“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith.” —Reinhold Niebuhr
Faith. What is your faith? Not your religion. Not your beliefs. What is your faith?
James Fowler begins his book, Stages of Faith, with a story. He was driving to a workshop on faith which he was leading. He was rehearsing a set of questions he had planned for the opening session, questions designed to open up some honest talk about faith in our lives. They were the questions, which Avis read earlier. He felt satisfied with these questions; they were not easy questions. He congratulated himself for his cleverness in coming up with such a useful, probing workshop opener and then, it hit him. How would he answer his own questions? "I had to pull my car over to the shoulder and stop. For the next forty minutes, almost making myself late for the workshop, I examined the structure of values, the patterns of love and action, the shape of fear and dread and the directions of hope and friendship in my own life."
When I began reading Fowler’s book for the first time several years ago, I never made it past his opening story. I was caught by the image of him being hit by the force of these questions so that he pulled off the road and sat there answering them for his own life. I was caught, too, by the questions themselves.
I have two wishes for you this morning. The first, is that you may be caught by these questions in the same way that Fowler was that day in his car and the same way that I was when I first read Fowler’s story. To have one’s attention, mind, heart, and spirit caught in such a way is both gift and grace. The second wish I have for you is that, if you do not receive the gift of feeling compelled to honestly answer these questions and then reflect upon your answers, that you choose to do so. Both ways give access to transformation.
In the recent restructuring of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Lifespan Religious Education Department was renamed Lifespan Faith Development. A few months ago when a new Lifespan Religious Education Consultant was hired by our district, the Joseph Priestly District, the position title was changed to Lifespan Faith Development Consultant. This year, our own Religious Education and Adult Education Committees will discuss changing the name of our lifespan religious education program to lifespan faith development. We will talk about what this change would mean for us and how we can have a church-wide discussion about faith development and about changing the name of our program to be consistent with the UUA and our district.
"Homo poeta" Ernest Becker calls humans, "human the meaning maker." This definition is part of our UU heritage as well. One of the old UUA curricula is named "Man the Meaning Maker." Some of you may remember that curriculum. James Fowler shares this understanding of human beings as meaning makers and says that questions of faith "help us get in touch with the dynamic, patterned process by which we find life meaningful." Process theology is also part of our UU heritage. Fowler says that faith is not the same as religion or belief and that faith is not always religious in content or context. He says that faith is universal for all human beings, for those with or without religious beliefs, traditions, or communities. Fowler’s definition of faith: "Faith is a person’s or group’s way of moving into the force field of life. It is our way of finding coherence in and giving meaning to the multiple forces and relations that make up our lives." Questions of faith help us to "reflect on the centers of value and power that sustain our lives. The persons, causes and institutions we really love and trust, the images of good and evil, of possibility and probability to which we are committed. These centers of value and power, these people, causes, institutions, and images of good, evil, possibility and probability form the pattern of our faith."
Fowler draws on the work of theologians Paul Tillich and H. Richard Niebuhr to talk about faith beyond religion and belief. In Tillich’s writings in the 1950s, he challenged readers to ask themselves what values "have centering power in their lives." What are the values that concern us ultimately. Fowler writes, "Our real worship, our true devotion directs itself toward the objects of our ultimate concern. Ultimate concern may be invested in family, university, nation, or church. Love, sex and a loved partner might be the passionate center of one’s ultimate concern. Ultimate concern is a much more powerful matter than claimed belief in a creed or a set of doctrinal propositions [or, we might add, a set of principles]. Faith as a state of being ultimately concerned may or may not find its expression in institutional or...religious forms. Faith so understood is very serious business. It involves how we make our life wagers. It shapes the ways we invest our deepest loves and our most costly loyalties."
H. Richard Niebuhr also understood faith as a "universal human concern." He saw faith as taking form in our earliest relationships and in growing through our experiences of trust and fidelity. He saw faith at both the individual human level and at the group or institutional level in "the shared visions and values that hold human groups together. And he saw faith, at all these levels, in the search for an overarching, integrating and grounding trust in a center of value and power sufficiently worthy to give our lives unity and meaning."
Fowler says that the key question of faith is not "What do you believe?" but "On what or whom do you set your heart?" Fowler uses the work of comparative religionist and linguist Wilfred Cantwell Smith to present the Hindu, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin words for faith and demonstrates how all of the words "involve an alignment of the heart or will, a commitment of loyalty and trust." I set my heart on, I give my heart to, I hereby commit myself to, I pledge allegiance to were meanings of the word "believe" through the sixteenth century. For example, the existence or being of God was taken for granted; I believe in God was understood as pledging love and loyalty—I give my heart to, I hereby commit myself to God.
Fowler says that we tend to ask of one another, What do you believe? but that if we are "to reach any significant level of depth," the question has to become one of faith: "On what or whom do you set your heart? To what vision of right-relatedness between humans, nature and the transcendent are you loyal? What hope and what ground of hope animate you and give shape to the force field of your life and to how you move into it?"
