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The goal of these essays is to reach the following three audiences:
 regular folks who find that their faith and religion have been pushed to the side because spiritual things don't seem very relevant to their lives. therapists who've never had much formal training in how faith and religion can shape a person and how to respond to religious dilemmas.ministers who struggle to find fresh ways to communicate ancient and wise perspectives on how to live a life that matters. |
| Introduction A few years ago I landed in a ditch that was far deeper and darker than any ditch I had encountered before. It is true that I was forced off the road by circumstances over which I had little control. It is also true that I should have seen the traffic coming. I suppose I'm fortunate that I made it to mid-life before I ran into a situation I couldn't bend by sheer force of will, but, when the depression and anxiety hits like a truck, it is hard to be objective about such things. The result was that I was out of a job. I was angry, and ashamed, and scared. My family needed for me to be resilient, and determined, and brave. I wasn't.
Interestingly, at least to me, was the delayed onset of the worst of my crisis. For a few months I just hunkered down and took care of the business at hand. I thought I was doing fairly well. However, within twenty-four hours of accepting a new position, I began to slide deeper into that ditch. The depression took hold. The anxiety emerged. I could barely get on with my most basic responsibilities. I'd had many clients in a similar place. I'd read reams about such things, so I thought I understood what depression and anxiety were like. I didn't.
I still recall quite clearly one of the worst nights. I'd taken the sleeping meds - maximum dose allowed - but was still lying wide awake in the dark. As waves of anxiety swept over me I began to pray. I couldn't seem to form any sort of conversational prayer, so I began to recall the prayers I'd learned along the way. I prayed the simple prayers of the mystics. I prayed the Lord's Prayer. I began to offer snippets of childhood prayers recalled from Sunday School. By the time I got to “Now I lay me down to sleep...” I came to a rather startling conclusion: My faith doesn't work.
As I look back on that night, it seems as though everything I had been taught that faith was supposed to do had come to nothing. God was not there - at least not in the ways I thought God was supposed to be there.
As is often the case with such hard insights, the anxiety was actually the dark wrappings of a gift. As medication, therapy and spiritual direction began to help me regain traction, my curiosity about faith became more pressing. I knew that I didn't want to go through this sort of crisis again, and I figured that some kind of deeper or more mature understanding of faith might innoculate me against such a recurrence. (see note below) I'm sure I haven't found anything approaching a vaccine, but I have found it helpful to rummage around in the basement of my beliefs about religion, spirituality, and faith.
These essays are a part of that rummaging. It is my hope that these reflections will be of some interest and help as you go through the boxes in your basement.
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| What Faith is NOT: Part 1 The Misperception of Faith as Believing Information
Let's begin with a few questions:
 What were you taught about faith? How has faith been defined for you? What do people of faith do that sets them apart from people without faith?How have your ideas about faith changed over the years (or have they)? Having grown up in a very traditional Baptist church, I was taught a slew of information that I was expected to believe was "true" in much the same way that my school teacher expected me to believe that 2 + 2 = 4 is true. In other words, I was taught that belief where faith is concerned is the same thing as belief where verifiable facts are concerned.
Although an occasional preacher or teacher would say that having all these "facts" straight was not necessary to be "saved," the implication was that anyone who was serious about being a Christian would certainly believe these things to be true. Furthermore, to question the truth of such statements was considered a bad thing. Of course, I heard numerous sermons along the way about "Doubting Thomas," the disciple who doubted the resurrection of Jesus. The sermons invariably tried to express that doubt is not a bad thing in itself, but said sermons also always came around to saying that good doubt will almost certainly lead back to certainty.
The trouble is, when faith is tied to insisting that particular religious information is "true," then faith cracks when that information is discovered to be less that reliable.
Consider the following lessons from our faith history. The earth revolves around the sun, and not vice versa! Is anyone reading this troubled by this declaration? After all, the Bible clearly states it is the sun that is moving (Ecclesiastes 1:5, Joshua 10:13), and if the Bible says it, we're supposed to believe it, and that's supposed to settle it. Right? Copernicus was deeply troubled when, in the early 1500s, his own observations of the universe led him to question his religious training.
