WHAT I MEAN BY “HAVING FAITH”

Stuart A. SchlegelProfessor Emeritus of Anthropology

University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz, California

andRector Emeritus

St. Luke’s Episcopal ChurchLos Gatos, California

I would like to open this essay by quoting from two sermons I gave back in 1987. They

were statements, in two different contexts, of convictions I held for a very long time be-

fore then and still subscribe to today. The first passage was on how I understand the

Christian faith:

The Christian faith, you see, is not believing a lot of “beliefs.” So many people,

both within and outside the Church, seem to think that to “have faith” is to believe

a lot of difficult-to-believe intellectual propositions. But that is simply not what

faith is. Intellectual beliefs — like the Virgin Birth of Jesus, or his Ascension into

heaven, or the idea of heaven itself — are all just human words. They are efforts

— deeply sincere and meaningful efforts to be sure — but just efforts to put into

human language an experience of, and a relationship with, the heart of reality

that we call God. The words, which change with historical time and place, are not

“the faith.” The faith is that relationship and that experience. And “having faith” is

not some sort of intellectual assent to beliefs, it is entering into a state of trust

and hope: trust and hope that at the heart of the universe there is love, there is

affirmation, there is hope, there is trust.1

As often happened, many parishioners resonated with what I had said, but there were

those who were offended by my words.

1 “Consolation, Resurrection, and Life,” St. Luke’s Church, Los Gatos, CA, (March 26, 1989)

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The second was on how I understand the doctrine of the Trinity. I had been giving sev-

eral different verbal definitions of the Trinity:

Some years ago, I took a try at writing down in words my best expression of how

we understand God in three ways. I will share it with you. I know it falls short, like

all the others, but at least it makes more sense to me than “Creative Idea, Cre-

ative Energy, Creative Power” [the way a modern English writer put it]. It goes

this way: God the Father is the fundamental force of love in the world at the heart

of all things. To believe in the Father is to believe that love is the deepest reality

in the world. God the Son, Jesus, is the historical person who has shown us what

it is to live in and for perfect love, and who has taught us by his words and deeds

just what that love is, which is at the heart of reality. God the Holy Spirit is that

love present within us, and which we give to and receive from each other. So, if

you have experienced love and felt it transform you and hold you and set you

free, then, in our Christian way of words, you have experienced God — Father,

Son, and Holy Spirit.2

That, too, did not sit well with some literal-minded listeners.

I was recently reminded of this criticism, which stalked me throughout my years of

preaching to Episcopal congregations, when a very old and good friend asked me an in-

teresting question. She said, “So many of your beliefs do not seem to be those of a per-

son of faith. What do you mean when you say you have faith?” It was a good question,

and one I have often been asked in various ways. I have been a priest for over fifty

years, and I have been asked it again and again by puzzled parishioners. I have also

been a cultural anthropologist for well over fifty years, and in that role have been asked

another question numerous times: “How can you be a priest [or, often, a Christian]

when you are a cultural anthropologist? How can you possibly believe in God?” I think it

is essentially the same query as that of my friend about my faith, put differently because

arising in a different context.

2 “God in Three Persons: Holy Trinity,” St. Luke’s Church, Los Gatos, CA, (May 21, 1989)

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They are fair and good questions, and have led me to give some thought to how I might

answer them forthrightly and honesty, and this essay is my effort to say what I mean by

“having faith,” and how I can believe in God. I do, indeed, see myself as a person of

faith and a believer in God, and I perceive no incongruity of either with my being an an-

thropologist. In fact, I think it is my understanding of culture and myth as an anthropolo-

gist that permits me to be a Christian. I will return to this matter shortly, but first need to

set forth some background.

* * *

I think the place to start is with my understanding, as a cultural anthropologist, of what it

is we call “reality,” and what it means to “know something.” My studies have convinced

me, like many other anthropologists, that there are many notions of “reality” in this

world. For example, different cultures see the world in terms of their own “take” on what

it is like and how to live in it.

