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March 4, 2007
Faithful to the Good Rev. Barbara J. Pescan Unitarian Church of Evanston, Illinois
The phrase, “faithful to the good” comes from a poem by the Kentucky poet, farmer and essayist, Wendell Berry. It is from the book, The Country of Marriage and its title is “A Marriage, an Elegy.”
They lived long, and were faithful to the good in each other. . . .
I am no reviewer of poetry, nor scholar of it. I only know what I read and when it speaks to me. There are poets I cannot decipher for the life of me. But, Wendell Berry - with his love of the land and his sorrow at its erosion by fertilizers and overuse, his sadness at our humanity drained by living in cities - seems to me, first and foremost, to be a lover, a man of faith; a faithful man.
How could a farmer be otherwise? How could he --- pouring his labor and the prayers of his body into the soil each spring to tend and water and weed, to see what strength of crop might flower and put forth fruit come the harvest season --- how could he be any other than a person of faith? How could a poet be any other than a person of faith? Doing what they do, pulling meaning out of happenstance, retrieving beauty from dead things, from scoured landscapes and the troubled human heart? And, what is faith?
I facilitate a covenant group twice a month of people who might themselves decide to be facilitators of the next groups. The theme a few weeks ago was when do you discover your limits and, when you have reached them, in what do you have faith; what has been faithful to you? There was an animated conversation about the meaning of faith, and the question arose: If you don’t believe in the things people usually say they believe in when they speak of faith, how can you have faith? Can you have faith if it doesn’t have an object? That is, if you don’t believe in a supreme being, can you be a person of faith? One member quoted a spouse, who said about faith, why bother?
I could take umbrage at those kinds of remarks, but I don’t. Those kinds of questions, after all, critique my livelihood and my vocation. I might say, “How rude!” But, I understand in such questions not a dismissal of faith, but a yearning for an answer that will prove, at last, to be good enough. And, to be completely honest with you, they are my questions as well. They are with me in what Michael Anderson described a few weeks ago as the two o’clock doubts. Michael said:
The truth is sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I have a hard time getting back to sleep. When I wake— it’s often around 2:00 AM—sometimes I’m just worrying about work or worrying about the children, that sort of thing. But at other times there’s an emptiness, a sadness, and then, as I lie there in the dark, waves of doubt wash over me and voices of doubt. Then I, the doubter, doubt my doubts.
I would say, first, that faith, like beliefs or principles, is not something you have. None of these words we are accustomed to using about the religious life are static things; they do not describe a constant state of being. They are indicators, arrows; they are suggestive of moments in the arc of life that connect us to each other and to the mystery of each life, and maybe to the mystery of Life. Even the most faithful souls wake at 2 a.m. with their doubts.
The best words, we are taught in writing classes, are strong verbs. They carry you forward into a description or narrative like no adjective or adverb ever does. I always think that faith and peace should be verbs, rather than nouns. The Hebrew word, shalom, in its fullness, means not only peace. It means: Completeness, wholeness, health, peace, welfare, safety, soundness, tranquility, prosperity, perfectness, fullness, rest, harmony, the absence of agitation or discord. And, when Israelis greet each other in that nest of ongoing violence, they nonetheless say to each other, “Shalom aleichem, May peace be upon you.” Likewise, assalamu alaikum, a common greeting throughout the Middle East, means the same thing. It is not an acknowledgment of peace, but an invocation of it.
Shalom comes from the root verb Shalom meaning to be complete, perfect and full. In Modern Hebrew the obviously related word Shelem means to pay for, and Shulam means to be fully paid.
In Pali, the language of the original Buddhist texts, the word usually translated as “faith, confidence or trust,” is saddha – literally it means, “to place the heart upon.” In Pali, faith is a verb, just as in Latin credo is a verb, and it means, “I set my heart to.” In Pali and in Latin, the words are active, a leaning into an intention to live a particular way.
