Oberlin Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
Order of Service -- October 2, 2005
“From Intention to Action,”
Cindy Frantz, service leader
This earthen chalice was born of clay and water, the flesh and blood of Gaia;
Given form by the hand of the potter;
Set by the bonding fire of the kiln.
As we touch the flame to her lips, joining fire and air,
May her light remind us of that unity
of earth, air, fire, and water,
of plant and animal, human and mineral,
that we and the earth are one. Edwin A. Lane
Story for All Ages:
Singing: “Go Now in Peace”
Go now in peace, stay if you please. May the light of love surround you everywhere, everywhere you may go.
Fellowship Covenant (read together)
We, the members and friends of the Oberlin Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, covenant to live together in our quest for truth, love, social justice, and environmental responsi-bility. In this spirit of caring fellowship, we offer our combined gifts and resources.
Joys and Concerns
Responsive Reading or other
Offertory:
Readings: “Transcendental Etude” by Adrienne Rich (#665 in Singing the Living Tradition)
No one ever told us we had to study our lives, make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history or music, that we should begin with the simple exercises first and slowly go on trying the hard ones. Practicing till strength and accuracy become one with the daring to leap into transcendence. And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on everything at once before we’ve even begun to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin in the midst of the hardest movement, the one already sounding as we are born.
“Introduction” to faith by Sharon Salzberg (pages xiii-xv)
“One day a friend called to ask if we could meet for tea. Knowing that I was writing a book on faith from the Buddhist perspective, she was confused and wanted to talk. “How can you possibly be writing a book on faith without focusing on God?” she demanded. “Isn’t that the whole point?” Her concern spoke to the common understanding we have of faith—that it is synonymous with religious adherence. But the tendency to equate faith with doctrine, and then argue about terminology and concepts, distracts us from what faith is actually about. In my understanding, whether faith is connected to a deity or not, its essence lies in trusting ourselves to discover the deepest truths on which we can rely.
For some this will be a very different approach to faith. Many link faith to narrow-minded belief systems, lack of intelligent examination, or pain at having one’s questions silenced. Faith might evoke images of submission to an external authority. Historically, the idea of faith has been used to slice cleanly between those who belong to a select group and those who do not. To fuel their own embittered agendas, fanatics harness what they call faith to hatred.
I want to invite a new use of the word faith, one that is not associated with a dogmatic religious interpretation or divisiveness. I want to…help reclaim faith as fresh, vibrant, intelligent, and liberating. This is a faith that emphasizes a foundation of love and respect for ourselves. It is a faith that uncovers our connection to others, rather than designating anyone as separate and apart.
Faith does not require a belief system, and is not necessarily connected to a deity or God, though it doesn’t deny one. This faith is not a commodity we either have or don’t have—it is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience.
The Buddha said, “Faith is the beginning of all good things.” No matter what we encounter in life, it is faith that enables us to try again, to trust again, to love again. Even in times of immense suffering, it is faith that enables us to relate to the present moment in such a way that we can go on, we can move forward, instead of becoming lost in resignation or despair. Faith links our present-day experience whether wonderful or terrible, to the underlying pulse of life itself.
A capacity for this type of faith is inherent in every human being. We might not recognize it or know how to nurture it, but we can learn to do both.”
Morning Message: DOUBT AND FAITH
Some months ago, I idly picked up this book faith in the little bookstore that Eric Stewart keeps at Sola Luna. Sharon Salzberg’s introduction hooked me at once. The book is Sharon’s story of her own journey, her discovery and nurturing of her own faith. At the same time, she presents an excellent overview of Buddhist beliefs and practices. The book has impressed me enough that I have been urging it on my children and want to share a bit of it with you this morning. I have realized more fully than ever why so many UU’s are also interested in Buddhism, or practice Buddhist discipline.