Like any good Christian of that day, Copernicus assumed the heavens rotated around the earth because the Bible said so. When he realized that the observed movements of heavenly bodies could much more easily be explained if one allowed for the movement of the earth as well, then poor Copernicus knew he had a problem! Not only did this information upset his personal religious apple cart, Copernicus had to contend with the religious powers who, like many sorts of powers, prefer stability over truth. When Galileo later tried to run with these ideas, he backed down quickly when the religious establishment turned its wrath in his direction. And yet, today, very few Christians have a problem with believing that the earth rotates around the sun. Why the change? Although scientific discoveries create much religious upheaval in the generations upon whom they are sprung, we seem to ultimately embrace the change, and finally even raise our eyebrows at those we look back on as being rather simple-minded. Its hard to believe that it was only a couple of generations back that many Christians were insisting that persons of color were not as human as "whites," and were using the Bible to "prove" it.
Like many of you who are reading this essay, my education led me to the conclusion that many of the so called religious facts I was taught were questionable, if not out and out insupportable. Also like many of you, this led to a significant upheaval in my conceptions of faith. Ultimately I decided to affirm that information does not have to be physically or literally true in order to be spiritually true, but this was not an easy conclusion to affirm. Somewhere along the way I decided that I would never tie my faith to any information that science could potentially disprove.
If it seems to you that your faith is not working, perhaps the following questions will help you sort things out:
Was I taught that I must believe in certain religious facts in order to be spiritually healthy?Have things happened to me that have raised questions about the truth of these religious facts?At this particular moment, what information do I believe is absolutely necessary to get right in order to be on a healthy spiritual journey? Where did I get the idea this information was important?Can I trust that God is more interested in how my faith leads me to love than in how much information I'm willing to "believe?"
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| What Faith is NOT: Part 2 The Misperception of Faith as Leading to Less Pain
I recall thinking as a fairly young person something like, "If God really wanted to sell this whole Christianity thing, you'd think he'd work it so that Christians are happier and healthier than everyone else." This way of thinking has roots in both the Old Testament and in the protestant work ethic (that some argue provided the religious fuel for placecountry-regionAmerica's frantic drive towards materialism).
Since most of us would like to be protected from the dangers of life, it is not unusual for us to want our religion to provide some of that protection. In fact, there are those in virtually every religion who insist that believers in their set of facts have better lives than everyone else (though these are never, I would argue, the most mature expressions of the religion in question).
It doesn't take long for the observant person to see that God doesn't do a very good job of simply blessing the good guys and whacking the bad guys. And yet, it is amazing to me how tolerant I can be of this obvious injustice, until it hits me close to home. I seem to be able to rock along quite nicely, fully aware that hundreds of innocent children die of starvation every day. Yet if something painful happens to ME, or to someone I love, the injustice leaps into bold relief. Furthermore, miraculous healings and personal transformations, I've discovered, seem to occur with as much regularity outside the fences of my religion as they do within. Again, this seems like an embarrassing oversight on the part of a God who surely is trying to convince the world that my religion is the best religion.
All folks who stay on a spiritual journey eventually have to come to grips with the fact that faith doesn't grant any special privileges. In fact, mature religious faith will generally be a source of discomfort, if not outright pain. Those who aren't willing to swallow this rather annoying concept usually either reject religious faith altogether or relegate it to a set of comforting religious practices that bring order to life.
Questions to consider:
What DO I think about the place of pain in the life of faith?Was I taught, directly or indirectly, that I could expect a less difficult life if my faith was "right?"How do the current painful circumstances of my life effect my faith? If, as I'm insisting, faith has nothing to do with believing information or avoiding pain, then what does it mean to have faith? There are many, many thoughtful reflections on this question. I'd like to focus on two:
Faith is living "as if ."Faith is what gets you up in the morning.______________________________________
Note: Hauerwas, Stanley. "Abortion, Theologically Understood," in The Hauerwas Reader, John Berkman and Michael Cartwright, eds. CityDurham and placeCityLondon: Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 603-622, p. 614
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| Faith: Living "As If" I assume that most of you reading these words have a calendar. Whether it's a fancy electronic gadget or the old fashioned paper and pencil style, you enter appointments and plans somewhere. Here's the question: What if you could only schedule appointments on days when you literally could guarantee, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that your car would start? It's a rather ridiculous question, isn't it? Since you never can guarantee that your car is going to start, you have to make these appointments in faith. You will schedule as if you know your car will start, even though you can't possibly guarantee that it will. Or, in other words, you will choose to live in transportational faith.