In her book titled Faith, Sharon Salzberg tells us that in Buddhism, the new practitioner’s “state of love-filled delight in [Buddhism’s] possibilities and eager joy at the prospect of actualizing them” is known as bright faith. It is about immersing oneself in practice and study. Buddhists recognize this early stage as simply a beginning. It is, however, “not a beginning in which we surrender discriminating intelligence, but rather one in which we surrender cynicism and apathy…[it] propels us forward into the unknown.” [Page 28 and following, Faith, trusting our own deepest experience]
You may remember a book published in the early 80’s, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, by Rabbi Harold Kushner. I looked through it for what he might have to say about faith in difficult circumstances. I read the book a long time ago, and I had forgotten how he came to write it.
He and his wife discovered when their son Aaron was 3 years old that he had progeria, the childhood disease of rapid aging; the children usually die in their early teens. Kushner, a young rabbi, knew then he would write a book for people who found themselves in similar circumstances, who found it hard to believe in something but whose anger made it hard to hold onto their faith and find comfort in religion; and for all those whose love for God led them to blame themselves for their suffering and feel that they deserved it. His book is a 20th century meditation on the life of Job.
I have met many people who have turned away from religion when life circumstances dealt them a painful blow. Angry, they leave behind the religion that promised good things if only they would believe. Or, wounded, they hide, hopelessly, from religions that suggest that they are at fault for their suffering. Or, cynical, they throw out with the now-frigid bathwater of punitive dogma and doctrine all the hope and joy and metaphors for anything that smacks of spirit and soul and mystery and love. I knew someone who called religion a crutch; but, to quote progressive clergyman William Sloan Coffin, “It is often said that the church is a crutch. Of course, it’s a crutch. What makes you think you don’t limp?” [Credo, p. 147, Westminster John Knox Press]
Kushner writes:
Let me suggest that the bad things that happen to us in our lives do not have a meaning when they happen to us. They do not happen for any good reason which would cause us to accept them willingly. Bu we can give them a meaning. We can redeem these tragedies from senselessness by imposing meaning on them. The question we should be asking is not, “Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?” That is really an unanswerable, pointless question. A better question would be: “Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?” [P 136, Avon pb, 1981]
That American philosopher, Woody Allen once said, “Eighty percent of life is just showing up.” Sharon Salzberg once asked a psychiatrist friend what he considered the most compelling force for healing in the psychotherapeutic relationship. He said, “Love.” But, Salzberg suggested there might be something more basic: “For all we know, what is most important to healing in therapy is that people show up for their appointments.”
It’s showing up and paying attention --- now or at two in the morning --- where faith is formed, where it manifests itself, where it tests itself. Being awake to the possibilities in a particular moment. When she asked a teacher where she should go to study Buddhism in India, Trungpa Rinpoche replied, “In this matter you had perhaps best follow the pretense of accident.”
We do not know the ultimate unfolding of any story, Salzberg writes. We do not know enough to know that the events of our lives have no effect, or a positive or negative effect, upon us; or that what we do has no effect. What Buddhism requires is an “openness of view that is attained by looking more deeply at what is right in front of us.” It means going beyond the surface of life and looking below, learning to look below to layer after layer of “dynamic Interconnectedness.” If we look to the greatest depth, Buddhism says, we will see a word where no one and no thing stands apart.
The poet “shows up.” And I concentrate my attention here on poetry and poets because they engage with a moment and, in very dense language, limn its possibilities as a fractal of our total existence. They have this openness of view that is aware that more than the surface of things exists. They follow the “pretense of accident” and find in the accidental great meaning.
