Faith: You Gotta Believe!

Rev. Abhi Janamanchi

October 12, 2008

This morning I wanted to reflect on the question of how it is possible to maintain faith in times like these. I wonder if our country has ever lived through as stressful and demoralizing a period as the present. To be sure, there have been previous economic panics, downturns, and depressions, and also periods of wild inflation. But they have never before coincided, giving us severe recession with high unemployment, inflation, and financial market meltdown simultaneously. Never before have they impacted adversely the global financial markets from Australia to Asia to Europe to S. America. And they have never before come at a time when peoples' expectations and demands of society ran so high and their confidence in leaders ran so low. Never before has such blatant corruption and corporate greed permeated so completely not only in the public but the private sector, with major financial institutions and their executives standing accused of making billions of dollars by cooking the books. And never before has there been a situation where our nation found itself mortgaged to other nations.

Our families are being rent apart as people battle to find a job in a diminishing work market, cling desperately to hold on to their homes, watch with horror as their retirement savings and college funds evaporate before their eyes, while their children sit transfixed before the Great Indoctrinator of our time - TV.

We tremble as we see the world economy teeter-totter, whole nations like Iceland on the brink of bankruptcy. We seem to feel, as Americans, no longer energetic, idealistic, and optimistic, but cynical, selfish, and somehow lost.

So how can we have faith in a time like this? And can the faith of yesterday be somehow restored?

Despite the anxiety inherent in such facts as I have just shared, I think we all, in our deepest hearts, know that somehow we must generate the faith to live by; we need to believe. Not the faith of yesterday, which was good enough for yesterday, but a faith precisely for times such as these. As human beings, we must have faith! Life cannot go on, or go forward, sparked by pessimism, cynicism, hopelessness, and despair. Whatever our problems, however complex and unwieldy, opaque and dangerous; whatever the trends or degree of disintegration, we have to believe that we can do something about them. We have to believe in ourselves, in each other, and in our collective ability to create a better future. We gotta have faith!

When I say, "we gotta have faith," I don't mean that we need to cling to a dogma beyond evidence or in spite of all the evidence or to have no doubts whatsoever or to blindly believe that everything will be okay or that we will all be saved. We cannot be like the disciple in an ancient Indian story who heard his guru say, "God is everywhere and in everything. If you believe in that, no harm will ever come to you." So, the disciple went around the countryside repeating it like a mantra when he encountered a mad elephant running rampant through a village. The villagers were running helter-skelter but the disciple kept on walking towards the elephant secure that nothing would happen. The villagers yelled at him to step off the road but he didn't listen. The elephant grabbed him with its trunk and flung him against a tree. After a time of recuperation, the disciple went to his guru and angrily demanded an explanation. The guru replied, "Alas, my son, I wish you had paid attention to God who was yelling at you through all those villagers to get out of the way!"

So where do we begin? We must learn to separate the dynamic of faith from its content. We all have faith, to a greater or lesser degree, but for each of us the focus of that faith may be different.^[1]

As the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber put it:

"Real faith means holding ourselves open to the unconditional mystery which we encounter in every sphere of our life, and which cannot be compressed in any formula."^[2]

Being faithful need not necessarily mean that we compromise our intelligence or our critical abilities. It can, in fact, help us understand why we are committed to some values more than others and allow us to establish and fulfill meaningful priorities.

So then, what is faith?

Faith is what you put your trust in. It is your allegiances. It is the promise you make that you really try to keep. Faith is those few convictions in which you have confidence, confidence even when the facts are not all in or in the face of daunting tragedy or sickening anxiety or serious financial hardship. Faith is something that's with you even in the midst of your confusion, anger, grief and also in your moments of triumph and ecstasy. Faith is reaching toward and connecting with that which is greater than ourselves and recognizing that there is an underlying oneness in the multiplicity we perceive and struggle against.

When all seems to fall away or is taken away from us, we fall back upon this faith to take us through the painful, confused, or difficult valleys in our life. Faith gives us the energy, trust, and inspiration to face those places and to awaken to their truths rather than running from them.

Our faith is a verb; it's a matter of being and doing. But it's not without doubts: in fact, our faith is based on learning to live with and work our way through our doubts.

We Unitarian Universalists feel that a faith which makes God or, for that matter, government responsible when we ourselves should feel responsible is not only a failure of nerve, a cop-out, but a lie. We think a faith which condemns the human species as 'lumps of sin' in the hands of an arbitrary, condemning, capricious, and vengeful deity is not only wrong but a colossal waste of time. No doubt it is reassuring to many to have a divine parent in whom to entrust the future. It is a great relief to excuse natural and human failures as divine necessity or human futility. However, this reassurance and relief remain short lived and are ultimately dead ends in the quest for maturity of thought and the realities of life.

