Busload
of Faith
Rev.
Ron Sala
Unitarian Universalist Society in
Stamford
January
27, 2002
Once
upon a time, a drought threatened the crop in a village of Crete. The
priest told his flock: "There isn't anything that will save us,
except a special litany for rain. Go to your homes, fast during the
week, believe, and come on Sunday for the litany of rain." The
villagers heard him, fasted during the week and went to the church on
Sunday morning, but as soon as the priest saw them, he was furious.
He said, "Go away, I will not do the litany. You do not believe."
"But Father," they protested, "we fasted and we believe."
"Believe? And where are your umbrellas?"
If
only the mysterious thing called “faith” were quite as simple as that
story implies! Just believe enough and what you want to happen will
happen. The story assumes a) a God and b) a God who decides whether
or not to send rain to Cretan villages when certain litanies are believed
in.
I
suppose the tragic note that underlies much comedy is in this case the
frustration we feel living in a world where sometimes the rain still
doesn’t come no matter how much we believe.
Lou
Reed, in his classic 1989 album New York, takes a more blunt
view of the world we live in in a song called, “Busload of Faith.” A
sample of the lyrics:
You can’t depend on your family
You can’t depend on your friends
You can’t depend on a beginning
You can’t depend on an end
You can’t depend on intelligence
You can’t depend on God
You can only depend on one
thing
You need a Busload of Faith
to get by.
Reed
goes on to mention a wide variety of things that mock our faith in God
or a higher meaning and the goodness of other people: murder, rape,
the Holocaust, the materialism of the churches. And he wrote the long
before the extraordinary tragedies of last year.
The
song ends with the verse:
You can’t depend on no miracle
You can’t depend on the air
You can’t depend on a wise
man
You can’t find them cause they’re
not there
You can depend on cruelty
Crudity
of thought and sound
You can depend on the worst
always happening
You need a Busload of Faith
to get by
What
juxtaposition between the verses and the chorus! (Reminiscent, perhaps,
of Greek tragedy). There’s so much wrong with the world, so much cruelty,
so much senseless violence. And yet, Lou Reed seems to say, that the
very pain we experience in connecting with the world around us is a
call for us to have more faith, not less. In fact, we need a busload!
This
“Busload of Faith” idea, whether invented by Reed or not, seems, I recently
discovered on the Internet, to have taken on lives as the title of a
play, the name of a band, the hook in a news article about tensions
in the Southern Baptist Convention, and a word of encouragement, as
in “So best of luck, and a busload of faith!”
What
is this thing called faith? Is it something that only some have or everyone?
Do you have to believe in God to have faith? Is it the same thing as
a set of beliefs? Those are some of the questions the
Our UU Story class struggled with Thursday night. We discussed
the ideas of theologian Paul Tillich who said that faith involves three
important aspects.
Part
of faith, according to Tillich, is a set of beliefs, the mental part
of faith. We all go through life having experiences and reflecting on
them, whether we are conscious of this cycle or not. To paraphrase Nietzsche,
we are all greater theologians than we realize. We all form a set of
beliefs as we attempt to make sense of what happens.
Another
part of faith, says Tillich, is emotional. Can we trust in the workings
of God or the Universe? Can we trust other people and ourselves? Can
we harmonize our desires and self-interest with our beliefs and ideals?
A
third part of faith, Tillich declares, is behavioral. What do we do
in the world? How do we put our beliefs into practice? How do we treat
others who may be similar or different from ourselves? Each of us has
some typical way of acting. What we do is far better an indication of
our faith than what we say we believe.
Though
it wasn’t part of the class, Tillich said there was another part of
faith: doubt. Tillich said, “Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it
is one element of faith.” “Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is
one element of faith.” How many of us were brought up learning to feel
guilty about our doubts? Or perhaps your religious upbringing tolerated
some momentary doubt as long as it led back to the safe worldview of
your particular tribe.
We
Unitarian Universalists try “do” doubt more than guilt. We understand,
perhaps better than many others, the value of doubt. For by doubting,
even for a moment, our acquired view of the world, we open to ourselves
new vistas. By doing so we find more ever more ways to sustain and live
out our faith. As UU minister Arthur Curtis put it,
In
trying to explain “faith” to my congregation I search for synonyms other
than “belief”, and rely particularly on “trust”. Faith, it seems to
me, is built on all those elements of life that we rely on to sustain
us and carry us forward: family, friends, good habits, science, sunsets,
Bach… [Curtis goes on:] On the whole UU’s are fortunate enough to have
such spiritual anchors in many directions, so we need not depend on
one “rock of ages”. I say to UU’s: “you have more faith than most people.
You don’t need the crutch of a creed or a single saviour.”
The
Polish poet and aphorist Stanislaw Lec said, quite reasonably, “To believe
with certainty, we must begin with doubting.” That makes sense, doesn’t
it? For centuries, no one doubted Aristotle’s physics. As a consequence,
discovery in the physical sciences was brought to a near-standstill
in comparison with the time when Aristotle would be questioned and shown
to be quite wrong on a number of points. It was the doubting of previous
solutions that was the catalyst for an opening of the imagination.
And
so it was during the periods that Newton’s and then Einstein’s theories
would be surpassed by newer generations of theoreticians. Indeed, scientific
theory often takes generations to make radical shifts in viewpoint as
it is the tendency of older scientists to hold dogmatically to the theories
of their youth. Arthur C. Clarke, author of
2001: A Space Odyssey, in the first of Clarke’s Laws, says,
"When a distinguished
but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost
certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is
very probably wrong."
