November 5, 2017
Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
Audio:
Opening Words
I want to write about faith,
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow, night after night,
faithful even as it fades from fullness,
slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
sliver of light before the final darkness.
But I have no faith myself.
I refuse it even 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.
– David Whyte
Faith is what brought us all here today, atheists and theists alike. Faith is the only thing that got us out of bed this morning. Now, here, together, in the gift of community, faith can be nurtured, faith can be searched, faith can be sustained.
So, come into this place & time where doubt and faith walk hand-in-hand,
leading us deeper into the heart of life.
SERMON
The Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg tells this story:
One day a friend called to ask if we could meet… 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 [belief]. 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. I want to invite a new use of the word faith, one that is not associated with a dogmatic religious interpretation or divisiveness. I want to encourage delight in the word, to help reclaim faith as fresh, vibrant, intelligent, and liberating.
What about for you…? Is faith a word you embrace? Denounce? What does it mean to you?
Sometimes, Unitarian Universalists, especially those who have left the religion of their upbringing, see faith as superstition, as the silly & naïve enemy of reason. This is likely because in most circles we have equated faith with belief. As in: “I believe in such and such religious doctrine, and I have faith in it.”
But belief and faith are not the same, even though they sometimes overlap.
Belief is more of a mental stance. Faith comes from the Latin word fides which means “to trust.” So, to discover our faith, we can ask ourselves:
As we move through the world, in what do we place our trust? How do we orient ourselves to the world and our place in it? Belief is about what we think and can put into words. Faith goes much deeper, encompasses much more, and often cannot be put into words. Whether we know it or not, faith directs our thinking, our feeling, our acting, our very being.
So we all have faith, even if it is an unexamined, unconscious faith, even if it is a superficial faith, or a faith that ultimately does not serve us.
The Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson said:
A person will worship something–have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts–but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.
He says, “what we worship”…but he could also have said: what we trust…what we orient ourselves toward…what we have faith in…
Here are some further, deeper questions to discern our faith. These are by the theologian James Fowler:
I’ll read them slowly…
What are you spending and being spent for?
What commands and receives your best time, your best energy?
What power or powers do you rely on and trust?
To what or whom are you committed in life?
What are your most sacred hopes and purposes?
James Fowler is known for his work on the Stages of Faith:
The stages are developmental.
One must follow the other, but the progress is more of a spiral, not a ladder…which means wherever we are on the spiral, we always contain the earlier stages as well, and we can bring parts of those with us, or shift outward again, before we continue again inward.
Each stage is important, and the questions we ask in each stage give us gifts that we then carry in our satchel for the journey, taking them out when the time is right. My colleague Susan Smith describes these stages using Santa Claus, and I am quite indebted to her for this analysis((The explanation of the Stages of Faith draws from James Fowler, Susan Smith, and a sermon by Rev. Joanne Giannino: “Question Box Sunday: Faith, Maturity, Wow”
given at Beacon Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 2015 August 23))…So here we go:
Stage 1: Intuitive-Projective faith is typically ages 3 to 7. It’s faith that is CAUGHT. A child absorbs the attitudes, ideas, and beliefs of their caregivers. Reality and fantasy intermix. This is the time when Santa is very real, no question about it. And Santa makes good things happen (like giving us just what we asked for), or bad things happen (like coal in our stocking).
Stage 2: Mythic-Literal Faith is typically early elementary to the onset of puberty. It is faith that’s TAUGHT and taken quite literally: the stories, beliefs, rules and attitudes. Deities are anthropomorphized, and many, many questions are asked: like “how many elves does Santa have? And how does he get down the chimney, exactly?” There is also an emphasis on fairness and justice with accompanying retribution. I remember counting how many presents I had received and comparing that with what my siblings and step-siblings had received.