For example, I lived for two years in a rainforest in the southern Philippines among the

Teduray people. Their “reality” was a beautiful one, and their vision of how one should

live in such a world was strikingly lovely, too. I have described both in a number of

books, most particularly Wisdom from a Rainforest: The Spiritual Journey of an Anthro-

pologist3. The traditional Teduray of the rainforest believed that all beings — spirits, hu-

mans, plants, and animals — were totally equal; none were superior to any others. They

believed the world was created by the greatest of all spirits, Tulus, and that humans

were created specifically to take care of that world, its people and its environment. Radi-

cal egalitarians, they believed that all hierarchical ranking was wrong; that all use of per-

sonal coercion was just as wrong and merely a tool of ranking; that all violence was

equally bad and wrong, being essentially a tool of coercion, and thus of ranking; that

competition was totally misguided, and cooperation the proper relationship among all

3 Schlegel, Stuart A.,Wisdom from a Rainforest: The Spiritual Journey of an Anthropologist (1998), Athens, Georgia: the University of Georgia Press.

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creatures; and that the most fundamental moral imperative for all people was to help

others in any way they possibly could. While the Teduray — like all human beings, ev-

erywhere — did not always live up to this code, they believed deeply that they should,

and to a remarkable extent they did. Their often-repeated observation about hierarchy,

coercive relations, violence, and competition — all of which they knew to be common-

place among neighboring people outside the forest — was: “That is no way to live.”

It took me several months before I began to grasp the contours of this vision of reality — what the world is like to Teduray, and how they think we should live in such a world — and to have its profound difference from my own accustomed American views sink in. It

is almost impossible to state just how amazing it was to live amidst a society where all

people literally scanned constantly for ways they could help their companions achieve

their immediate and long-term goals. Beyond any doubt, Teduray reality and mine were

constructed very differently.

Moreover, it is an anthropological and sociological commonplace that, even within many

cultures, there can be diverse views of what the world is like. This may be seen as a

defining feature of “modern” societies like mine4; they present us with a sort of cafeteria

of possible values and belief systems, which we must choose from among the options.

Will I follow the sociopolitical ways of my parents? Shall I be religious or not”? Do I ac-

cept or struggle against racial and other prejudices? These are all questions that would

seem strange, even unthinkable, to Teduray.

I think the only way to make sense of present-day divisions between conflicting U.S. po-

litical ideologies is that they inhabit different realities, each thinking the other to hold

such stupid views, and to act in such unacceptable ways, as to be not only immoral but

unhinged. Just consider the way the Right and Left view abortion, or aid to the poor, or

the unrestricted pursuit of corporate profits. The different approaches do not just reflect

political differences; they express disparate understandings of the very nature of reality.

4 For example, see Peter L. Berger, Facing Up to Modernity: Excursions in Society, Politics, and Religion. (Basic Books) 1977.

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In the same way, the world-view and values of the dominant culture in the United States

are different in important aspects from those of African Americans, Native Americans,

and Latinos, as are those held by the very rich from those of the very poor. What is un-

derstood by any one group to be “true” is simply not universal, but a function of the cul-

tural or sub-cultural place where it stands, the conceptual frame within which it has

learned to view the world. People on welfare without a job, and unable to find one, how-

ever hard they try, see themselves as truly “disadvantaged by the system.” But, far

more fortunate people with great jobs and a huge income may see those same people

as truly “moochers and freeloaders, trying to exploit the system to avoid work.” These

are, again, not just different political points of view; they are manifestations of living in

different “worlds of reality.”

* * *

Now, back to what I mean by “having faith.” Perhaps, the best place to attack this issue

is to specify what I do not mean.

I do not mean that I believe in the metaphysical truth of some religious proposition or

another. Consider, for example, the idea that God is omnipotent, able to do anything

God wishes to do. Whether this is true or not is an important theological matter, and the

debate over it has been a profoundly significant one that has gone on in the West since

at least the days of the ancient Greeks. But, agreeing on whether it is “true” or not that God is omnipotent is no part of what I mean by my “having faith.”

Nor do I mean I believe in things that, “without faith,” are unbelievable, such as the Vir-

gin Birth of Jesus, or God parting the Red Sea to deliver the Hebrews from their Egyp-

tian slave masters. Again, those are certainly consequential matters, but believing in

them is not my meaning of “having faith.”