Faith is not, in and of itself, a religious or spiritual concept. Faith is simply choosing to live as if something is true even though you cannot prove it to be true. You plan a ski trip in faith that there will be snow on the mountain when you arrive. You walk down the aisle and link your life with another person in faith that both of you will keep all those idealistic promises made in front of God and everybody else. You invite someone over for dinner on Friday night and promise them a big bowl of your special chicken enchilada soup in faith that the grocery store will have the ingredients for you to buy and that the stove will work come Friday afternoon.
In this culture, if you don't have faith, you're sunk.
Religious or spiritual faith is a particular kind of living as if. This kind of faith involves committing to a path which promises to lead to a life of deep meaning and peace. This is an especially dicey proposition. You get to find out if your faith in snow on the mountain was a good choice as soon as you show up at the lodge. You can only find out if your spiritual faith has any merit at the end of your life, when the cards have all been played.
I have come to see the fundamental faith commitment of Christianity as something like: The most meaningful life is the life lived in sacrificial love. I'll unpack this more in another essay, but for now let it suffice to say that Jesus' life and Jesus' teaching can be summed up in that simple statement. We Christians, then, commit to a life of sacrificial love because we have faith that this truly is the best way to live. Sacrificial love is God's way of relating to creation, and so we trust that it should be our way of relating to it as well. When I claim to be a Christian, I'm claiming that sacrificial love will be the measure of my life.
Without question, the single greatest gift of my trip through the dark night of depression and anxiety was coming face to face with the nature of my faith. I had to admit that my life was not centered around a commitment to sacrificial love. My life, rather, was centered around a mish-mash of conflicting faith convictions like:
 The most meaningful life is a life where I am admired as extraordinarily clever and successful.The most meaningful life is a life where I get my way.The most meaningful life is a life where I get to buy the stuff I want (without appearing to others that I'm materialistic) and still save enough money to feel secure. And these are just three of the faith convictions that I've been able to identify (and that I'm willing to tell you about...)! No telling how many other anxiety-ridden declarations are marching around in my soul.
All of this is to say that I am constantly embroiled in a Texas death match between the Christian faith I claim to follow, and all the anxious faith commitments that I actually live out. Is it any wonder that my faith seems so impotent at times?
And it doesn't help that religion and faith have such an ambivalent connection to one another. The most important task of religion is to help people unpack the life of spiritual faith. For Christians, this means that true religion encourages us and supports us in our determination to live lives of sacrificial love. Unfortunately some religious congregations get sidetracked and end up catering to our comforts and anxieties. (see Note)
Christian faith is not about getting the religious rules right so that you can have a life of joy. Christian faith is about living as if the life of sacrificial love is the meaningful way to live, no matter what life throws in your way.
Questions for reflection:
I have said that Christianity's core declaration is: "The most meaningful life is the life lived in sacrificial love." How does this sit with you?If someone were to follow you around for a week, what would they conclude you believe about how to have a meaningful life.How do your religious practices encourage you as you journey down the road of faith? How do your religious practices distract you in this journey?_____________________________
Note: Please be patient with me regarding my current struggles with "organized religion." I'm told that Carlyle Marney once said something like, "Whatever God intended, surely it wasn't this." I don't believe he was referring to the way we humans organize our religious lives, but I wonder if he wouldn't agree. For instance, anyone who digs through the budgets of a dozen or so typical Christian congregations will make some interesting observations. About 90% of the funds that many churches bring in are spent on the church members themselves. The money goes to hire professional staff to serve the members, to pay for heating and cooling to keep the members comfortable, to build beautiful rooms so the members can create a sense of awe for worship, to buy literature so the members can study. Certainly most church members are willing to welcome anyone to partake of these good things, but little attention is given to the reality that those who most desperately need our attention are not likely to show up. If we're not careful, our religion can become another way to avoid faith. Although I don't have any detailed experience with other religions, I'd be willing to bet my Sunday afternoon nap that this dilemma is shared across the religious board. ( If anyone of a different religious faith is reading this, and can tell me about how budgets work in your congregations, I'd love to hear from you.)