Poets and storytellers and religion and faith “reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings.” [Hannah Arendt in Salzberg, Faith, p. 8]
In her poem, “The Uses of Sorrow” (In my sleep I dreamed this poem), Mary Oliver writes:
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift. [Thirst, 2006, Beacon Press]
At the end of his book, Rabbi Kushner writes of a man who survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust. He rebuilt his life, became a success, married and raised a family. One day, his wife and children were killed when a forest fire ravaged their home in France. This tragedy almost broke him. But, instead of trying to find out whose fault it was, instead of “setting out to find a villain, or accusing other people of being responsible” for the fire, for his misery, he founded a movement to protect nature from future forest fires. He concluded, “Life has to be lived for something, not just against something.” (p. 136 and following)
So, what is faith? It is a verb we animate as we live our lives. Wendell Berry’s long-married couple lived “faithful to the good in each other.” Harold Kushner’s family lived with joy each moment that Aaron was alive with them; and his death led the rabbi’s ministry to grow into more depth than it might have done otherwise. After the death of her partner, Molly, Mary Oliver fashioned her new book of poetry as a religious exploration called, “Thirst” --- what better word to describe a time of loss and mourning in which one, nonetheless, endeavors to be present. This openness of view, this readiness for life, scanning the horizon for what is next, and preparing to meet it --- this is a manifestation of faith.
I have spoken mostly of faith as we experience it in time of trouble. That may be when we most need the crutch of hope, of religion, of confidence in our capacity to go on. These circumstances of mourning may be when we are most in need of a dawn to believe in when, at 2 a.m. the night is darkest and our spirit is limping. But, we also manifest faith when we move ahead by small steps in our ordinary circumstances, in our daily condition.
Unlike other animals, human beings may be the only animals who know we are going to die one day. But, like other animals, the inherent drive to live exists in us, too. Our consciousness turns the instinct to live into thoughts and words, into anxieties and into strategies. Human awareness turns the knowledge of our mortality into theology and poetry, too.
That we also know that death will come, and the corn will come, and the leaves will return to the trees is one of the meanings of faith, of trust that the universe works also in dependable ways. Faith in God is what some call this trust. I call it faith in what is, in all that is --- we can trust that change is inevitable, and that:
I. Life is challenging. For everyone. Our physical bodies, our relationships-all of our life circumstances-are fragile and subject to change. We are always accommodating.
II. The cause of suffering is the mind’s struggle in response to challenge.
III. The end of suffering-a non-struggling, peaceful mind-is a possibility.
IV. The program for ending suffering is the Eightfold Path.
1. Wise Understanding: realizing the cause of suffering;
2. Wise Intention: motivation to end suffering;
3. Wise Speech: speaking in a way that cultivates clarity;
4. Wise Action: behaving in ways that maintain clarity;
5. Wise Livelihood: supporting oneself in a wholesome way;
6. Wise Effort: cultivating skillful (peaceful) mind habits;
7. Wise Concentration: cultivating a steady, focused, ease- filled mind;
8. Wise Mindfulness: cultivating alert, balanced attention.
[From The Buddha's Four Noble Truths, Sylvia Boorstein, Shambhala Sun, September 2002.]
The message of Buddha's Four Noble Truths is that paying attention and seeing clearly lead to behaving impeccably in every moment, out of love, and on behalf of all beings. [Boorstein, ibid] The message of Jesus life is Love one another; and love your neighbor as yourself; love even your enemies. Where faith enters in here is in what Rabbi Kushner suggested: Being against other people, setting out to find the villain, accusing other people of being responsible for your misery, only make a lonely person lonelier. Life, he concludes, has to be lived for something, not just against something. A life lived faithful to the good is a life lived for something.
My individual faith in the efficacy of compassion for others and for this earthly home we share may not make a difference to the world in the long run. I have no objective proof for it, but I happen to believe that when I can live faithful to the good, that makes a difference. I believe in the Butterfly Effect --- I have faith that a small movement of the wing of the butterfly in China adds force to the winds that bring the rain to water the crops in Kansas; just as I have faith that our small movements of love, our small shared offerings make a difference in the lives of others far, far from here. And, I am absolutely certain that when I am living faithful to the good, it makes a difference to me, to you, and to those whose lives we touch.
Let it be. And may we live as blessing, blessing, blessing, blessing.
Unitarian Church of Evanston
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