I also do not mean “by faith” to accept a devout explanation of things that simply pass

human understanding, such as whether the death of my older son from cancer was

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“part of God’s plan,” or whether there is an answer to the agonized cry: “How can a

good God allow the righteous to suffer?” (Psalm 73), or that there is literally “one God,

existing in three Persons.” Nor, closely related, do I mean, by “having faith,” believing some pious verbal statement about “mysteries,” which are things that, by definition,

cannot adequately be expressed in human language, such as the nature of God, or

specifying God’s precise characteristics. Most theologians of all faiths have taught that

putting mysteries into words inevitably distorts the subject — that, for example, defining

God in anything other than metaphor inevitably mischaracterizes God’s true nature. A

secular example might be how impossible it would be to totally describe in words the

meaning of the love we feel for our spouse or our children. Accepting the “truth” of

some official definition or another about a mystery is not part of what I think of as “being

a person of faith.”

Every religion offers its responses to the matters I have just been describing. Examples

include such aphorisms as: “The good suffer and the evil prosper, but justice will be

done in the afterlife,” or: “The good will go to a higher level through reincarnation, while

the evil will be reduced in the next life to a lesser level,” or: “Who are you to ask? Just

submit. Allah is inscrutable but it will be wonderful in the end, in Allah’s good time.” These are all part of the traditions of various religions, but they are not part of what I

consider “having faith.”

* * *

For a long time, in talking about religions, I have accepted the analytic value of a distinc-

tion made by Wilfred Cantwell Smith between the “faith” and the “tradition.” In The

Meaning and End of Religion,5 he wrote that not making this distinction can greatly ob-

scure what one is talking about. Smith proposed that the word “faith” should refer to

fundamental orientations toward reality, while “tradition” should be used to denote

all the various cultural elaborations and institutions that have developed around given

orientations in particular times and places. So, for example, a person may have the ba-

5 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion. (Fortress Press) 1962.

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sic stance that one should live a life of compassion and caring, or, by contrast, that one

should live in judgment of those who are wrong, and do not hold the correct beliefs. Ei-

ther way, Smith defines such approached to life and reality as one’s “faith.” On the

other hand, “traditions” are something quite different, referring to such institutional

characteristics as the particular myths, rituals, forms of clergy, types of scriptures, and

associated art forms like music and architecture, that have developed in a particular reli-

gion. Thus, Christianity’s tradition includes its Bible, its belief in the divinity of Jesus as

well as his humanity, and the particular hymns sung in cathedrals, whereas the Islamic

tradition includes the Koran, the belief that Jesus was a prophet, and the particular art-

work found in mosques.

It is a genuinely helpful distinction, and one not always given its due. It provides insight

into such things as the common missionary observation that many of their converts take

on the trappings of their new religion — use its distinctive terms, and attend its form of

services — but make no a deep commitment to living a new, changed life. That phe-

nomenon can be very subtle and difficult to adequately assess, but I would suggest that

one way of looking at it is that the converts have adopted the missionaries’ “tradition,”

but not their faith.

I myself prefer not to follow Smith in using the word “faith,” when talking about these is-

sues. In our ordinary discourse, “Faith” has a specifically religious connotation, but the

phenomenon it denotes is present in all human beings, whether they identify with a reli-

gion or not. Moreover, “faith” has come to have a novel — and I believe misleading — connotation to us in the Western world, which I will discuss a bit later. To avoid misun-

derstanding, I therefore refer to what W. C. Smith called “faith,” as a “stance” or “ori-

entation.”

* * *

It is an interesting fact that two very different basic orientations seem to exist within ev-

ery religion. I call them “the love wing” and the “judgment wing.”

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The first is the fundamental stance toward the world that life is most rich and full and re-

warding if lived in loving relationship to others. This is the stance taken by what I call

“the love wing.” It stresses compassion and acceptance, forgiveness and the possibility

of growth, and kindness is the characteristic of those who follow that orientation. Every

religion has its love-wing. The other orientation is to approach the world, in a significant

way, as divided into “us” and “them” — the righteous and the evil, the in-group and the

out-group, those who have things right and those who have them all wrong. Folks who

take this stance put their stress on correct beliefs, on divine justice, on punishment of

the wrong and rewards for the correct, and they are characterized by a marked ten-

dency for self-righteousness. I term them “the judgment wing,” and it, too, is found in all

the various religions — Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and all the others.6 In

every one of them, both wings are alive and thriving, although the distinction may not be

conscious.

