The Meaning of Faith
Faith is not about belief. Faith in fact has very little to do with what beliefs you hold, 
other than that it allows you to hold them. Faith is a sacred, deep, emotionally involved kind of trust. Faith is the kind of trust that you enter into with your whole being. Faith is the kind of trust that, when it has been broken, it hurts deep inside… but faith is the kind of trust that finds a way to trust again despite the hurt.
We are all people of Faith. Faith is a basic aspect of human nature. We live in a universe that is so awe inspiring, so infinite, so grandly complicated that all of human knowledge amounts to only a tiny fraction of reality. Indeed, much of human perception about reality is pure construct… because the whole of infinity cannot be understood by finite human minds.
The realization of just how little about the universe we actually understand exists in all of humanity, both consciously and un-consciously. That realization is one understanding of why humans created religion (but not the only one).
Faith is what allows us to function despite knowing or sensing how little we actually know about all that surrounds us. This is where beliefs come into the definition of Faith. Faith does not equate to beliefs… but it is possible to hold faith in some of your beliefs.
We can have faith in (or sacred trust in) beliefs, in principles, in people, in religious traditions, in community, in systems and institutions, in ourselves, and in the universe as a whole. This last is sometimes referred to as “Faith in God”, “Faith in Dharma”, or “Faith in Creation”. As I have found faith in the universe as a whole, that it is not conspiring against me, not indifferent to me, but rather conspiring on my behalf and that I am a part of it… I have found something to have faith in… but that is not my faith.
My faith is the ability to trust something from the very core of my being. When we are bound together by trust that touches the deepest aspects of who we are… we are living in Faith Community.
A Crisis of Faith is not when a belief is questioned, but when we sense that a deep trust has been broken.
Someone has been Faithful, a Faithful spouse, a Faithful friend, a Faithful person, when they hold not only the sacred trust they place in others, but the sacred trust others place in them as one of the most important aspects of their human existence.
A Religious Faith is not a collection of people who share beliefs, but a community of people who have made the commitment to trust one another to care for each other’s spirits and souls, and who join together for a Faith filled purpose.
Blind Faith is a trust that is not examined, not understood, and of which requires only body and soul, neglecting the mind and the spirit.
Pure Faith is the kind of trust that you hold even when your rational mind says you should not. This is a two edged sword, because at times the ability to hold a pure Faith is a blessing, at other times it is simply Blind Faith in disguise.
Click here to read the rest of the Defining Religious Language essay series
Yours in Faith,
Rev. David
Fear and Love at Tent City
There is a protest at Tent City tonight, the place where Sherriff Joe Arpaio holds thousands of immigrants in his self described ‘concentration camp.’ Where there is never any relief from the Arizona heat, where humiliation is a daily occurrence.
I’m with my people, in our bright yellow Standing on The Side of Love shirts that match the school buses that take us there, Unitarian Universalists in Phoenix for our annual convention. There are hundreds of us going, a couple of thousand maybe, mostly white, middle class, documented. And yet I am afraid.
I’m afraid because I’ve heard there will be counter-protestors, militia folks maybe, perhaps with the weapons which are legal to carry in Arizona. I’m afraid because it’s so hot, because I’m not exactly Olympics material in my physical fitness, because I am taking a teenaged child whose safety means everything to me.
And then, as we sit in worship and prayer, preparing to go, speakers from the local Latino community speak. A young woman describes her decision to commit civil disobedience, to be arrested by Sherriff Joe Arpaio, because she is tired of living in fear, of her whole community living in daily fear of being rounded up for real or imagined infractions and thrown into the Tent City, as they have been for the past 20 years. A young man describes arriving in the United States at age one, and now facing deportation –leaving the only country he’s ever known to be sent to one which is foreign to him.
And I begin to feel embarrassed by my fear. Not ashamed, not guilty, just embarrassed. As if I am a kid who grabbed too many cookies off the plate. And I think, this fear that binds us all, this fear of being arrested and humiliated and tortured in our own country: How does that hold us back? How does that diminish us? The young woman who chose to be arrested says, Yes, she was afraid, but she’s been afraid all her life. This arrest, in a way, freed her. I think of the words of the poet Audre Lorde, in her essay which is desert-island-essential to me, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action:
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
As we get into our bright yellow school bus, a minister offers a prayer for our journey. I say to the driver, Are we holding our departure up because we are standing up praying? And she looks up with some annoyance and says, “No! I am praying!” As I begin to lead the crowd off the bus, she says, “Thank you so much for doing this. My husband is in there.”