In our English language we have no verb form of the word faith, as does Greek and Latin, which is a handicap to us in talking about faith. Because, as Fowler says, faith is a verb; "it is an active mode of being and committing, a way of moving into and giving shape to our experiences of life...faith is always relational; there is always another in faith. ‘I trust in and am loyal to....'" Again, though, faith is not the same as belief. Fowler, building on Smith’s work, says that "Belief may be one of the ways faith expresses itself. But one does not have faith in a proposition or concept. Faith, rather is the relation of trust in and loyalty to the transcendent [or, we might say, the ultimate concern] about which concepts or propositions—beliefs —are fashioned." Fowler has two quotes from Smith that I want to read you:
"Faith is deeper, richer, more personal [in contrast to belief]. ... It is an orientation of the personality, to oneself, to one’s neighbor, to the universe; a total response; a way of seeing whatever one sees and of handling whatever one handles; a capacity to live at more than a mundane level; to see, to feel, to act in terms of, a transcendent dimension."
"Faith, then, is a quality of human living. At its best it has taken the form of serenity and courage and loyalty and service: a quiet confidence and joy which enable one to feel at home in the universe, and to find meaning in the world and in one’s own life, a meaning that is profound and ultimate, and is stable no matter what may happen to oneself at the level of immediate event. Men and women of this kind of faith face catastrophe and confusion, affluence and sorrow, unperturbed; face opportunity with conviction and drive; and face others with cheerful charity."
On whom or what do you set your heart? Fowler points out that "we do not commit ourselves—‘set our hearts upon’—persons, causes, institutions or ‘gods’ because we ‘ought to.’ We invest or devote ourselves because the other to which we commit has, for us, an intrinsic excellence or worth.... We value [and commit to] that which seems of transcendent worth and in relation to which our lives have worth," and our commitments shape our identities. Fowler suggests that there are three major patterns of faith-identity relations. A polytheist "lacks any one center of value and power of sufficient transcendence to focus and order one’s life." The polytheist, in Fowler’s usage, has many minor centers of value and power, none, "not even the self—one’s myth of one’s own worth and destiny—can lay a compelling enough claim to unify one’s hopes and strivings." Some polytheists display what Fowler calls a "protean" pattern. "Protean people make a series of relatively intense or total identity and faith plunges, but their commitments prove to be transient and shifting." Other polytheists "live with a diffuse pattern of faith and identity ...never bringing all of their passion to any relationship or value commitment. They tend to preserve a kind of laid-back or cool provisionality regarding commitment or trust." Fowler says that most of us are more polytheistic than we would like to think. Our consumer society with its dominant myth that "you should experience everything you desire, own everything you want and relate intimately with whomever you wish" makes the polytheistic pattern seem normative.
Fowler’s second faith-identity pattern is henotheistic from the Greek, heno, "one" and theos, "god." In this pattern, one invests deeply in a transcending center of value and power, finding in it a focal unity of personality and outlook, but this center is inappropriate, false, not something of ultimate concern. Many people have a henotheistic pattern with their work or profession. Henotheism can have noble forms. Fowler says that "institutions and causes that elicit selfless sacrifice and virtually total commitment are often worthy" but are still finite.
Fowler’s third faith-identity pattern, he calls radical monotheism, "in which a person or group focuses its supreme trust and loyalty in a transcendent center of value and power, that is neither a conscious or unconscious extension of personal or group ego nor a finite cause or institution. Rather, this type of monotheism implies loyalty to the principle of being and to the source and center of all value and power."
A rather lengthy, but important quote from Fowler on radical monotheism:
"Monotheism, as understood here, does not mean the negation of less universal or less transcendent centers of value and power, but it does mean their relativization and ordering. In radical monotheistic faith persons are bound to each other in trust and loyalty—to each other and to an inclusive center of value and power—in relation to which our ... finite gods must be seen for what they are. Radical monotheistic faith calls people to an identification with a universal community. Again this does not negate or require denial of our membership in more limited groups with their particular ‘stories’ and centering values. But it does mean that our limited, parochial communities cannot be revered and served as though they have ultimate value. Our potentially henotheistic centers of value and power can be loved with a proper and proportionate devotion."
Radical monotheistic faith, as understood here, rarely finds consistent and longlasting actualization in persons or communities. People too easily lapse into a confusion of our representations of a transcendent center of value and power with that reality itself. We continually feel the pull towards henotheistic and polytheistic forms of faith. But as a regulative principle, as a critical ideal against which to keep our partial faiths from becoming idolatrous [Fowler defines idolatry as "the profoundly serious business of committing oneself or betting one’s life on finite centers of value and power as the source of one’s or one’s group’s confirmation of worth and meaning"], radical monotheism is of tremendous importance. If we regard the future of humankind as requiring our learning to live in an inclusive, global community, then in a sense, radical monotheistic faith depicts the form of our universal ‘coming faith.’ It becomes terribly important for us to work with this understanding of faith and to try to formulate and symbolize it so that it exerts truly transformative power over our more parochial faith orientations."