An interesting corollary is that both orientations can be found within the same tradition,

and different traditions can embrace the same orientation. Both Christianity and Bud-

dhism, for instance, have a wing that takes the love stance, even though they each live

it within a very different tradition. Both liberal and conservative Christianity have pretty

much the same tradition, but within each can be found followers of those two classic ori-

entations. Liberal and conservative Episcopalians see the question of gay rights very

differently, one group with compassion and inclusion, and the other with judgment and

condemnation, in spite of having virtually identical traditions. In the American South,

most Protestant fundamentalists have similar polities and other aspects of tradition as

their counterparts in the North, but they may adamantly disagree with northern liberal

Protestants over racial integration in their congregations, thereby manifesting a different

stance.

6 I am dissatisfied with every term I have come up with to name this wing. I have settled on “judgment” but other possibilities might be “the exclusionary,” or “dogmatic,” or “self-righteous” wing. I actually think a fitting, though uncharitable, name would be the “terrorist wing,”

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This split can show up within a single congregation, and among the most devout of

parishioners. Christians almost all profess to be followers of Jesus, and the teachings of

Jesus were entirely expressions of his love stance. But, in America — as throughout the

Christian world — there are many, even in liberal congregations, who never give up

their own quite different orientation. For example, in the parish where I was rector for

several years, I frequently heard some of my most loyal and committed members say

things like, “Yes, Father, of course Jesus did not want us to kill people as a tool of judi-

cial or foreign policy, or give significant help to the poor and homeless, or welcome into

our congregation people “not like us,” or pay their employees a living wage. His senti-

ment was lovely, but in the real world it just isn’t practical.” So — their argument went — we have to have the death penalty and a military empire; we must maintain our busi-

ness plans and seek big profits over employee welfare; food stamps simply must be cut

to balance the budget, we must keep homeless people away from our church, and out

of sight of our local community; and it only makes sense to support “separate but

equal” parishes and schools, and be completely unconcerned about anyone who is per-

ceived to be of a lower class, and certainly not invite them into our congregation, where

they just wouldn’t fit. In other words, in those parishioners’ “real world,” it is not only

okay — but necessary — to maintain their totally non-Christian, non-loving, orientation,

while they enthusiastically participate in the ritual and social life of the parish. They re-

main adherents — in the midst of a love-oriented parish and denomination — of an “us

and them” stance of judgment, condemnation, and exclusion.

My studies and personal experience have convinced me that these two orientations —

love and judgment — are found in all institutions. They exist in all spiritual7 contexts, even non-religious ones, such as atheism and secular humanism. They are equally

present in every other form of social expression, such as politics, economics, education,

7 I consider “spirituality” to be the effort to find meaning in one’s life, and, as such, intrinsic to all human beings. We have a deep instinctual need for meaning, but we pursue it in various and of-ten different ways. Some people’s spiritual journey may mean for them to pray and attend church regularly, for other’s to play as much golf as possible, and for other’s it is to end a hard day of labor in front of the TV with a beer and chips. Whatever people think or do to make their life good and full — which is to say, as meaningful as they believe possible — is their spiritual-ity. The term need not mean anything religious, although it is through their religious commit-ments that most people on the planet have sought meaning for most of history.

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and the various professions. I know many Christian people who are deeply judgmental

and self-righteous, and I know many secular people who are consistently loving and

committed to others. At the university where I taught, there was a patent anti-clericalism

and disdain for religion among most of the faculty, but there, too, I had numerous col-

leagues who identified themselves as atheists, but were kindly and compassionate peo-

ple with a lively concern for the well-being of the students and the entire university com-

munity. They would not articulate it this way, but I think of them as in the love-wing of

non-theistic humanism.

In late 2013, Bill Moyers interviewed Thomas Cahill, the medievalist and historian, on

his television program.8 At one point, Cahill said he believed there were basically only

two “movements” in the world, and they cut across religious divides, but were also

found in politics and economics, and indeed in all other human social institutions. One

movement results in acts of kindness, and the other in acts of cruelty. He was making

the same point that I am.