At Tent City, I don’t see any counter protestors, with or without weapons. I see a small gaggle of brave locals, who have come to thank us for being there. One woman I speak with tells me that her inability to pay for a traffic infraction landed her there for ten days. She describes the endless heat, the lack of adequate drinking water, the horrible food. She says then, tears in her eyes, “My girlfriend is in for a year.”
Another man holds a sign charging Joe Arpaio with homicide. I ask him how many people have died at Tent City. He says at least five. I ask him if his church stands up to speak out about this. He replies sadly, “I am still Catholic but I do not go to church anymore. Most of us don’t. There was one priest who spoke out for us but they got rid of him.”
As I get back on the bus to go back to air conditioned comfort, a shower and clean pajamas, his words stay with me most. I wish that I could have responded, in Arizona or in my own home state of Minnesota, “You would be welcome in my church!” I know that the Phoenix UU church is doing fantastic work to be welcoming, to stand tall as an advocate for justice for immigrants. And yet I know that, while we stand on the side of love, sometimes we stand too far off to the side, in our fear, in our privilege, buffered, unwilling to disrupt our comfort. I offer a silent prayer and wake up this morning with his words still piercing my heart.
(Photos by Jie Wronski-Riley)
A Personal Relationship with God
The aspect of my personal faith that seems to bring about the most confusion in friends and colleagues is that I believe I have a deep and
abiding personal relationship with a God that is incapable of knowing that I even exist.
I find that the confusion about this theological point rests not only with those more theologically conservative than I, but also with those more theologically liberal or secular than I. More conservative ministers and theologians are confused by my claim that I can have a personal relationship with a non-personal God. My more liberal and secular colleagues question the same thing, but with the opposite emphasis.
While I have talked about this in other articles (including here), I believe that there is no division in God, that every moment of every day we are intimately involved with God; in a flight of birds, in a breath of wind, in a cab driver who cuts us off, in a moment on the Zen cushions… all one, all God. We are a part of God, and nothing can be more intimate than this. God is a holy spirit that is intimately involved in all things, and we are intimately involved in the part of God we can touch and sense.
However, God does not, in any personal way, know that I exist as an individual. I wonder whether God is even capable of “knowing” in any human sense. More, my faith in God does not require God’s knowing of me. I am “known” simply in my being, along with all of being, and together we are becoming… and becoming… and becoming.
I do not believe that God is “consciously” involved in human life, except that we are a part of God, and we are consciously involved in our own lives. Human Free Will is a part of God. What prevents us from sensing this is our own delusion of division and self… our own conflicted natures. Issues of whether God is omniscient or omnipotent depend upon God having a human understanding of knowing or of power, and I do not believe that to be true. God simply is, and we relate to God because of that.
As one minister/professor colleague of mine has said to me, this theological stance is fairly complex, and inspired by both my understanding of Christian Faith and my experience of Zen Buddhism. It is in part this belief that holds me in Unitarian Universalism, in that it inspires in me my connection to the inherent worth of all beings and the interconnectedness of all existence, two core principles of Unitarian Universalism.
A few years ago, in a communication within the Army Chaplain Corps, I found this statement: “Whereas the Chaplaincy, as spiritual leaders, model faith and belief in the Hand of God to intervene in the course of history and in individual lives;”. Now, I can do some theological circumlocutions and come to a place where I can accept that statement (if not agree with it), those circumlocutions are somewhat intensive. I certainly could not accept it in its obvious, literal intent. For me, God does not intentionally intervene in human history or individual lives… God simply is, and human history and individual lives change and mold in reaction to God’s existence. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, God does not play dice with the Universe, because God is the Universe and all within it.
If a belief in an intervening God who has a personal relationship with individual lives is a prerequisite to be a military chaplain, then perhaps I have some thinking to do about my call to ministry. If, rather, the document that quote was taken from actually is trying to define what the theological center of the Chaplain Corps is, then I accept that I am theologically on the margins but can still find a place. I will, in Unitarian Universalist prophetic tradition, continue to speak my truth, the truth that is written on my heart by my life, by scripture, by the flight of birds and the existence of evil, and let “Einstein’s Dice” fall how they may.
Yours in Faith,
Rev. David