by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, October 12, 2003
Unitarian Universalists are sometimes unsure where we place ourselves in relation to the notion of faith. We're comfortable using it as another word for religion, as when we speak or sing about "our chosen faith" or affirm our tolerance for other faiths. But we're sometimes uncomfortable with it when the word is used to point to a quality within us.
Some of the language common in the traditional Christian fold is a little rusty among us from disuse. The word faith as it is sometimes used in those communities is part of that rusty language. We don't often talk about what it would mean to "deepen our faith", for instance, and if we were ever told that we had to simply accept something "on faith" it would make us uneasy, and doubtless bring out the rebellious streak that's never far below the surface for most of us.
One of the reasons we're wary of the word "faith" is because of our tendency to think of doubt as faith's opposite. We'd be more likely to call ourselves "people of doubt" than "people of faith", because when we think of faith at all we tend to think of it as blind faith. We consider ourselves to be people who have our religious eyes wide open, so why would we need faith to walk our particular spiritual path?
Our way is to test each step out for ourselves. And while we're doing that testing, we also "multitask" by maintaining a lively chatter with those who walk along with us and keeping a sharp eye out for alternative routes. That's not a bad way to think of our religious path, and it's actually pretty accurate. But it isn't a path we walk without faith. In fact, the religious path of Unitarian Universalism requires at least as much faith as what's needed to walk any other religious path with sober intent. It isn't faith-as-belief or faith-as-the-opposite-of-reason. It's faith as a stance toward our world.
We're familiar with this kind of faith in our lives, and we even know it by that word; but in a funny way we don't think of it as something that has to do with our religion. For instance, when we want to encourage someone or shore them up, especially someone toward whom we feel real love and connection, we say, "I have faith in you." When we're bracing ourselves for a big change that is risky and frightening and yet beckons us with some sort of power and promise, we speak about -- and sometimes take --a "leap of faith".
What do we mean by these phrases? When we tell people we have faith in them, we know we don't mean "blind faith". We mean we have confidence in them, we trust in their ability and their inherent goodness, we stand by them and wish them well in what they're trying to do. When we talk about a leap of faith, we mean that despite appearances and odds and whatever forces are arrayed against us, we are willing to fling ourselves forward toward our future, in trust that some new ground will be there on which we can land.
Both of these meanings are held within the sort of faith that we need in order to walk the religious path of Unitarian Universalism. It involves trust and confidence, both in the guiding truths we try to live by and in our own discernment. It includes risk-taking, the willingness to let go of familiar territory and open ourselves to change. This kind of faith has nothing to do with beliefs; it doesn't concern ideas or creeds, but is instead the orientation we bring to our world.
Sharon Salzberg brings a wonderful new light to bear on the notion. She writes, "In Pali, the language of the original Buddhist texts, the word usually translated as faith…is saddha. Saddha literally means "to place the heart upon". …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….Saddha is the willingness to take the next step, to see the unknown as an adventure, to launch a journey."
I particularly like this way of thinking about faith because it leaves so much room for doubt. 'To place our hearts upon' a teaching or a teacher, a spiritual practice or a set of beliefs, doesn't require us to do it without reason, any more than we'd be likely to place our bodies upon thin air when we go to sit down. We are right to be wary of truth claims, and right to reject beliefs that contradict our own perceptions or experience. We are right to listen to religious teachings with a careful ear, to take for ourselves what seems on the surface to hold merit, and then to walk with it a while and test it out in the ground of our own lives.
Along the way, it is likely that we will test and shed beliefs over time, and replace them with beliefs that seem to be more true. But through that process of testing, through the sometimes hard and painful change that comes when a cherished belief begins to fray until we have to leave it behind, it is possible to not only maintain but to deepen and strengthen our faith. Faith is what keeps us looking. It's what allows us to let a strong belief go in the trust that without it we can see more clearly.
Sharon Salzberg tells a story about a friend of hers who became uncomfortable maintaining the Santa Claus myth with her growing daughter and decided to tell her the truth. "She explained that the presents under the tree on Christmas morning were put there by her parents. The child listened to this information, then sadly left the room. A few minutes later she returned to ask, 'Are you the tooth fairy, too?' Her mother said yes, and again the child left, looking sad. Then she came back again and said, 'Are you also the Easter bunny?' When her mother said yes, the child looked at her fiercely and demanded, 'Is there a God?'"
Is there a Santa Claus, an Easter bunny, a tooth fairy? No. These are beliefs that we have to relinquish as we grow up. If we're lucky, the relinquishment is gradual and easy, and a little bit of the magic inherent in our real world slips in to replace the magic in which we no longer believe.
'Is there a God?' That question is a different one, because God stands for much more than a Santa Claus or an Easter bunny. But it's similar in the sense that if we lose a certain kind of belief in God, it matters what happens next. Do we substitute a stance of apathy or cynicism? Or do we find a richer and more complex understanding?