Let’s look again at what Sharon tells us faith is. The essence of faith lies in trusting ourselves to discover the deepest truths on which we can rely. Faith, fresh, vibrant, intelligent, and liberating, emphasizes a foundation of love and respect for ourselves. Faith also uncovers our connection to others. Faith, whether or not it is connected to a deity or God, is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience. Faith enables us to try again, trust again, to love again. Faith enables us to relate to the present moment in such a way that we can move forward, instead of becoming lost in resignation or despair, and links our present-day experience whatever it may be to the underlying pulse of life itself.
Buddhism asks us to trust in our ability to learn and to use a process that will help us to live with life’s inevitable pain and distress, gaining compassion, joy, insight and wisdom along the way. The Buddha, here, is not asking us to have faith in specific beliefs, but to understand faith as a process of trust. Thinking about faith in this way helped me to understand this old word in a new way. Faith is often used to mean a set of beliefs. But we have faith IN something. Faith in this sense, then, is a state of being.
According to Sharon, “The offering of one’s heart happens in stages, with shadings of hesitation and bursts of freedom. Faith evolves from the first intoxicating blush of what she calls bright faith to a faith that is verified through our doubting, questioning, and sincere effort to see the truth for ourselves. Bright faith steeps us in a sense of possibility; verified faith confirms our ability to make that possibility real. Then, as we come to deeply know the underlying truths of who we are and what our lives are about, abiding faith, or unwavering faith as it is traditionally called, arises.”
During bright faith, initial enthusiasm is often directed toward the teachings of a particular person. Bright faith can become, or be confused with, blind faith. She writes, “Bright faith, with its exhilarating sense of discovery, makes for a wonderful beginning to a spiritual journey. But it can make for a faltering middle if it’s all we have to count on, and for a bad end if we are unwilling to go deeper. Bright faith is necessary but not sufficient. Eventually that blaze of glorious feeling must be grounded and refined through some very hard work.”
Verifying faith is a crucial step where we validate through our own experience what we have previously only seen or heard about. We need to learn to trust our own experience of truth rather than trust an abstract tradition or authority. “…in Buddhism,…, faith grows only as we question what we are told, as we try teachings out by putting them into practice to see if they really make a difference in our own lives.” It is important to question, to doubt, and do as the Buddha himself said, “See for yourself if it is true.”
Sharon writes eloquently, There is essential questioning that must be brought to any belief system. “Can it transform our minds? Can it help reshape our pain into wisdom and love? When we grapple with the truth of our experience in relationship to our beliefs, we have the chance to deepen our faith. Does our experience match the belief system or not? If not, we can let the belief go. If it does, we can trust it as our own.”
I hope this approach to doubt, verification and self-discovery sounds familiar to a lot of us. Robert Weston’s “Cherish Your Doubts” that we just read is a strong statement of these convictions. His writing is part of a tradition of independent thinking that harks back at least to the Reformation. For example-- I found in an 1866 essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Character,” a description of a feeling similar to what Sharon calls bright faith. “There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men’s words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. … But it is only as fast as this hearing from another is authorized by its consent with [our] own, that it is pure and safe to each; and all receiving from abroad must be controlled by this immense reservation.” Much earlier, in 1838 in “The Divinity School Address,” he wrote more plainly, “Truly speaking, it is not instruction but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject, and on his word, …be he who he may, I can accept nothing.”
I could go on. The work of the mid-20th century UU philosopher Henry Nelson Weiman comes immediately to mind. He respected mystical experience, but taught that revelation by itself does not yield truth or knowledge. These result from a critical, analytical, intellectual process. The tests of truth must come from scientific methods of observation, agreement between observers, and logical coherence. The truths and teachings that one discovers are not absolute and final, but can be changed with further testing.
The Commission on Appraisal of the Unitarian Universalist Association has spent four years researching important questions: What is, indeed, at the center of our faith? What is it that holds us together? Is there unity in our theological diversity? The resulting report, published in May 2005, is very well worth reading. The solid Ground on which we meet includes among other things the source of our religious authority. The commissioners conclude, “We are an experiential faith. We are focused more on experience, [both] our own and that of trusted others, past and present, than beliefs. We do not hold with beliefs that contradict our experience, although we recognize that there are realities that can draw us beyond the present limits of our knowledge.” They quote UU Wiccan Margot Adler, “The battles I would wage would be my own, under my own authority … rejecting all answers that did not come from skin and bones and my always ambivalent, continually doubting, heretic’s heart.”