That same week, I heard side-by-side interviews: one with the manager of a local fast-

food outlet, and the other with the CEO of her company.9 In the first, a black woman de-

scribed how she was required to clean her restaurant — even scrub the floor — after

hours, and for no additional pay. She spoke with emotion about how she was paid little

more than minimum wage, about how her husband had a similar tiny wage at his job,

and how the two of them went without dinner half the nights of each week, so that they

would be able feed their two children. Then, immediately following from a different stu-

dio, the man who ran that national fast-food corporation was interviewed. Asked how

much his salary was, he said it was well over ten million dollars a year. When pressed

on how he could justify that salary, when he paid his employees so little, he replied —

with considerable emotion of his own — that he deserved every penny, because he did

his job very well, which was to ensure that corporate profits were maximized and the

stock holders received the highest possible return on their investment. As far as em-

ployee salaries were concerned, he said he paid all that was permitted by the necessary

8 Moyers and Company, PBS, December 27, 20139 I kept no record of what program featured the interviews; I believe it was on MSNBC.

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business plan, and, besides, that the employees of his company were supposed to be

teenagers, just earning pocket money. Watching him and listening to his words, I mar-

veled at the coldness of his heart, and at his utter indifference to anything other than the

bottom line. I had two immediate responses, other than revulsion. First, that the situa-

tion can only be seen as that very cruelty — fully adopted and institutionalized into the

corporate world — that Thomas Cahill was talking about, cruelty that comes from the

corporate version of the judgment wing of today’s American economy.10 And, second, it

seemed clear to me that he and his unhappy black manager certainly lived in different

realities, vastly different worlds of thought and values.

I think this is the general case with the two fundamental orientations. The stance that

holds love and compassion to be the root values of a good life and society is grounded

in a totally different reality than the one that views the way to live to be with judgment

and calculation of which people deserve decent treatment. They are different realities

with different values, even different notions of what seems completely appropriate to

say in public. Indonesians have a fine metaphoric proverb: “Different fields; different

grasshoppers.”

I will conclude this section on the two fundamental stances by saying that I feel a real

kinship and spiritual connection with those in all love wings everywhere, and virtually

none at all with anyone, anywhere, who lives by the judgment wing. I see myself as

vastly more akin to a love-oriented Muslim, Buddhist, or atheist, than I do to a judgment-

oriented Christian. In my scheme of things, the Dalai Lama is my spiritual brother and

ally; Pat Robertson is not.

* * *

10 Two excellent statements of how cruelty has become institutionalized in America are: Henry A. Giroux, “Living in a Culture of Cruelty: Democracy as Spectacle,” in Alison Alexander and Jarice Hanson (eds.), Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Mass Media and Society, 11th edition. (McGraw Hill) 2008, and Tim Wise, Culture of Cruelty: How America’s Elite Demonize the Poor, Valorize the Rich, and Jeopardize the Future. (City Lights) in press.

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Historians of religion observe that, throughout most of history, adherents of the world’s

various religious movements considered their traditions to be far less important than the

stance those traditions were meant to embody and serve; this conviction, however,

changed dramatically during the development of Western Christianity11.

Prior to that development, the meaning of the word “faith” and its equivalents in various

languages meant committing to a stance, not “believing” in something intellectual. In

every case, doctrines were considered part of the tradition, and held to be much less

fundamental. Faith was something one did, not something one believed.

In fact, the meaning of “God” to people, arguably, reflects the orientation they are

drawn to. Many theologians say that one’s sense of commitment to a certain stance is

what orients a person to a particular notion of divinity. Polytheism in the classical Greek

world was quite clear about this; if you believed law and order were the fundamental in-

gredients in the good life, Zeus was the god to whom you sacrificed; if erotic love, then

your god was Aphrodite, and so forth. Similarly, the God of love-wing Christians is gen-

erally understood as a God of love; the God of judgment-wing Christians as a God of

abstract justice.

The late Eknath Easwaran, the renowned Indian spiritual teacher, writer, and translator

and interpreter of classic Indian literature, was recently commenting on a passage (I

John 4:8) in the Christian Bible: “He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love.”

He wrote:

We don’t first get to know God and then, by some miracle of grace, come to love

our fellow human beings. Loving others comes first.

