First Parish Unitarian UniversalistIs Faith What You Have?
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
September 17, 2006
Reading
From the Introduction to Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience by Sharon Salzberg.
One day a friend called to ask if we could meet for tea. Knowing that I as 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 religious adherence. 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.
For some this will be a very different approach to faith. Many link faith to narrow-minded belief systems, lack of intelligent examination, or pain at having one’s questions silenced. Faith might evoke images of submission to an external authority. Historically, the idea of faith has been used to slice cleanly between those who belong to a select group and those who do not. To fuel their own embittered agendas, fanatics harness what they call faith to hatred.
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. This is a faith that emphasizes a foundation of love and respect for ourselves. It is a faith that uncovers our connection to other, rather than designating anyone as separate and apart.
Faith does not require a belief system, and is not necessarily connected to a deity or God, though it doesn’t deny one. This faith is not a commodity we either have or don’t’ have—it is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience.
Sermon
The phone rang the other day when I was beginning to write this sermon on faith. The woman, whom I do not know, was calling to ask for financial help for her fiancé who is presently in his home country. As she described a series of awful things that had befallen him there, I became more and more dubious of their truth, especially when it became clear that she had sent him money after each tragedy. She sounded so sincere, and so in love with him, that I felt very mean suggesting that perhaps it was a scam, a ruse to get money from her. I asked how she knew these terrible things had actually happened to him. She asked me, “what ever happened to going on faith?”
Her use of the word “faith” jumped out at me, of course, given the topic I announced for our worship today. Her meaning was clear; it was the #1 definition in the dictionary: “unquestioning belief that does not require proof or evidence.” But, strange as it might be to hear a member of the clergy say this, that’s the kind of faith I prefer to live without.
My beliefs are questionable, of that—at least— I am sure! What about yours? And, as I suspect may be true for you, I do require evidence, evidence based on my own experience, deeply considered. Evidence based on our own experience, deeply considered.
That is very UU of us, as you will see on the back page of your order of worship, on which is printed the Covenant of our Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. On the left are what we call the Seven Principles, and on the right is a list of six “sources” from which our living tradition draws. The first of the six sources is… and I invite you to read aloud with me (if you can read the tiny font) ….
“Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.” It’s the evidence of our own experience, deeply considered.
Of the remaining five sources of our living tradition listed there, “unquestioning belief” does not appear in any of them. Instead, Unitarian Universalists draw on “words,” “deeds,” “wisdom” and three kinds of “teaching”—Judeo-Christian, Humanist and Spiritual. Not one mention do we UU’s make of faith of the #1 dictionary definition variety.
Yet we use the word “faith” a fair amount here at First Parish and in other UU congregations. For example, it’s in our most often-used Chalice Lighting words, written by a colleague Christine Robinson, and published in the gray hymnal:
We light the Chalice/ sign of our Unitarian Universalist living tradition/ as people of faith with joys and sorrows/ gifts and needs. We light this beacon of hope/ sign of our quest for truth and meaning/ in celebration of the life we share together.
Many people, including many of us, associate the word “faith” with the #2 dictionary definition, belief in God. So, to the extent that we do, or don’t, believe in the God of the Bible, we count or discount ourselves among the faithful. Some UU’s say we should not call ourselves “people of faith.”
Our reading this morning was by Sharon Salzberg, American Buddhist and a founder of the Insight Meditation Center in Barre MA, and inspired speaker at the annual UU Minister’s Association meeting this past June in St. Louise. She wrote, “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.” (Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, viii). Trusting ourselves to discover the deepest truths on which we can rely.
This morning I want to develop that as a meaning for us of the word “faith.” It’s a meaning that allows us—unequivocally—to count ourselves among the faithful.
I think we need to count ourselves among the faithful, for at least two reasons. One, for ourselves--we need a faith to live by in these troubling times. We need to be able to “go on faith,” even if it’s not of the unquestioning variety. And, reason two, for the world--I think the world needs us to speak as people having more than just opinions when we speak out. The world needs us to speak as people of faith. It cries out for the freedom, reason and tolerance that our liberal faith professes and preaches and tries to practice.
This summer the world news seemed to be especially oppressive. Some of you—as well as some of my colleagues, friends and relatives—have told me you couldn’t bear to watch it on TV or even read about it in the newspapers. I, too, was glad to be out in the woods for a couple weeks, out of reach of television, radio and newspapers.
For that time, I was free to be oblivious of the fact that people of faith were going at each other with horrifying viciousness. Our (self-identified) faith-based Christian President took us to war in Iraq where death and destruction continue three and a half years later, much of it now Muslim against Muslim. Jews and Muslims went to war again this summer on the Lebanese-Israel border, devastating many towns and the cosmopolitan city Beirut, only recently re-built from the last such war. And, this past Friday, the New York Times ran a front page article with the headline “Uganda Peace Hinges on Amnesty for Brutality” and an accompanying gruesome photograph of a woman whose lips and ears were cut off by the militia of a man whose Catholic faith had gone madly haywire, for eight long years. There’s more, but a few examples are, sadly, more than enough.
Is this what happened to “going on faith”? Nothing but death and destruction?
Ever since my teens, I’ve put my faith in people. I can attest to my faith in people going back that far because I remember a worship service in the sanctuary of my family’s Presbyterian church. In it our minister asked us, if we were going to bring up to the altar something that symbolized the holy, the sacred, how we knew God, what would it be?