This insistence that our primary religious authority is our own experience did not come from Buddhism. However, for many years Buddhism has been a valuable ally and has offered very useful tools to UU’s.
Buddhism has led many people over and over again back to within the challenge of finding out what is “true for myself.” When a person is in crisis, it is easy to blindly follow ego-centered cult leaders. However, in the end, if we put ideas into practice for ourselves and try them out, we can achieve much more understanding and growth. Sharon states, “In fact, faith is strengthened by doubt when doubt is a sincere, critical questioning combined with deep trust in our own right and ability to discern the truth. In Buddhism this kind of questioning is known as skillful doubt. For doubt to be skillful we have to be close enough to an issue to care about it, yet open enough to let questioning come alive.”
She also talks about “unskillful doubt which can manifest as cynicism, or the desire to fixate on big, unanswerable questions which Buddha called ‘the writhing entanglement of speculation’ that lead to personal resentments and sorrow, not to wisdom or peace.” Does this Buddhist approach hold a message for us?
It is interesting that Salzberg has decided that despair rather than doubt is the opposite of faith. She describes working through deep depression. Despair is a feeling of utter isolation and eternal disconnection. The belief that things can indeed become changed for the better can be wiped out by hopelessness, or faith in that belief can enable a person to keep trying.
According to the UU minister Kenneth W. Collier “Our spirituality is living our deepest reality, our deepest truth, our deepest value, into the world. Our spirituality is the unfolding of who we are, and our richest integrity from the deepest places of our hearts into the ordinariness of our living. The first step in this process is accepting ourselves in our own awful beauty and dignity.” (Our Seven Principles in Story and Verse) The business of accepting ourselves is not easy, however, and proceeds in stages. At the same time, since we are starting in the middle as Adrienne Rich points out, we need to try to live our deepest values into the world where we find ourselves, working in community. Faith, that inner quality unfolding as we learn to trust our deepest understandings, enables us to try again and again.
This is pretty abstract stuff. What does it mean in practice? We all have to answer that for ourselves, of course. Suppose at work your boss asks you to do something you disagree with, or worse believe is wrong. Or maybe it is a friend you greatly admire. What do you do? Depending on how you understand the world, you may or may not spend a lot of time worrying about your decision. Like Guji Guji, you may experience a lot of doubt. Do you join the crocodiles, who after all do make a strong case that you are one of them, or is your faith in what you hold dear strong enough that you refuse and strike out into the unknown?
Personally, I have been trying to live by the UU Principles for roughly 20 years now. I have been testing them out and finding them very good. I have learned a lot along the way. Also, I have found that if I am able to look at hurtful or difficult situations with non-partisan or what the Buddhists call “quiet” eyes, I can indeed see interconnections more clearly. Therefore, I can see better how to act.
Knowing that we live within the great universal web is another understanding that we share with Buddhism. This morning I want to close with a comforting Buddhist teaching—one that might test true for you. According to the teaching, there are a number of important aspects to any action. The immediate results and how people respond to an action are only a small part of its value. The intention behind the action, the skillfulness with which it is performed, and the long-term effects within the interconnected web are also important. Intention is critical. When we nurture the intention to do good, the effects will ripple out often in positive ways unknown to us. However, the world being imperfect as it is, the immediate results of our work often seem insignificant. Sharon writes, “But if that inevitable sorrow is joined with faith in interconnectedness, rather than bitterness at the nature of things, we can more likely get up the next morning and once again do the best we can, knowing that in this interconnected reality, even the smallest action done with good intention is consequential.”
Closing Song:
Closing Words:
Extinguish the Chalice (read together):
We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we carry in our hearts until we are together again.
Closing Circle*: Shalom Havayreem (#400) (All stand or sit in a circle and hold hands.)
*Please rise, as you are able.