “ultimate concern.”  We all have something that concerns us in an ultimate way.  That is our faith, whether that ultimate thing to us is family, money, success, power, a flat-screen TV, or something that we call god.

Faith is more like falling in love than it is about some logical proposition.  When we truly fall in love, when we “give our heart” to someone, as we know, logic and good sense go out the window.  Some friend can tell us that the person we love is not right for us, or not good looking enough or too bossy, or doesn’t seem like a good match in any of a dozen ways, and it doesn’t matter.  It’s not really about the head—it’s about the heart. 

Being an atheist also has a component of heart.  There is something that feels almost heroic about it.  I know this because this “spirit” of atheism was handed down to me from my own father and I revere it.  It means having the strength to face the hard truth about the world, that we are on our own and death is total extinction.  Friedrich Niezsche once wrote to his sister, “If you want to have safety and security, then believe, but if you want to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.”  The heroic pursuit of truth no matter where it leads, no matter how cold and hard it makes the world seem is an end in itself.  It is noble.  But it is not without its component of faith.  Some abstract vision of truth is the ultimate value.  Some idea of the nobility of the human being standing alone and strong in the face of cold truth, and in the face of so much of humanity choosing to follow the easier, safer and wishful-thinking path of the general herd.  Nietzche sees himself as the beginning of the emergence of the “ubermensch,” reclaiming the power and nobility of human life that religion has childishly projected into the heavens.  To be a real atheist is to give ones self to this noble calling as a seeker of truth.  There is a genuine beauty in that.  It too represents the religious impulse.

At the center of the religious impulse is not a literal assertion of some kind of super-being.  It is, instead, the longing to give ones life to some larger vision, some quest, some purpose beyond just the littleness of our everyday routines.  For people of faith, it is the discovery, at the heart of human life of some connection with a larger reality of which we are a part.  Rather than the nobility of standing strong and alone, faith finds that there is relationship at the heart of life.  The one assertion of the New Testament that, I think, we can take quite literally, is the claim that “God is love.”  God is not some being that we can debate the existence of.  God is instead, this connection between each of us that holds us together.  When Paul Tillich defined God as “the ground of being,” he was saying that rather than God being some separate entity, God is the totality of what is. 

But the key religious claim here is that there is a totality.  Human life is not just a bunch of separate beings; the whole cosmos is not just a bunch of separate worlds spinning in empty space.  There is a connection.  At heart we are all one.  At heart everything is connected and those connections are more important and more central to life than anything else.  God as love is metaphorically like the force of gravity in physics.  We are all these separate beings, so idiosyncratic, so different in background, influences, history, and psychology.  It is so easy for us to simply spin in our separate orbits, with so many centrifugal forces pushing us farther and farther away from one another.  But there is this other force.  Physics calls gravity the “weak force” because compared to all of the others, it hardly seems important, but it is constant, omnipresent, relentless, and unyielding, pulling all of those separate things inexorably together. 

This is how God as love works among us, mysteriously but inexorably drawing us toward one another.  So many things come between us and divide us, but at the heart of each one of us there is this other force pulling us into oneness.  It is expressed in us in sympathy, compassion, empathy, and the need to love and care.  People of faith call that connection God.  We are those who have fallen in love with all of what we call creation and are convinced that our oneness with one another and even with all that is, is what we need to give our lives to.  How we make sense of this love affair in intellectual terms is just not the point.  Whether to call that connection God or something else is just not the point.  We are in love and no one can talk us out of it.  We have given our heart to a vision of reality that sees all of life as this web of connectedness.  No, we are not nobly and strongly standing alone for truth; we are hanging on to each other for dear life and believing that this love between us has something to do with the nature of being itself.  We are part of this grander, unfolding, reality that is in fact eternal and so we are eternal with it.

ENDURANCE

I hate to complain about things that we cannot change.  And I try, after all these years in Maine, not to be one of the weather whiners.  But seriously, it’s hard not to whine.  After the hardest winter in recent memory, when many of us are beyond fatigue with snow removal and temperatures that try the soul, there’s only one word for what this winter’s end requires of us—endurance.  We cannot know what the next few weeks may have in store for us, but if the experience of this season is any indication, it will be worse than we expect and I, at least, will ever so slightly resent it.  I might even whine.  That said, there is still nothing to be done but to endure it.