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| Faith: What Gets You Up in the Morning? (or keeps you awake at night?)
When you are six weeks old, you live to eat, poop and sleep. Some would say that many of us men never move beyond this, but if your surroundings have been trustworthy (see Note 1), then by the time you are three, you awaken with the need to explore. As you grow physically and intellectually stronger in early childhood, you are driven to experiment with more complex forms of play and learning. Whatever interests you have in things religious or spiritual are tied very closely to the quality of the snacks in Sunday School.
By late childhood you have added "best friends" to the mix. You hop out of bed with a desire to run next door to see your buddy. Games involve both cooperation and challenge. Anxieties about fitting in and competing take shape. Religious life is more about being with friends than being with God (though we become quite proficient at answering the God questions correctly).
As romance is aroused in adolescence you awaken each day thinking about that special someone that is either in your life, or that you are trying to figure out how to make a part of your life. But adolescence also brings a full flowering of your brain power. You may develop an intense interest in performing music, or solving math problems, or reading books. You begin to get ideas about what you really want to do when you grow up. The same hormones that unleash romantic passion may also energize your spiritual life. Many of us report that our first experiences of being deeply touched by God occurred in our teen years, often at church camp.
Assuming that one navigates the anxieties of adolescence in a good-enough fashion, young adulthood brings a new spin on motivation. You are pushed along by the call of a career and by the desire to find someone you can spend the rest of this great adventure with. You face a variety of challenges. You need to write papers for class or solve problems at work. You want to figure out how to afford some of the good things in life. You are pushed to make difficult moral and ethical choices, without having a parent standing over your shoulder. All of thi
 s is leading towards a goal of standing on your own two feet. And it is all complicated by the deeply biological and deeply cultural pushes to find a mate. Up to this point, what gets a person up in the morning is shaped by a growing body and developing brain. The rules of your family and broader culture also pressure you to focus attention in particular directions. Here's an example of some rules:
The most important thing in life should be finding a mate who will take care of you.The most important thing in life should be making as much money as you can.The most important thing in life should be doing whatever your parents tell you to do.The most important thing in life should be to take as much as you can from anyone who has more than you.The most important thing in life should be.... Each of these is a kind of faith proclamation. That is to say, whatever you feel most pressed to pursue when you get up in the morning is what you believe will bring the most meaning to your life.
Operating behind the scenes in this drama is the fundamental biological directive: You must survive. Failure to recognize the power of this directive is, in my opinion, the single biggest stumbling block to spiritual maturity. Edward O. Wilson puts it like this: "[The] brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive." (Note 2)
And this is where the dilemma for those interested in pursuing a spiritual life gets interesting.
If you've been keeping up with these essays, then you already know I believe that, if you claim to be a Christian, then you are declaring that what "should" get you up in the morning is the full-bore all-out pursuit of sacrificial love. Trouble is the biological push for personal survival, plus the cultural rules to pursue success can really gum this up. Pursuit of authentic spiritual maturity is, therefore, no simple task. This is affirmed by the Apostle Paul, whom most of us consider no spiritual slouch:
Sometimes I just don't understand myself. The things I know I should do, I DON'T do. The things I know I shouldn't do, well, those are the very things I DO! (My paraphrase of Romans 7:15)
How does one overcome this dilemma? In a word: Discipline.
There's much more to be said on this subject, but for now I want you to ask yourself these questions:
If it seems like my faith is not working, could it be that I've underestimated the role that biology and culture are playing in my soul?What does get me up in the morning? How does this square with my faith commitments?What does keep me awake at night? What do these anxieties tell me about my faith commitments?In what ways have my survival and success directives shaped my religion?-------------------------------------
Note 1: This description assumes "good-enough" parents, that is, parents who are not perfect, but who are mature and loving enough to be able to focus on the needs of their children. Many of you reading of this may well have not been born into such a family...
Note 2: Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, (New York: Knoph, 1998), p. 96.
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| Faith and Telling the Truth If you have a car, you have a change tray. If you smoke, you may still call it the ash tray, but for the rest of us, its just the change tray. Why is there a change tray? The change tray exists to insure that you will have money for emergencies. My wife disagrees, but my wife is wrong. My wife thinks the change tray exists to provide her with large cherry-limeaides from the drive-in. This woman, who has never balanced a checkbook in her life, can glance at the change tray and tell you exactly how many large cherry limeaides can be purchased with the contents.