That is precisely what I ask you to do—beginning with Fowler’s faith questions (copies will be on the table on your way out of the worship hall) to answer them with honesty, with courage, with trust that these questions can teach you something about yourself and can lead you to transformative growth. And, as you do your work, that you hold as a critical ideal a faith that calls us to a universal human community and that is grounded in an inclusive and transcendent center of ultimate value, as, in fact, I believe our Unitarian Universalist faith does call us. As Unitarian Universalists it may be fairly easy for us to affirm Fowler’s ideas about radical monotheism at the level of our religion and belief—the understanding of a universal human community is part of our own religious heritage. It is not as easy at the level of our faith, where we are really spending our time and energy, our commitment and hopes.
At the end of May, my brother got married on top of Stone Mountain in North Carolina. My brother is a member of the small church that we grew up in and a number of people at the celebration of his marriage were people I’ve known all of my life. One of them was the sister of my best childhood friend. Our families have been close all of our lives with several pairings of best friends amongst us as well as basically considering everybody in each other’s families as our second family. She and I walked back down the mountain together, eager to share our happiness about my brother’s marriage, to exchange news, and to help each other down the mountain as we are both uncomfortable with heights and were going down a little slower. Woven all through her conversation was a lot about her faith. One thing she said was, "I want to live the kind of life that God will want to answer my prayers." Her focus was not really on God answering prayer but rather on living the kind of life that reflected her understanding of ultimate value. I recently read a quote by Rabbi Abraham Heschel who said, "One reason why we don’t understand our own religious heritage in the West is that we have forgotten which question to ask. Instead of prophetic questions, like Micah’s ‘What doth the Lord require?’ (to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God), we are such products of consumer society that our questions about religion are upside down: ‘What do I require? In a group, a cause, teacher—a God that I’ll trust?" Like Micah, my friend’s focus is on what is required of her. She, like Fowler, understands how easy it is for us to fall into selfishness and behaving in ways to serve our own egos and she engages in regular critical self-reflection and contemplative prayer. She has the unconscious humility of the truly righteous. She is very aware of and grateful for older members in the church who paid attention to her and helped her and she has done the same for others of all ages, but especially for those younger or newer to the church. She values and uses reason to a greater degree than many of us UUs who claim the use of reason as a fundamental part of our religious heritage. In my earlier days of studying different religions I used to notice that some said "faithandpractice" as almost one word. Certainly in my friend’s living, in how she spends her time and energy, her faith and practice are intertwined. She, like Fowler, considers faith serious business and she has an infectious joy of life.
We need to do the work of faith development. We need it here in our church. We have not behaved out of our better selves and we have done real harm. We do have better selves. Most of what I’ve shared with you about Fowler’s work comes from the first few chapters of his book. The bulk of the book is about his work and research on stages of faith. He says that it is in times of transitions that many adults move to another stage of faith, although some remain in the transition never growing into the next stage. We have the possibility for some significant psychosocial and faith growth for us as individuals and for our institution, if we choose it.
We also need to do the work of faith development for our world. We live in a society dominated by the myth of consumerism and at the same time yearning for spiritual substance. We live in a global community trying to figure out what that means and how to live and make choices in this new century. With our understanding of pluralism, our respect for the inherent worth and dignity and freedom of all people, our value of the use of reason and respect for the truth, our understanding of our interconnectedness, our understanding of universalism, we Unitarian Universalists have a critical voice for the issues of our time. We must speak not only from the richness of our religious tradition and our beliefs but from our faith as well, from where we really live and spend our time and energy.
The Adult Education Committee is offering the First Sundays program again this year. On the first Sunday in November, our program will be about Fowler’s faith questions—an important opportunity for you to share your faith development with one another. That is a long time from now, when I am asking you to begin work with these questions today. If enough of you would like to meet before then, please let me know. On the first Sunday in December, our program will be on Fowler’s stages of faith.
I wish for you that you may be gripped by these faith questions in the same way that Fowler was and have the gift of your attention, mind, heart, and spirit compelled to engage with them. If you are not gripped by them, I wish for you to use your human gift of choice to choose to answer the questions honestly and to reflect upon your answers with your mind, heart, and spirit. Both ways give access to transformation and to joy of life.
"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, makes a difference. Do not say the detail of how I know, which is all of my life: small love begets eventually the large and whole; finds itself in company with other love set loose in the world. The pattern emerges after, but was always in the making." —Reinhold Neibuhr
May your faith development lead you to set loose your love in the world.
Blessed Be.