On Keeping Faith

The Flying Cow Tavern (where they launch sacred cows in the trebuchet of conversation) has recently had a thread going on how one loses faith.

I think that I want to write a manual for losing your faith: it has to be done delicately.

Here are a few reflections on it sparked by that thread.

I think that a lot of confusion comes from a misunderstanding of what faith really is.

Imagine a boy and a girl falling in love.

They experience all the magic and beauty of the thing. They say the things that people in love feel. They feel the universe to be this living, vibrant, magical, miraculous thing together.

They are putting their faith in this experience, breathlessly.

And they are changing. They grow, they are energetic, they read together, they share ideas, they are shaped by this faith and this thing that possesses them and which they possess.

They say things to one another: they make promises that they intend to keep... that is they keep faith with one another.

What are those promises to? The future? Or to reverence this particular moment?

It's awfully hard to sort that out sometimes. Religious experiences, like love affairs, are not always easy to untangle in terms of the future. You can move beyond a religious experience that you once thought as permanent, as we move beyond the love affairs we thought were forever. And in some ways it's not breaking faith with those experiences: we reverenced them for what they were, not knowing what we ourselves would become.

But you know how these things go. The summer is over and our couple has to go back to school where they don't share the same classes, and for awhile they keep up the pretense that things were what they were. But now they are different.

How do you "keep faith" with that moment once it's gone?

I'm not sure there's a right answer for that, only your answer.

Such moments have no purpose but themselves (otherwise we wouldn't experience them as we do), but we give them purpose by the ways in which we keep faith with them, or don't.

Imagine that the girl meets a cool older boy who plays quarterback in her history class, and she, wiser about who she is and what the shape of her life is because of her summer love, goes on to make a good life with him. She'll never forget her summer love, because they have (in the biblical phrase) "carved their names upon each others' palms."

Imagine that the boy in that case never gives up believing that that summer love was forever, and grows old believing in it. His answer then is different from hers... truly then they are divided. But they are both keeping faith in their different ways.

Or imagine that the couple marries. Slowly, they change, as married couples do, rubbed this way and that by the difficulties and joys of married life. In thirty years (or even three) they are not the same as they were. They aren't the carefree kids that fell in love. Yet they have kept faith with a moment, in the same way, with that moment, and resolved that they will not grow or change so much that that summer ceases to unite them as a couple.

I think that religious experience, like falling in love must be largely about how you will incorporate something you know is real now into what you will become.

And I think it's possible to fake a faith, or to lose a faith in that experience. It's possible also to have a passionate and boundlessly hopeful faith in that experience.

I do not, however, think those are your only two options, as some sorts of religious people frequently allege.

I think that there's an implicit threat in religions that, having experienced an emotional, spiritual truth, you will never move from that spot. And I think it's a mistake to think that moving on past that moment is breaking faith with it.  To some degree, that's confusing what the theologians distinguish: "the faith by which one believes" with the "faith that is believed," that is, the propositional content of your belief.   And I guess if you're totally committed to that propositional content, you have to stake your spot there and remain.

It might be so: but I don't think it has to be.

And it might be helpful to think of it this way: many denominations impose the assumption that your adherence to the truth as they see it and have it must impose some sort of upward limit on your spiritual growth. That is, they must say, "Make covenant with us that you will not grow beyond this moment, or if you do that you will grow in relationship with us." There is some powerful good that can come from such a covenant, just as there is powerful good in covenanting in marriage that you won't grow past a certain point in relationship with a spouse, though it limits your personal growth in some ways.

But it's not necessarily the case that it has to be that way. You can regard such spiritual truths as signpost on your own way.

Just to take a random example, you might go to a church that has enormous love and regular miracles. Such a period in your life would be deeply meaningful, and if you haven't been part of such a church, I hope you find one, at least for a time.

But when something in you looks around and says, "This also is Thou, and this also is not Thou," and it's time to move on, you do not necessarily break faith with that experience by moving beyond it.

You MIGHT be breaking faith with those you covenanted with in that period. And that's no small thing: love itself gets a little annoyed with you when you do that (I speak from personal experience). So be careful what you promise, and to whom. Unless God is coextensive with a religious experience that clearly isn't working for you now (and God is not, I think, coextensive with any such experience or structure), it's not worth signing up for that life-term commitment anyway.  Maybe it is... but it'd better be stable.  But it's your own choice.

But don't be afraid of the fact that faith is itself not a static thing. Faith changes its shape. It's rarely the same twice: those two kids in the summer sun will be lucky if they feel those things twice in a lifetime, but they would be foolish to try. Those moments are given so we will grow, and our memory sometimes is as much a part of our faith as the dull consciousness of the present moment.

Comments

[Debbie]

I can't get this post out of my head. I love the analogy, and it's comforting to see ones faith as flexible, but I also wonder at what point you redefine it so much that it becomes unrecognizable.

In the churches I grew up in, I was taught that "head knowledge" is not real faith, whereas "heart knowledge" saves. It used to make sense to me, but now, not so much.

Why must the two be antithetical? What would be the purpose in teaching something like this? It seems a little like a set-up for faith crisis to me. (But, maybe that's my cynicism speaking.)