Clarke defines the adjective
'elderly' as :"In physics, mathematics and astronautics it means
over thirty; in other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed
to the forties. There are of course, glorious exceptions; but as every
researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good
for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out
of the laboratory."1
I
don’t imagine that Arthur Clarke, who is round about 85 and still vital,
would apply this age barrier to writers. And when it comes to theologians,
among which I account all of you, since you’ve signaled at least a passing
interest in the subject by the fact that you’re here this morning …
among theologians it is said that they don’t reach their prime until
70. So all of us here are probably either around our prime or have that
to look forward to. That’s a support for faith!
The
late James Gleick writes about this phenomenon of resistance to doubt
in his bestselling book, Chaos: Making a New Science. Gleick
writes, “Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people
to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.” Elsewhere,
he writes about Einstein’s famous declaration that “The Lord God does
not play dice.” Einstein made that statement in reaction to the new
science that began to appear in his day, Quantum Physics, which began
to describe the universe in quite different ways than he was used to.
Eventually, Joseph Ford, speaking from the standpoint of Chaos theory,
a gift of the late twentieth century, would answer Einstein. “God does
play dice,” Ford said, “But they’re loaded dice.” You see, since Newton’s
time science has gone from presenting a cosmos of absolute space and
time, with definite laws, and total predictability to one that is relative,
uncertain, and unpredictable.
Philosophy,
the arts, and theology all have a way of following the lead of the physical
sciences. It’s getting harder and harder to believe we live in an Enlightenment
world of 200 years ago with a world governed by a God of absolute power
and perfection, who has set the creation on its predictable way, and
knows how it will all turn out. Today, we are coming appreciate the
inherent chaos of everything around us.
For
instance, in what scientists call, “The Butterfly Effect,” extremely
small changes in the initial conditions of a system can have huge consequences.
The illustration that gives the Butterfly Effect its name is the idea
that a butterfly flapping its wings in Mexico could impact storm systems
in China two months from now.
In
one sense, that’s a scary thought. The universe is so indescribably
complex that there’s really no way of predicting just what it will do
next. Perhaps not even God, provided there is one, can or is willing
to look through this unpredictability.
Rabbi
Harold Kushner, in his excellent book,
When Bad Things Happen to Good People, writes about the intense
fear we may feel at the prospect of a world where things
just happen by random chance. It is more comforting for many
people to believe in an all-controlling God, no matter how inscrutable
or seemingly cruel that God’s actions may be, than to believe that things
happen for no reason. I think Rabbi Kushner is on to something when
he contends that the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”
as inevitable and as human as it is, misses the point. A more useful
question, he reasons, is “Now that something bad has happened to me,
what do I do now?” For me, living out the answer to that question is
faith. Since faith is really the way we live our lives, day by day,
struggling, reasoning, loving, acting with compassion, making meaning
and hope, our faith never reaches its final form until the day we die.
Perhaps, as reincarnationists like my wife assert, it doesn’t end even
there. Perhaps God, or whatever name you choose for the underlying order
of the universe, does not make everything happen but is a source for
us when we would improve our lives and “grow our souls.”
In
April, you’ll have the chance to hear one of the great minister-makers
of our denomination, the Rev. Bruce Southworth, who will preach my installation
sermon from this pulpit. I don’t know how many men and women have gone
straight to seminary after spending time at the Community Church of
New York where Bruce preaches. I spent the early 90’s sitting in the
balcony there listening to him talk about the preciousness of life,
of the need for acting compassionately toward our fellow beings, of
the inherent worth each of us shares despite our outer circumstances.
All of this communicated to me a sense of faith. He convinced me that
having everything figured out was not the most important thing. In fact,
even if we could do it, it would probably end up being pretty boring.
Rather, the important thing was to continue journeying, growing, experiencing
life and love boldly and with savor. I began to sense the value of developing
a basic sense of trust in the way things are—without ever knowing what
they’ll be next.
The
science of Chaos, in a way, supports having a basic sense of faith.
Though the phenomena we see around us—clouds forming and dissipating,
waves crashing on the beach, snowflakes building themselves crystal
by crystal—are extremely chaotic in the short run, they do have, at
the same time, a general predictability in the long run. All these natural
systems involve basic patterns that follow universal principles. In
fact, scientists have demonstrated similar types of order-in-chaos in
places as seemingly disparate as growing trees, the undulations of coastlines,
and our own brains and lungs. We are all connected—with each other,
with nature, with the astronomically large and the infinitesimally small—in
ways that we can hardly imagine. As Max Ehrmann’s famous poem, “Desiderata,”
says,
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and
the
stars.
You have a right to be here.
And whether it is clear to you or not,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Just
as I credit everyone who comes through these red doors as being a theologian,
so I credit you with faith. It is faith that draws each of us here,
believing that a deeper and richer life is possible, believing that
community heals us, believing that we can make a difference in the way
things are. John Updike, who has often criticized and lampooned organized
religion, has also made a more complimentary observation:
All church services [Updike
writes] have this wonderful element: People with other things to do
get up on a Sunday morning, put on good clothes and assemble out of
nothing but faith—some vague yen toward something larger. Simply as
a human gathering I find it moving, reassuring and even inspiring. A
church is a little like a novel in that both are saying there's something
very important about being human.2
In
the words of Lou Reed, you need a Busload of Faith to get by. May you
find some fellow riders here….
All
aboard!
1
http://www.cofc.edu/~huntc/2thursday5.htm
2
U.S. News & World Report (Oct. 20, 1986).