I told you that so I could tell you about this.
A few years ago Holly and I are driving into Houston. Our three kids are in the back behaving like the siblings that they are. It’s a nerve-fraying experience on a good day. We see the exit for the toll road we need to take, so I slowly work my way over to the correct lane and we take the exit that will transfer us to that road. I see the signs, “Tollbooth ahead.” The traffic is backing up, but I can see that the far left lane is short. As I pull over to that lane I see the sign, “Correct change only. No pennies.” I’m thinking, “No problem, I’ve got the change tray.” (You see where this is going already, don’t you.) I lower the window, pull up to the machine that has a big basket-looking thing to catch the change, and I pull open the change tray – nothing but pennies. My wife has scavenged every piece of silver from the tray and purchased cherry limeaides.
I’m suddenly panicked. No one has any change. Cars are piling up behind us. I’m yelling, “Why isn’t there change in the change tray?” I don’t just yell it once. I preach a sermon on it.
“There’s supposed to be change in the change tray!”
“I always keep change in the change tray!”
“You always take all the change from the change tray!”
“Why can’t you just leave change in the change tray?”
(Unlike you, I occasionally get worked up over things others find insignificant.)
There’s a tap on the side of the car. I turn to see a young woman in a toll booth uniform. She asks, “May I help you?” I yell, “My wife bought cherry limeaides!” She rolls her eyes, takes a dollar bill from my trembling hand, and gives me four quarters. As she walks away I toss the coins into that basket thing. The gate goes up. I drive through. But my sermon was not finished.
“Haven’t I always told you to leave the change tray alone? Haven’t I made it clear that the change tray is sacred? I’m sick and tired of never having change from tray!”
I then offer the altar call: “So, will you promise to leave the change in the change tray!?”
And my wife says . . ., “No.”
Wrong answer. Well, actually it was the right answer. It was an answer that marked a shift in the way we did our relationship.
For twenty years Holly had been lying to me. For twenty years she had been saying what I wanted to hear in order to make the conflict go away. She would be the first to tell you that, on many of those occasions, she knew she wasn’t taking me seriously. But, I could be so boneheaded about the most ridiculous things, it wasn’t worth it.
I’m not exactly sure why Holly chose that particular moment to shoot straight, though I suspect it had something to do with the conversations she’d been having with a therapist. Whatever the motivation, the moment was a gift for me. For as angry as I was, Holly was helping reestablish our relationship on more honest ground. For too long I’d been using my anger to control the direction of our marriage, and for too long she’d been trying to dance her way around me. I realize now that I am lucky Holly stilled cared enough to work towards undoing this silly and destructive pattern.
Brad Blanton has written, “We all lie like hell. It wears us out. It is the major source of all human stress. Lying kills people,” [Brad Blanton, Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth (Dell, 1994), p. xxv.]
I agree with Blanton. Trouble is, as much as lying kills people, telling the truth terrifies people. People are rarely more wide-eyed in therapy than when I suggest they tell the truth to themselves or to someone else. Here’s an example of the sorts of questions that are an invitation to truth-telling:
 What if you really are just making excuses for yourself?Could it be that you really are as selfish as your spouse says you are?Do you suppose you’ve just decided to stay stuck instead of deal with your situation?What would happen if you told your friend how angry you are with him?How do you think your dad would react if you told him you weren’t coming to visit until he stopped drinking?What would happen if you didn’t pay any more of your daughter’s bills until she got a job?These sorts of questions almost always result in that "deer-in-the-headlights" look. And so I'll ask, “Why do you suppose it seems so scary to consider this approach?”
I’ve defined faith as living as if something is true even though you can’t prove its true. Telling the truth fits under this heading. Christian Scripture says, “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32) I take this to mean that the journey towards a meaningful and redeemed life involves telling the truth. This can be a difficult principal to follow since telling the truth can also stir up much pain and chaos.
What do you think? Can you believe that truth telling is necessary if you are going to grow up? Can you believe that truth telling is worth all the anger and fear and sadness it can stir up?
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