Faitfhful Risk for Living Faith
I rarely speak of faith as a noun, but rather of faithing and faithful living. Every day we’re invited on a risky adventure of living into our promises and aspirations, of growing spiritually, and of contributing to the blessings of this world. If we’re not risking, we’re probably not faithing, but play-it-safe-ing.
Yet because so many of us have been taught that faith is either a virtue (you have it or you don’t) or a place (Greetings from Faith!), we have to unlearn the play-it-safe-ing that often accompanies the virtue and place ideas of what living faithfully is. We have to develop new spiritual habits, spiritual habits that have very real world consequences and actions attached to them.
Contemplative spirituality leads to and supports active spirituality. When contemplative spirituality is only about self-improvement and self-regulation, then it loses the spiritual piece and becomes another set of practices, like turning off the lights when we leave a room. Good and useful, yes, but not something that moves us out of our comfort zones and into working with others to bring more compassion, merciful justice, steadfast love, or ecological renewal to this world. The fruits of practice that is self-focused are personal. The fruits of true spiritual practices, of living faithfully, are contributing to the goodness of the whole.
The Gospels make this latter point very strongly, particularly in Matthew 25:1-46. Do we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, visit the sick and imprisoned? Do we add to the blessings of this life or have we been too busy pursuing those blessings for ourselves? Universalists, Unitarians, and Unitarian Universalists, like other faith traditions, have said over and again that adding to the goodness of this world is how we live faithfully.
Living faithfully, we make commitments to stretch and serve, to risk these promises and aspirations. Our lives are already at stake, so what do we really have to lose? What commitments to add to goodness do you need to make this year? Once we make the commitments to faithful risk every day, how will we live into them? How will you make them into practices and develop those commitments into spiritual habits?
Put play-it-safe-ing faithing behind you this year. Take a faithful risk to seek out and welcome the stranger, to visit the imprisoned, to bring relief to the sick, to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, to clean up a waterway, to be more generous than you can imagine today.
- Another Helping of Brokenness - March 1, 2014
- Keeping On Though Not Yet - June 11, 2012
- Spiritual Drought & Restoration - June 4, 2012
