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).



1