Faith is not…

Faith is not belief despite evidence,
It is adventure in scorn of consequence
Faith is not credulity in the face of occasional miracle,
It is discerning the miraculous in the daily round;
Faith is not blind confidence in the hereafter,
It is the will to live in the here and now;
Faith is not clinging to creedal assurance,
It is grasping the uncertain with conviction;
Faith is not confidence in salvation which lies beyond.
It is trust in the life which surrounds us here

Dick Gilbert, quoted in “Faith is a Verb.”

Fowler on Faith

“Anyone not about to kill himself lives by faith. It is what keeps us going when love has turned to hate or hope to despair. Faith carries us forward when there is no longer reason to carry on. It enables us to exist during the in between times: between meaning, amid dangers of radical discontinuity, even in the face of death. Faith is a sine qua non of life, a primal force we cannot do without.”

Fowler and Keen, Life Maps. P1

Adult Faith Stages

I am working through some ideas right now about faith development and adulthood. Mature faith is “Owned Faith,” according to John Westerhoff, and is often experienced as a kind of conversion of sorts after a period of searching and questioning.  When you take ownership of your faith, the belief and practices of your faith tradition are now important to you not because of family’s or society’s expectations but because of your personal commitment to God.

James Fowler talks about a mid-life stage of “Conjunctive” faith characterised  by moving beyond scriptural fundamentalism into a dialogue with the sacred texts, and by more focus on personal spirituality and morality than on religious leaders and religious rituals.  For Fowler there is still one more stage of faith development beyond the Conjunctive stage, however, and that is the “Universalizing” stage.  In this the most mature stage of faith we move beyond the boundaries of a particular faith tradition and accept that God’s Truth is a universal reality. Fowler admits that this “Universalizing” faith stage  is experienced by very, very few people, in fact the examples he gives are mostly historical figures not contemporary people, so he cannot interview them. 

Is it not possible that these men are  placing their own personal faith lens over their investigations and reflections? For Fowler, whose interest is in the relationship between psychology and theology, faith is not even necessarily religious in nature, it is about ultimate meaning. While Westerhoff’s Owned style of faith is much more common among people in faith communities, people like the divinity students he educated for decades, and the members of the church he ministered at.

So, my question is, what are these theories missing?  What experiences did these men not take into account? Are there other stages of styles of faith? Why do I feel I don’t fit?

I didn’t know these were the questions I had until I read an article by Richard Rohr, “Don’t Miss the Second Half”  that distinguishes between two halves of life. He talks about a second stage of life precipitated by a “stumbling block,”  a crisis in which one’s world falls apart, a situation you cannot control, fix or understand. According to Rohr it is only now that true spirituality begins, “Up to that point is all just preparation.”  Well I guess I am prepared. But this stumbling block doesn’t necessarily lead to spirituality, it depends on “whether you deal with your suffering in secular space or sacred space.” I can understand all this intellectually, but I don’t see this experience as lucky, which is a word Rohr uses, and I don’t believe in a God who would “lead me here.” However, I am very clear on one point: If I can’t find God in the suffering in my life, then I can’t find God. So maybe my stage of faith is somewhere on the fence between the first half and the second half of my faith life.

Evidence for God

The New Orleans Saints are in the Superbowl…!!!

Couldn’t resist a little humor!

Preaching to Bishops

This week in Commonweal is a one page opinion piece, written by a funeral director, that contains the most succinct criticism of Catholic bishops that I  have read to date. The egregious behavior of the bishops of Dublin is contrasted to the religious ministers from various faith traditions with whom he has worked, who ” bring a brave and sacred narrative to bear on the existential questions” raised when a loved one dies. The best part, though, is the opener…

“Preaching to bishops,” a long-dead churchman told me years ago, “is like farting at skunks. You’ll win some battles, but lose the war.” All the more so, no doubt, the higher you go. His Holiness, Their Eminences and Excellencies—“Don’t cross ’em,” the curate cautioned; “those boyos aren’t to be tampered with.”

Catholicism doesn’t bring much humor into my life, so I am extraordinarily grateful for the laugh Thomas Lynch gave me, and I am happy to share it. But don’t stop here, check out the whole piece.

Preaching to Bishops, Commonweal Magazine, January 15, 2010.

Women of the Wall

Apparently it is not only in the Catholic Church that women face interrogation and injustice.  Read this news item on the Union of Reform Judaism website.

 Women of the Wall

In recent months, Israeli police have increased pressure on Women of the Wall, a progressive monthly prayer group that meets at the Western Wall. Read responses from the Reform Movement on the interrogation of group leader and IRAC director Anat Hoffman.

Forgiving the Church

I found the following quote on a number of 0ther www sites and I finally tracked down the book from which it originated. The idea of needing the Church makes sense to me only in the broad sense of needing a community with whom one can reflect on and share one’s faith journey. But does this mean also accepting the hierarchical structures of the Church?  I don’t think so, until the heirarchy owns the fact that it is indeed part of a sinful, fallible, human community, and I don’t hear them preaching that message.