I’ve had a recent reacquaintance with Anton Chekov’s great play, “Uncle Vanya.”  The play ends with a long monologue by Sonya, a young woman short on prospects or hopes for any life better than the grim one that she is living.  She expresses beautifully a philosophy that seems to grow naturally out of the Russian way of life (a place with even longer, harder winters than ours).   She says this: “What can we do? We shall live through the long procession of days before us, and through the long evenings; we shall patiently bear the trials that fate imposes on us; we shall work for others without rest, both now and when we are old; and then we shall die, and we shall meet it humbly, and there, beyond the grave, we shall say that we have suffered and wept, that our life was bitter, and God will have pity on us.”

In other words what Sonya says in the parlance of a modern and rather vulgar bumper sticker is, “Life sucks and then we die.”  The Buddha said something very much like this 2600 years ago (and he didn’t even have much in the way of winter weather). 

Most of us don’t feel quite this pessimistic about the future even when it snows.  But the reality is that life presents us with both joys and trials.  There are moments of great pleasure and satisfaction, but there are also times of great pain, disappointment, and most of all, long, difficult struggles.  An important part of our spiritual lives is how we deal with those difficult times and challenges.  Many of us want our faith to make things better.  We want to know that God is on our side and helping us to overcome problems.  We want to feel that faith is a comfort that eases the pains by giving us meaning or reassurance or an answer to our prayers for relief.  We want to know that our God is going to do something to make things better.

But the fact is, God doesn’t seem to remove our griefs or mitigate our trials or take away the difficult stuff.  Sometimes our lives, like our winters, just become grim and cold.  There are bad things that we cannot change and that faith cannot clear out of our path.  In those times, the real gift of faith is simple, the strength to endure.  Sometimes, the only answer is to grit your teeth and tough it out.

A few years ago, when our dear friend, Deb Mathews was first undergoing treatment for cancer, she confessed to me that she just didn’t think she had the strength to go through what they were telling her that she had to go through.  I tried to tell her that she had much, much more strength available to her than she could even yet imagine.  I was sure that she possessed untapped wells of strength and endurance that she didn’t even know about yet.  I believed this because I believe that inner strength; a rock-hard steely core of strength, is available to all of us if we ask for it.  As many of you know, Deb eventually went through years of unbelievably difficult treatments before losing her battle with cancer.  While her body eventually gave out, her spirit never did.  She never reached any limit on her resolve to fight.  She never gave up or used up the strength that was given to her.  She endured.

Lent begins this week.  It symbolically represents the 40 longs years that the Israelites spent in the wilderness and the forty long days and nights of Jesus’ fast in a different wilderness.  It also represents to us the long days and nights that all of us are sometimes called to spend in our own inner wildernesses.  It represents all the long periods of pain or grief or worry or fear that beset every one of us from time to time.  Those are times when we just have to endure; when we have to trust that God’s spirit in us is a source of strength beyond anything that we can imagine.  Whatever life throws at us, we can endure.  Whatever challenge comes our way and threatens to undo us, we can endure.  However much life sometimes hurts, we can endure.

And now, if the weather forecast calls for more snow—let it come.  If this winter plunges us into minus 20 degree nights even unto May—let it come.  I can take it.

THE COLOR OF THE LIGHT

Sometimes I like to sit and meditate in our empty sanctuary during the week.  Other times I just sit there and breathe in the space and look around.  We are blessed, of course, with one of the most lovely and spiritual places imaginable to worship in.  It is not the grandest of churches or even the most beautiful, but it just enfolds me in the sense of the presence of holiness.  Its beauty is not formal or awe inspiring or grand.  It is more comfortable, warm and lived in.  It’s hard to figure out exactly what makes a space or a room seem sacred.  There are many beautiful churches that are well designed and functional that never quite convey that feeling of holiness.  It may have something to do with history, with the spirit with which it was built or ornamented, or with the emotional connotations that its appearance has for each one of us. 

One of the factors involved in our church has to do with the color of the light.  The amber tones of the stained glass windows along the outer walls color the light a warm golden tone that is enriched by the cherry wood that dominates the room.  It seems like you can actually see the air.  The color makes the air around you feel like an actual presence, whereas pure white light simply seems like an absence.  One of the things that every visitor to the old city of Jerusalem discovers is the amazing color of the light there as the desert sun refracts off the golden stones with which it is built.  Our sanctuary has some of that same quality and I have no doubt that it was intentional.

While our building dates from the eighteenth century, nearly everything that we see as we sit there dates from a renovation in 1885.  That is when those windows were done and the cherry pews and furniture were added, all at great expense.  And that is the thing that most strikes and impresses me.  Down through the years, generation after generation has added their own efforts to enhance the beauty and the special quality of the space, and they have spared no expense (our own generation made its contribution with the renovation that was done twelve years ago).  No one seems to have wanted just a functional building to meet in.  No one settled for changes that would just “get by.”  They aimed for beauty.  They paid in money and effort for a little grandeur.  They wanted a place that would inspire.  They worked to make it holy. 