If it's all about heart knowledge, what happens after the honeymoon is over and the feelings of faith wane? What are we left with except intellectual agreement (which we've already been told is a false faith) and the ability to choose our actions (which we've been told we suck at, bein' children of Adam and all...)?

Makes it kinda hard to recognize the redefined faith as real faith when it's previously been defined so narrowly, or even incorrectly.

[IJR]

Among the painful dimensions of recognizing that it's time to move on is that it causes such rifts in families and other long-standing relationships. Such a recognition in one person can so often be seen as a betrayal, a moral failure with eternal consequences, by those not making that recognition. My sister and I have arrived at places now where there's not much common ground for us to discuss where our spiritual journies have taken us.

And in very different ways, my wife's grandfather was very much of a mindset that "moving on" from experiences and convictions he had, which trace back to the Welsh revival at the beginning of the 20th century, was entirely unconscionable.

Living with those divergences, even without needing or wanting to pass judgment, hurts.

[Otter]

Debbie:

I can't get this post out of my head. I love the analogy, and it's comforting to see ones faith as flexible, but I also wonder at what point you redefine it so much that it becomes unrecognizable.

I think that's a great question that every person has to define for him- or herself.

In the churches I grew up in, I was taught that "head knowledge" is not real faith, whereas "heart knowledge" saves. It used to make sense to me, but now, not so much.

Why must the two be antithetical?

I think that for some evangelicals, this is a way of explaining to themselves and each other why a person can profess the right things and still not be up to their standards of behavior, or to pass whatever the local smell-test is.

Others, more sensibly, acknowledge that it's quite possible to "know" a thing without embracing it. (See the Book of James, for instance.) And for such as these, "Heart-knowledge" is a sort of code for "approval, acceptance." I think the idea there is that if you don't embrace the idea (or person of Jesus or whatever) you haven't really got knowledge. And so those who accept it sort of elevate their "knowledge" above the unfaithful person's.

If you think about it, that's sort of how all trends, fads, and faiths work: we talk about people "in the know," in the inner circle, those who really get it.

The question of whether there's really something there to get, or whether it's worth the trouble of having an inner heart-knowledge circle or not, is a different question.

Personally, I think that Christians who believe in heart-knowledge sometimes have a good case. They have had experiences that many others have not. They are "in the know" about these things.

But I do think that very often they think that knowledge is of some value that it might not actually have. And in a lot of cases it can lead one to believe that there are not other, perhaps even better, things to know. The apostle Paul makes this point in many places, most notably with reference to spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12 and 13: knowledge, he says, puffs up. Love builds up.

How interesting if those who believed in heart-knowledge were to be asked, "Do you have head-love or heart-love?"

A quick look at their canceled checks and daily planners could answer that one, but answering the question of who has heart-knowledge is a little more difficult.

[Susan R]

I came across this quote by Joyce Carol Oates today . . .

“What is ‘art’ but the effort of giving permanent form—in language, in painting, sculpture, music—to those elemental forces in our lives, those passions, hurts, triumphs, and mysteries that have no permanence otherwise, and so require art to be known at all?”

. . . and thought of this post on faith.

Perhaps (I have not yet thought this through very thoroughly) faith, or fidelity, is also a way of “giving permanent form” to our relationship to truth, to God, to others—a way of anchoring ourselves, not to a fixed point, but to a fixed Person. Without that fidelity, I do think that the elemental forces pass over us in chaos, and cannot be “known.”

I agree that faith is not static—all living things grow and change and develop, and if my faith is not dynamic, it is probably plain ol’ dead.

Regarding your response, Otter, to Debbie:

... it's comforting to see ones faith as flexible, but I also wonder at what point you redefine it so much that it becomes unrecognizable.

I think that's a great question that every person has to define for him- or herself.

There is no question that we can and do define and live out faith, each according to our own light. But if I define (one aspect of) marital faithfulness rather conventionally as “I won’t have sex with anyone but my husband” and he defines it more creatively as “I will have sex with many women but my wife will always have a ‘special place in my heart’”—well, it seems that the word “faith” has become functionally meaningless in our communication.

Without a common denotation for vocabulary, the English language itself becomes useless. I’d make a strong argument that, quite apart from the flexible nature of faith, there is a very practical breaking point in the flexibility of the WORD "faith." Language itself lives and changes and flexes to some degree, but I don’t think you can escape the fact that at some point it just snaps and you're left with incoherent debris. Better to put the creativity into finding the common words that express one's meaning than to insist that the words themselves encompass broader meanings than convention dictates.

[Otter]

Susan, great stuff. I love the Oates-quotes.

There is no question that we can and do define and live out faith, each according to our own light. But if I define (one aspect of) marital faithfulness rather conventionally as “I won’t have sex with anyone but my husband” and he defines it more creatively as “I will have sex with many women but my wife will always have a ‘special place in my heart’”—well, it seems that the word “faith” has become functionally meaningless in our communication.

Yeah, and I think this is why I caution above that how one makes covenant is sort of important. You can't "keep faith" with another person solipsistically. You have to have some sort of clarity between you about who is in and for how much.