Daily Meditation: October 27
by Henri Nouwen; from Bread for the Journey, Harper Collins, New York, 1997

Forgiving the Church

When we have been wounded by the Church, our temptation is to reject it. But when we reject the Church it becomes very hard for us to keep in touch with the living Christ.

When we say, “I love Jesus, but I hate the Church,” we end up losing not only the Church but Jesus too. The challenge is to forgive the Church. This challenge is especially great because the Church seldom asks us for forgiveness, at least not officially.

But the Church as an often fallible human organization needs our forgiveness, while the Church as the living Christ among us continues to offer us forgiveness.

It is important to think about the Church not as “over there” but as a community of struggling, weak people of whom we are part and in whom we meet our Lord and Redeemer.

Renegade priests or honest men?

“The San Francisco Chronicle reported yesterday that a group of 20 “renegade” Catholic priests have left the RC Church because of celibacy requirements. The article states that the group consists of both of men who have married and those who want to be free to marry. What strikes me is the men’s openness and willingness to leave because of this issue. In areas where celibacy is seen as a harmful counter-cultural value, the rate at which men take de facto wives and raise families is quite high. These guys could almost certainly have lived any way they wanted and gotten away with it. Perhaps instead of calling them “renegade,” the report should call them ‘honest.’….”

Commonweal Blog,
January 2, 2010,  Lisa Fullam

This posting on the Commonweal blog has created a very active response. I found quite interesting a reference to Paul’s First letter to the Corinthians, 9:5 “Do we not have the right to bring along a Christian wife, as do the rest of the Apostles, and the Lord’s brothers, and Cephas?” This verse does not appear in the Lectionary. That is an issue I am only recently attuned to: the selectivity involved in the Lectionary. And if Catholics continue to rely on the Lectionary for their knowledge of scripture then they will remain in ignorance of the fullness of the Word of God.

Wise men?

Vigil mass, packed Cathedral, boy-choir, all male readers, all male celebrants. Too bad women are not capable of reading the Word of God.  Too bad there are no women who have experienced a calling to the priesthood in the Catholic Church. Or if they have it isn’t really a calling because we all know that the Holy Spirit is not experienced by women. Divine inspiration is only recognised by the all male clergy if it is received by another male. Convenient system! Women who claim such a calling must be crazy or heretical or both. They need to be silenced and threatened with ex-communication. But at least we get to arrange the flowers.

And in the US and Ireland, priests have been doing such a good job of being guided by the Holy Spirit, haven’t they. We would be hard pressed to find one let alone three wise men in the Catholic heirarchy right now! Three men who would put financial security, personal ambition, comfort and public reputation aside to follow their faith (and a star) into foreign territory and an uncertain future, who would give up all their worldly riches to serve God’s plan.

Then I think of wise Catholic woman like Edwina Gately and my hope is restored.

Cosmic Religion

“To the modern man, religion can no longer be a matter of entering into a relationship with the supernatural. The only kind of religion that can help him live and get the most out of life will be the one which will teach him to identify as divine or holy whatever in human nature or in the world about him enhances human life. Men must no longer look upon God as a reservoir of magic power to be tapped whenever they are afraid of their physical limitations.”  

“Without faith that the world of nature is a cosmos and not a chaos, that it has intelligible laws which can be unravelled, and that the human reason offers us an instrument capable of unravelling them, then no scientific theorizing would be possible. This is another way of saying hat science cannot dispense with what Einstein has appropriately names “cosmic religion,” the faith that nature is meaningful and hence divine.”

                 Mordecai Kaplan, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion.

Profound words I was reading tonight when my husband told me the news story of a woman seeing the image of Mary on her Thanksgiving breakfast pancake. I don’t think Kaplan had that in mind when he said we need to identify the divine in the world. But it strikes a chord with my current musings. There are intellectuals who can relate to the ideas of great thinkers like Kaplan and Einstein and find in their writings rational support for belief in God. Then there are people for whom faith is not a matter of academic debate but an intuitive sense that God is real and that even things like pancakes can be mediators of “The Holy.” Whether the image on the food product is the result of burnt butter or not doesn’t matter to them. It is a reminder of what they already know to be true: God is in all things.

So I ask myself, are intellectuals arrogantly supposing that their path to “meaning” is the only valid one? Why do we laugh at the simple faith of ordinary people?  In the end does it matter whether one comes to God through academic theology or piety? Isn’t it all about how we live and love, about what kind of “footprint” we leave on the planet?  The woman who saw Mary in her pancake didn’t come to faith because of a breakfast food, she came to breakfast with her faith already firm and with eyes willing to see reminders of holiness and giving thanks for what is really important in her life on Thanksgiving: spending time with family and friends.