Is there a God like the one I believed in when I was ten years old? No. Is there mystery beyond our understanding, forces that move out past the edge of our view and knowledge, a universe so enormous and complex that it brings us to silence and awe? Yes.
Each of us has beliefs about this extraordinary universe of ours and its mysteries. Whether we are atheists or Buddhists, Christians or Jews, Muslims or Unitarian Universalists, we hold religious beliefs. I hold beliefs now, as a Unitarian Universalist and a practicing Buddhist, that are quite different from my beliefs as a child, but many of them are just as unprovable. The difference is not that my beliefs now are more mature, or more rational or sensible or scientific, although they may be all of those things. The difference is that my faith is stronger now than it once was: faith, both in the sense of trust and in the sense of risk-taking.
As I have gotten older, it seems to me less and less likely that my beliefs, however sensible they seem to me, can describe very much at all about the mysteries of our world. But I am more comfortable than I once was with the likelihood that I really don't know! I really don't know how it's all put together or what it means. The more deeply I sense that, the more willing I become to step out into the not-knowing, sure only that I will learn more through that willingness than I would by clinging to beliefs.
Buddhism teaches that when we cling rigidly to our beliefs about the world and about our lives, it's as though we're viewing reality through a straw. We can get very excited about the dimensions of our straw or its decorations or the person who gave it to us. We can start to feel very superior about the view through our straw as compared to the woefully inadequate sightline provided other people by their chosen straws.
It's an analogy that makes it easy to see and name the difference between beliefs and faith. Human nature being what it is, we will rarely find a way to live completely free of the straws of our beliefs and the ways they narrow down our views. But faith as a stance, faith as an orientation toward the world, lets us notice -- at least some of the time -- that we're seeing through a straw. Faith lets us hold it a little more loosely, acknowledging how much larger things are than our small vision.
In her book about faith, Sharon Salzberg mentioned a children's book that so intrigued me I went out to the library this week and brought it home. It's called Zoom, and is a completely wordless book by a Hungarian artist named Istvan Banyai. The first page shows a jagged, abstract red shape that looks a little like a close-up of a sharp-edged amoeba. But when you turn the page the view has pulled back, and you can plainly see that the abstract red shape is the comb on a rooster's head. Ahh, so it's an animal story.
The next page pulls the view back yet again, so you see the rooster distantly through a window, from behind two children in Scandinavian clothes who are also looking at the rooster. Hmmm, you think, so it's a story about these kids. The next view pulls back to show the window as part of a farm building, with lots of other animals in the foreground; ahh, so it's a story about a farm. But a few pages later a giant hand is in the frame, and the next page shows that the whole farm scene is a toy, a play-set that a Japanese girl is playing with. So maybe the story is about her? But by now we've caught on: the story will keep getting bigger.
Sure enough, in a few more pages it turns out that the girl playing with the farm set is in a photo on a catalogue held in the hand of a dozing boy. Then the boy turns out to be on a cruise ship; then the whole of the cruise ship, vast ocean and all, turns out to be an advertisement on the side of a bus in a busy downtown street.
A few pages later and the whole city scene is an image on a t.v. being watched by an Indian in Arizona. In a few more pages the Arizona picture has shrunk to a postage stamp on a letter being delivered halfway around the world, to Australia. The lens keeps pulling back and back until in a few more pages the earth is seen from space and then diminishes to a white dot, and then the final page is the empty blackness of space.
I don't know whether or not Istvan Banyai is a man of faith, but I suspect he is. It is this immensity of perspective that is the central gift and teaching of faith. We can't be certain of very much, but we can be certain that what we see is not all there is. Faith reminds us that whatever story we think is going on, it is not the whole story: there's a bigger picture. There is always a bigger picture. When we think of it in this way, it's very clear that what we call 'blind faith' isn't faith at all. Faith in the deeper sense not only tolerates doubt, it requires doubt.
Sharon Salzberg writes, "With their assumptions of correctness, beliefs try to make a known out of the unknown. They make presumptions about what is yet to come, how it will be, what it will mean, and how it will affect us. Faith, on the other hand, doesn't carve out reality according to our preconceptions and desires… [Faith] is the ability to move forward even without knowing. [It] is… not a received answer, but an active, open state that makes us willing to explore."
An 'active, open state that makes us willing to explore' is a pretty good summation of what we aspire to as Unitarian Universalists. Our tendency to reject the orthodoxies of our day is not supposed to lead us into cynicism, but toward an engaged and lively dance with our world.
In that dance of faith, doubt is a steady partner, but it's a curious, engaged doubt, and it moves in an easy rhythm with our reverence and awe. We're dancing in a universe with parameters immensely beyond our grasp, and it can't be contained or described in any of our belief systems. So we might as well relax, enjoy the dance -- and take it on faith. AMEN.