Our quest for some spiritual dimension to our lives is so important that generation after generation has been ready to sacrifice, to give, to work, to aspire, to create a place that would make the presence of God more real in people’s experience.  And so our very building testifies to that deep need in us.  We all need a sacred place.  We need inspiration.  We need moments where some magical combination of beauty and light and atmosphere can lift us out of our everyday concerns and routines and touch us with the poetry of grace.  We need to be reminded that life is deeper, richer, more profound, more connected to all that is, than we usually ever notice.  We need the touch of God in our lives.  Yes, we believe that it is always there, but sometimes it takes the golden glow of the morning light streaming through that stained glass window to open our eyes afresh to what is real.

Try to drop by the church sometime during the week when the sanctuary is empty and just sit and contemplate these things and discover some of the subtle work of God that has come down to us through our forbearers who built it into the very fabric of that place.  We all need the reminder.

YEAR'S END

Someone asked me the other day, what was the best thing that happened to me during 2013.  It was my first year-end question of the season.  It won’t be the last.  Everybody does it.  The New York Times posted their list of the ten best books of 2013 today.  Various media outlets will follow this week with the ten best movies, the ten biggest news stories, the one hundred best photographs, and on and on.  Time magazine already made public their “person of the year” (regrettably, not me or you).

The year-end is a time for rating, summing-up and ranking so many things that happened in the past year.  We seem to have this natural impulse to use the turning of the calendar for making judgments about all kinds of things in our culture and in our lives.  Was the year a success?  Did we accomplish anything?  Did we follow through on any of the resolutions that we made last year at this time (in my case the answer is “no”)?  What were the high points and the low points?  Even though the assigning of the new year to January 1 is completely arbitrary, it still provokes this assessment time.

The assessment process, or course, is not just fun, but an important thing.  It is one of the ways in which we sort through the million events and experiences of the year and figure out which ones were important and memorable and which ones were not.  We literally decide what we will remember.  The vast majority of things that happened during the year will be soon forgotten, in our culture’s life and our personal lives.  We need to sort through all of it to find the gems, the high points, the meaningful things that didn’t just happen, but have helped to shape our lives, because it is those things that we need to hang on to and remember.  This is part of how we make sense of our lives and of who we are.  It is how we turn the chaos of a million, often random, experiences into a narrative that has some meaningful progression.  We take an unshaped list of happenings and find the connections, the contours, the high points, the things that have affected us enough to make us different. 

This doesn’t just happen at the New Year, of course.  It is an ongoing process.  Sometimes we know immediately when something happens to us that it is a big deal and that we will never be quite the same again.  But often times, things sneak up on us.  Something happens or we meet someone or we read some book and it doesn’t stand out from the rest of what’s going on, but in retrospect we begin to realize that it has worked on us and become a part of some sort of transformation.  And sometimes, we have to stop for a moment and reflect back and figure out what those things were that have given new shape to our lives.

This process is not just true of the outer realities and experiences of our lives, but the inner ones as well.  Our spiritual life has contours too.  Our relationship to our inner selves, our relationship to the universe as a whole, our relationship to that reality within and without us that we call God, is moved and shaped and transformed by a million influences, thoughts, insights and revelations during the course of each year.  But because our spiritual lives are so often vague and difficult to articulate or conceive, those spiritual lives can sometimes remain unreflective and unshaped.  Here too, however, the process of finding and contours of the narrative is crucial.  It is important to take stock; to sort out what this year has meant, how is has changed your spiritual life and why.

So along with your personal list of best books or best movies, along with your list of high points and low ones, try to spend a few moments reflecting on how your spiritual lives have changed this year.  What were the insights you stumbled on this year and where did they come from?  What do you believe today that is different from last year or the year before and why?  Are you closer to being the kind of person you feel called to be and what has held you back?  Are you feeling more connected to the things and people that matter?  Are your prayers deeper or richer than before?  Think through your spiritual development like a story and recognize the way in which it has unfolded to bring you to where you are today.

There is one other year–end ritual that our culture goes through.  I watched it this morning on the Today Show as they flashed through a couple of dozen photographs of famous people who have passed away in 2013.  Sometimes we need to reflect on our losses as well.  At First Parish we’ve had a lot this year.  But in each of our personal lives, we’ve had a few.  Take a moment to remember those you’ve lost this year and reflect on what gifts they gave you and left behind them when they died.  This can leave you in awe of how rich your life has been made by the amazing gifts of other lives that touch us and move us every day.

Have a happy and blessed New Year.