Stage 3: Synthetic-Conventional Faith is typically puberty to late teens/early 20s. It is faith that’s BOUGHT, as in: we “buy-in” to the group or system. People are interested in what others think, and the feeling of belonging to a particular group is very important. Fowler calls this stage “conformist” with great attunement to the thoughts of others but not much self-reflection. A person usually adopts some sort of all-encompassing belief system, and has a hard time seeing outside their box, can’t recognize they are inside a belief system. Doubt is seen as threatening, and inconsistencies are ignored.
Stage 4: Individuate-Reflective Faith is faith that’s SOUGHT. This is a radical shift from dependence on others to independence, but it can be difficult. This is Santa Unmasked. This is differentiating from your family and background to create your own personal beliefs. Complexity can be difficult, though – it’s often about leaving something behind… about: “I am NOT that.” May feel some betrayal. May be absolutist, critical of others who don’t get this new understanding – like the older sibling making fun of the younger one who believes in Santa. In this stage, we feel very individualistic; our faith is personal. This stage is where we often get stuck – I’ll come back to this.
Stage 5: Conjunctive Faith. We are exploring other stories and rituals parallel to the Santa story. In this stage, we see that logic has limits, and we value paradox and mystery. We may see many sides of an issue at the same time. We may reclaim traditions with new eyes, finding deeper truth in the symbols, stories, and rituals. There’s a sense of belonging to the whole, and that all paths are meaningful. There’s some humility – the sense that I could be wrong, and so faith is not seen as primarily personal and individual, but also relies on community and interdependence for its thriving.
Stage 6: Universalizing Faith. Fowler says this stage is very rare. These people, sages and wisdom teachers live a life of deep commitment & passion for all beings. Inspiring leaders & martyrs, they manifest their values and divinity to others; they express universal love and work for universal justice.
I said I’d come back to the place where we often get stuck…Stage 4: Demythologizing…Remember this is the stage where we have gotten out of the box and are asking lots of questions. We are usually on our own – very individualistic and personal. It’s also very much about control and about being mostly in our heads.
So, here is an image that UU Religious Educator Joy Berry created to explore how we move into that 5th stage.
We described each of the first four stages with the words Caught, Taught, Bought, Sought.
In the Fifth stage, Faith is Wrought. Wrought is an old word that means worked.
Wrought faith is active, and shaped in community.
A deep, mature, abiding faith comes as we work to give our faith shape in the world, with others. So you can see in the above image the tools of work and creation: the hammer and paintbrush, pencil and wrench. Here, faith is strong because it is resilient, malleable, shaped by human hands, tested and broken and repaired. Not on our own, but together.
Mohandas Gandhi said:
Faith is not something to grasp, it is a state to grow into.
That growth happens through living and working and creating our faith in the world with the world.
Faith can be a hard topic for us Unitarian Universalists because we sometimes rest on our laurels.
The gifts of our tradition have been about the reminder that doubt is healthy, that reason is valuable, that the individual conscience is essential.
Sometimes we can rest there, and fear that if we grow into a place of faith, of mystery, of community, we will regress into an earlier stage of naïve superstition, of flights of fancy.
But we do have faith statements in our tradition: The arc of the universe bends towards justice ((Unitarian preacher Rev. Theodore Parker – often quoted by Martin Luther King, Jr.)). The societal problems we face are not greater than our collective power to solve them. The personal burdens we carry are not greater than our resilience. We are loved. The world can be better.
These are all statements of faith that can’t always easily be backed up by objective proof, air-tight logic, or individual experience. And yet we lean into them anyway. We risk living as though they were true.
We need a faith that is wrought. So we take the leap into doing the work, into joining alongside one another despite our differences and our fears, into taking a risk, into trusting again.
I’ll close how I began, with words from Sharon Salzberg:
We all have [the] absolute right to reach out, without holding back, toward what we care about more than anything. Whether we describe the recipient as God, or a profound sense of indestructible love, or the dream of a kinder world, it is in the act of offering our hearts in faith that something in us transforms…. We [don’t]…stand on the sidelines but [leap] directly into the center of our lives, our truth, our full potential. No one can take that leap of faith for us; and no one has to. This is our journey of faith.
May it be so.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon