Faith (August 2013) by Joy

Growing up in a religious home, ‘faith’ was one of those words that was thrown into conversations with very reverent, deliberate tones, and met with knowing nods and great Christian sincerity.  And it was also one of those words that whenever someone asked me what it meant, my mind went blank and my palms got sweaty.  I just didn't know.  

There was a vague sense that to have faith would make my life better, it would make me better.  And perhaps it possibly somehow related to ‘trust’.  Maybe I believed that Faith = trusting in good.

Sitting to write this now, my mind is blank and my palms are sweaty.  I’m surprised that so little has changed since my evangelical days.  I still want to be a better person living a better life marked by some great faith.  Mostly I want to stop worrying so much and live with a peace that melts the icy knot of fear that burrowed into my stomach decades ago and has never warmed enough to disappear

.

But it turns out that I am so tired (I mean literally exhausted) of living my life with the assumption that to have faith is to trust that ‘good’ things will happen at the exclusion of ‘bad’ things.  It’s difficult to explain, but life experience has taught me over and over again that the one thing we can trust is that beautiful, exhilarating and ‘good’ things are exactly as likely and expected as ugly, defeating and ‘bad’ things. 

Faith is a problematic word for me because I get stuck.  I get stuck in the who’s and the what’s…I get stuck in the nouns that we substitute for the word ‘good’ in my previously stated faith equation.  Some options I've considered for this equation in the past include:

1.  Faith = trusting in (God):  In the God I grew up knowing who was a father, a male.  Who gives caveats to the powerful and consolation prizes to the weak.  Who unleashes violence with some frightening sort of calculation.

2.  Faith = trusting in (nature):  In Mother Nature who provides lavishly and drums out a cadence of life.  But who unleashes violence with some frightening sort of arbitration.

3. Faith = trusting in (reason): In science and technology and innovation that makes life easier for some, more complicated for others, and nearly always perpetuates violence against other sentient beings.

4. Faith = trusting in (the inherent goodness of people):  As in, believing that our violence and hatred will be kept to a minimum.  Or that the propensity to rape and mutilate is the exception whether in war time or peace time.

Faith = trusting in words or rocks or clay or fashion or melodies or silences or vacuum cleaners or football or turkeys or sky or bells or laughter or life or death or saviors or communism or poetry or democracy or the forces of capitalist markets, etc.

At this point in my life I am realizing to choosing to place my faith in anything at all is exactly the reason I’m well on the way to a stomach ulcer before the age of 30.  Putting faith in anything at all guarantees a disappointing let-down of a crash into reality.  

In the end, I am stunned that the definition of faith that makes the very most sense to me, that gives me the most peace about the state of the crazy world comes from the Christian bible:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see.

Faith has no concrete, tangible or absolute noun.  It is a feeling and the vague sense that life is both all good and all bad, all beauty and all pain, all life and all death.  And that it should be lived to the absolute fullest despite and because of it all.

And now a poem, which as usual says everything more succinctly and lyrically than any essay possibly could:

Before He Makes Each One by Rainer Maria Rilke
Before he makes each one
of us, God speaks.

Then, without speaking,
he takes each one
out of the darkness

And these are the cloudy
words God speaks
before each of us begins:

"You have been sent out
by your senses.  Go
to the farthest edge
of desire, and give me
clothing: burn like a great
fire so that the stretched-out
shadows of the the things
of the world cover
me completely.
Let everything happen 
to you: beauty and terror.
You must just go--
no feeling is the farthest 
you can go.  Don't let
yourself be separated 
from me.  The country
called life is close.
By its seriousness,
you will know it.
Give me your hand." 

-Joy

Faith (August 2013) by Josh W.

Sentinels

Have you ever doubted that the sun would rise?

Have you ever wondered if the moon would stay invisible, hidden behind the shadows?

The sun and moon, sentinels of faithfulness, rise and fall in spite of your belief

or unbelief. 

Can we believe in a God just as faithful?

A God who is present whether we believe

or don’t believe.

The sun.

The moon.

God.

Thank you for your faithfulness.

    -Josh W. 

Faith (August 2013) by Renee

Our resolve for simplicity is renewed in the spring. We cast away our heavy layers and enjoy a new lightness. Windows are thrown open and delight is taken in the things we cannot own.

Smells.

    Sounds.

          Smiles.

Spring is simply being.




        



















So it is suiting that summer would be a time of


overabundance,
of shameless fertility, and of great wealth.

Vines hang over.

       Sweat pours out.

                 Light lasts longer.

There is so much to learn when the world is new each day.

Nature's choir brings us back to the dance floor. Barefooted walks and sleeping naked, our bodies cannot connect enough with this world.

Summer is wholly being.

In the fall, we eat. 

  Curried soups. 

        Pumpkin anything. 

               Whatever we can fire up in the oven to take the edge off the cooling air.

Breads. 

Casseroles, potato and cabbage. 

And we drink. Apple cider and fermented fancies. 

What cannot be eaten is canned and saved. 

Fall is being full, and fully being.

Then the heavy hand of winter slows us down.

Quiets us.

     Contains us for a season.

If you wait

   and listen,

      enduring the cold,

          you can hear the snow landing, softly.




What else do we have in the winter, save good company?
What else do we need but this quiet time of holy being.

Expecting summer's harvest?
 
Planting in the spring?

Or more. Faith is saving seeds in the fall,

when you are full

and forgetful.

Faith is season after season the same,

and yet an evolution.

Or a friendship, through all seasons.

I do not know the future, but I know you.

I do not fully know you, but I take you
                                               on faith.



      -Renee

Faith (August 2013) by Jonothan

Hey guys.

I had a conversation with a recent seminary graduate who is totally in to the preservation of "particualrity" when in comes to spirituality. I may have told you some of the previous conversations that I've had with him. This weekend at the beach we were using our group (some of what we talked about when you were down) as a case study for what "shared spirituality" might mean for us, being as we are at different places. None of this is rocket science, but it is nice to have words.

A1. We do have a shared spirituality in that we have elements of worldviews that are common: we "believe" in simple living, in sharing meals, in life together. We believe in the support of friends and deep connections. We believe in choosing to be together [how ironic] and sharing what we have and receiving what others have. This is a shared spirituality... this is our "confession".

A2. It just so happens that this spirituality we share is not "meta" in the way that organized religious traditions are. We don't have a common confession of epistemology or of teleology (to use Randy's' seminarian words). We are not joining in to the work of something bigger (like a tradition or a history) directly, even thought -- as we have pointed out-- many people have lived like we seek to live for a long time. In other words, our confession is of practices and not of reasons, of the what and not the why.

B1. Which brings us to Randy's suggestion of "a community of communities". What would be wrong with saying: "These are our common practices that we do as a whole based on our (actual) shared spirituality. And these 'sub'-practices are the things that the neo-pagans, or christians or earth-based-spiritualists among us do as a part of their shared spirituality... each their own set of practices that serves and emphasizes the particular spirituality (in the more "meta" sense) these sub-groups espouse."?

B2. Nothing, I suppose. There would be nothing wrong with this if we understand that a sub-communities particulars of language and practice and ritual are just that: the part of a peoples spirituality that is not common to the whole. And this is not so hard to fathom: we already do this all the time in a hundred different ways. Try this image: a Vin Diagram. Or perhaps more appropriate for the complexity and the layers: a kaleidoscope. All over the place there is "religion" that is held by some and not by others: think of sports fans with their religious practices and smokers with theirs and the goths and the soccer moms and the monks and folk-music-concert-goers. So the soccer-moms all gather to worship whatever it is they worship, and smokers take time out of their day (better than most of us) to honor whatever they honor on smoke breaks. A chain-smoking soccer-mom? A monk who won't miss a radio broadcast of the Phillies? A person who loves shared meals but does not care for the language of the Eucharist?

C1. One shared value that would make this Kaleidoscope of practices possible is grace: a grace that sees the difference of practices, the different particulars, and understands that they are good for "us". Note that I don't want this to be the same as tolerance; tolerance has a boring shrug-of-the-shoulders to it, a 1980's "whatever" to it. That is not this grace. This grace says: "I am a emerald green parallelogram. You are a mesmerizing violet ellipse. There are times and places that we overlap and have space in common. There are times and places that do not. And that interplay is what makes a Kaleidoscope interesting.  By way of contrast, think of a musical piece where all of the instruments and voices were reduced to the lowest common denominator: Noise is the result, even static perhaps, but not music.

 

So, here is to faith in whatever it is that creates the possibility for a kalsidoscope of practices within a common confession. May this mystery visit us often.

                   -Jonothan