This type of faith does not always come easily. Many times, it can be a struggle. In fact, it is far easier to be "faith-less" than "faith-ful" as my colleague Suzanne Meyer observes:

"My faith is many things to me, but it is seldom much of a comfort. It functions more like a sharp stick that pokes at my conscience most of the time... It is what moves me to speak when I would rather keep silent, to act when I'd rather sit on the sidelines, a not-so-innocent bystander. A faith that is too comfortable or too comforting is liable to be dangerous."^[3]

I agree with her. My own faith - faith in marriage, in the religious institution I serve, in the nation I make my home today and the one I was born in, in the principles of democracy, free market economics, justice, peace, and equality, in the future of the planet - have often been shaken. But somehow through it all, I have managed to 'keep the faith.'

First of all, we must not simply close our eyes to all of these troubles that surround us. Let's face it, folks. By closing our eyes or turning the page, these troubles are not going to go away. It would be worse than nothing for us to try to ignore them, and simply imagine they aren't there. "Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil," may work for monkeys. It sure won't for humans! Any adequate faith can be based only on the knowledge that we have taken the full measure of the problems with which we are confronted. Whether it is the global economy, or the national economy, or the church, or our own, let us face it, however terrifying or complex it may be.

At the same time, let us not fall into the trap of exaggerating the problems out of all proportion to their reality - and this is precisely what the mass media tend to do. If a husband murders his wife, it's big news. But if he is a decent, kind, loving husband, you'll never hear of it. The plain fact is if it is good, it isn't news, so we get the impression that everything is going to pieces when, as a matter of fact, most people seem to be getting along fairly well despite the troubles around them. In other words, we must learn to hold the media at arm's length, for they tend to hype up the anxiety and give an erroneous impression, and in this day and age the media dominate a major portion of our waking time.

Third, the present crisis is as much a crisis of confidence as it is of leadership and economic mismanagement from both sides of the political aisle, Wall Street, and Main Street folks. Most of the problems we are confronted with are solvable. The thing we have to fear, as FDR said, is fear itself. Fear has paralyzed the credit markets. Fear is making investors jittery. Now, I am not saying that other things are not involved. But lack of confidence is playing a significant role. And, lack of appreciation and gratitude. Appreciation is a spiritual lubricant which allows the gears of life to turn more easily. It is a balm which can counter balance a multitude of transgressions. Appreciation is, unfortunately, in short supply. It is a spiritual discipline that we all ought to practice more often.

Fourthly, if we are to have restoration of faith, we must have a rebirth of leadership. A complaint that's become increasingly common in recent years is that the world and particularly, the United States, suffers from a dearth of effective leadership. Where, today, can we find the political equivalent of a Lincoln, a Roosevelt, or a Churchill, we are asked; or the ethical counterpart of a Mahatma Gandhi, a Martin Luther King, or a Mother Teresa; an environmentalist of the stature of a John Muir or Rachel Carson; an economist as formidable as John Maynard Keynes; a philosopher with as much influence as Emerson, a social reformer as courageous as Dorothy Day, or a scientist with as much prophetic insight as an Einstein? These men and women were more than over-achievers in their various fields, and the general public looked up to and admired them because they exhibited not only expertise but moral authority, dignity, and guidance.

We need to choose leaders in whom we can have faith, and it often takes something like an act of faith to choose them. We don't have to set aside reason and skepticism while choosing our leaders though.

And finally, we must cultivate a hardiness and depth of faith that is capable of surviving some inevitable disappointment. People are never perfect, and life's situations are often frustrating, but I believe most people are mostly good and life, despite the evidence, is still worth living. In any case, people and life are more likely to be good if we actively expect them to be!

This is why no matter how troubled our age may seem to be, no matter how corrupt and greedy and mendacious and hateful and confused and crumbling people seem to be, we can still have faith. We can still have hope. We can still have love. We can still believe in the integrity of each individual human being. We can still celebrate this life and this world. We can see its pain and tragedy but know also its joy and beauty. We can still support the great endeavors of human culture, and not turn our backs on experiments and risks. We can still strive actively to unite the process of science and wisdom of myth, the process of democracy and the realities of tradition, the process of technology, and the facts of human need.

We gotta believe that we can do this, and when we do, things will begin to get better. This doesn't mean that we haven't a long way to go. As of this moment our society is still crumbling, our unjust global economy is threatening to collapse, our families are still falling apart. But if we will do what we can, we shall rescue them all! And we human beings will climb the mountain of our present woes more and more together, -- singing a song of triumph.

We gotta believe!

Benediction - The Choice, Donna Faulds

Is it faith or fear

That rises to the fore,

Affirmation or negation

At the very core

And center of the self?

Will it be light or dark

Within the heart today?

The icy grip of fear

That knots and sours

Leaving me to cower

In the shadows.

There is another way - I know it surely as I

Know the scent of Spring.

The choice of faith

Invites, invokes, calls forth

From all creation

Both the blessing

And the lesson of the day.

Whether faith or fear,

The choice is mine alone.

Each moment, choosing,

Stepping through the door,

Trusting that the path

Beyond will surely lead me home.