Someone said they’d bring a shell, symbolizing the ocean. I remember wishing I’d thought of that. I loved being at the ocean and especially being in the ocean and sensing its power all around me even as I learned how, if the waves weren’t too rough, to go with the flow of its power and ride the waves into the sand.
But, no, I’d thought simply of “people.” It was in human beings that I sensed the sacred, the holy, that of God.
Well, that faith has been shaken by current events, which seem grimmer than in my lifetime heretofore, and more laced with fear, as many of you have also observed.
But, at the same time, for the same reason, rather perversely in a way, it also seems that my shaken faith is deepening into something else—could it be? Faith in Life itself?
Recently, I experienced something that spoke reassuringly to me of life’s durability. I was in rural east-central Vermont, where our family has gone for Labor Day Weekend the last maybe fifteen years. We stay with longtime friends in a simple cabin on a hillside from which you can see the morning mist rising off the Connecticut River, hidden in its valley, behind which is the massive Mt. Moosilauke of the White Mountains range. Owned by our friend’s aunt and uncle and well-used from Memorial Day to Columbus Day by their large extended family and friends coming and going, it’s a homey, peaceful place in whose presence we are always renewed for the coming year.
The cabin is surrounded by milkweed plants, the leaves of which—as you may know— are the food of monarch butterfly caterpillars. When our children were younger, we would hunt among the milkweeds looking for caterpillars, hoping to take one, and some leaves, home to their former kindergarten teacher, so her class could watch the metamorphosis from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. Since middle school, as you would expect, that pastime was left behind, sadly. This year, however, the mother of a five year old, whose visit to the cabin preceded ours, left a note saying they’d found monarch chrysalises under the seat of the home-made wooden sandbox out by the vegetable garden.
I went out to look, crouching low to see under the seat not eight inches off the ground. Sure enough, I saw two small, brilliant lime-green ovals each with three lemon yellow spots, majestically hanging down by a mere filament from under the seat. Nearby, a flamboyant yellow and black striped monarch caterpillar, with green spots, crawled in the grass. And, to my further wonder, another caterpillar hung from under one of the other sandbox seats in a J shape, as if it was waiting to become a chrysalis. And a few feet away, under a table-like rock, I spotted a dried out, ripped and abandoned chrysalis hanging forlornly. In the same vicinity, a monarch butterfly flitted around.
In that moment, I felt a palpable, humbling awe: such is the provision made for the future of the monarch butterfly! Astounding! And all of its phases visible to me, in that moment, on my knees in the grass.
Somehow, someway, I felt in my bones, at that moment, life will go on. It may not be my one life, nor the lives of those I know and love, it may not be my country or any country that now exists, but the scene around that sandbox grounded me in my connection, our connection, to the ongoing force of life itself. There is no proof that it will be so in the future, but there is evidence that it is so now. That, for me, is a faith to go on. A faith to go on.
But, really, I sense that faith is not something we have, it’s something we do. It’s not static. It’s not an object, a possession. Just like there is “belief” and “believe,” there should be “faith” and “faithe.”
Salzberg says that in Pali, the language of the original Buddhist texts, as well as in Latin and Hebrew, “faith” is a verb, an action. In Pali, the word usually translated as faith, saddha, literally means to “place the heart upon.” (p. 12). To place the heart upon.
When people try to encourage us in hard times by saying “have faith” I think they mean “have hope.” But faith and hope are not the same thing. Hope is about the future. Faith is for the now. Of course it is true that now is soon the future, when it becomes tomorrow. We move, our faith grounds us and moves with us, or we move without it and into new faith, nothing stays the same for long.
When the news seems grim or our own and others’ suffering seems great, and our small actions for peace and justice and healing seem futile, we would do well to remember these words of Sharon Salzberg toward the end of her book,
“There is a far bigger picture to life than what we are facing in any particular moment…When we see only the suffering before us and our own actions in response to it, it is no wonder we might conclude that what we do seems in adequate… Both the suffering and our efforts to address it are woven into an immense but hidden flow of interaction, a dynamic process of action and consequence that doesn’t stop with us and our particular role.
We don’t know the ultimate unfolding of any story; certainly not enough to decide that what we do has no effect. When we stand before a chasm of futility, it is first of all faith in this larger perspective that enables us to go on.
This openness of view is also attained by looking more deeply at what is right in front of us. As long as we remain on the surface of life, everyone and everything seems to exist as isolated entities. But when we look below the surface, we see strata upon strata of dynamic interconnectedness. If we look to the greatest depth, Buddhism says, we will see a world where no one and no thing stands apart.” (pp. 127-128).
Before we left the cabin an hour or so later, I took one last look under the sandbox seats. The two lime-green chrysalises were still there. The caterpillar that had hung in a J shape was curled up more tightly, and was already mostly encased in its oval chrysalis, still just a pale green, with only a faint suggestion of the three lemon yellow spots.
Though I wasn’t there to see it happen, I go on faith, I faithe, that those yellow spots were brilliant by time we crossed the Connecticut River on our journey home. I faithe… that the awe and wonder of its beauty—and of the butterfly that will emerge—is present to me, and to all of us, in every moment of our lives. Present to us…at any time… in our own experience, deeply considered.
Amen.