A big shift came to Western Christian theology in the early centuries after the Church

was recognized and endorsed by the Roman Empire. In the fourth century, the Council

of Nicea decisively moved Christianity into creeds, doctrines, and dogmas, to thereby

11 See, for instance, Karen Armstrong, The Case for God. (Vintage Books) 2009.

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render it in accord with Greek language and Greek concepts — many of which the origi-

nal Jewish Jesus movement would not have recognized. These early councils insisted

that the propositions in the creeds, stated in words, must be accepted by all Christians,

and condemned any deviation as unorthodox and wrong, therefore heretical.

For example, God was no longer taken to be an indescribable “mystery ” beyond hu-

man language. God’s nature was now defined in very specific words that were not

metaphors, but statements of fact: God is three Persons, but one God; Jesus is both

fully God and fully human, and so forth. Anyone who did not accept those beliefs — in

just those words — was a heretic and not a real Christian, who, in certain times and

places, could be banished or burned at the stake. No Jewish Christian of the first cen-

tury would have found the fourth-century dogma that Jesus is God tolerable in any

sense; the very idea would have horrified them all, including Jesus himself, as outright

blasphemy.

Such beliefs, however — enshrined in language — became what Western Christianity

called “faith.” Assent to those propositions became the standard definition of the term

from then on, throughout the Western world.

* * *

Now, I can return to my earlier statement that I believe my anthropological understand-

ing of history, culture, and myth enabled me to remain a Christian, from my youth into

old age.

Until I studied the nature of cultural institutions, including religion, I assumed that the

Christian tradition and the Christian faith were one and the same, that, for instance,

when I said the creeds during Sunday worship, I had to understand them as statements

of truth, just as the Greeks who formulated them did. In 1957, when I was in my mid-

twenties, however, I spent a year in the Philippines before going to seminary, assisting

at an Episcopal mission in a remote village in the mountains of Luzon. An American

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missionary professor in the seminary in Manila, whom I liked and respected very much,

gave a talk at a youth conference I was attending with some of the young people from

our village. His topic was the Ascension of Jesus, which he described with graphic de-

tail. I listened and asked him, quite honestly and seriously, “Are we to believe that it

happened in just the way Luke described? For instance, if we had been present when

Jesus ascended, would we have looked up and seen the bottom of his feet?” He replied

that the story was literally true, and that is exactly what we would have seen. Although

the literalist truth of doctrines and biblical stories was part of what had been pressed on

me in my younger days as “necessary to salvation,” his response bothered me quite a

bit. I am totally certain that I would not have been able to hold on to such literalism, as

my life continued to unfold.

I gave up such views, long before I went to live among the Teduray, My seminary taught

me a non-literal reading of scriptures, and the importance and role of myth, which was

further developed in my anthropological graduate studies. But, even so, literalist and

conservative Christian views would surely not have survived my years in the rainforest.

As I came to know the Teduray and their ways so well, it seemed increasingly clear to

me that these remote and isolated people, who had never so much as heard of Jesus,

were living out, through their myths and animist beliefs, the closest likeness to the King-

dom of God I had ever encountered.

Thinking in mythical terms, rather than literalist ones, is one of the ways my education

allowed me to continue thinking of myself as a Christian. There is another, which I will

return to shortly.

* * *

If assent to belief-statements is not what I mean by “having faith,” what do I mean?

I mean I have what W. C. Smith termed a “faith,” but for reasons described earlier, I

prefer to call a stance. My fundamental orientation toward the world and how to live in it,

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is what I call the love-wing. As a biographical accident of birth, I learned to think and live

through the concepts, myths, and rituals of Christianity. But, those are all traditions and,

in an important sense, not what are central for me. It seems to me perfectly clear that

had I been born in a village in rural Burma, I would have grown up with Theravada Bud-

dhist traditions. But, as a Buddhist in a Burmese village, I think I would probably still

take the same stance toward reality —committed to love and compassion, accep-

tance, forgiveness, and kindness — that I do as a Christian in California.

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan friar, whose writings on spirituality are very congruent with

my understandings of the two fundamental orientations. He has articulated in numerous

writings precisely what I, too, think about faith and tradition. “Faith,” he wrote, “is not

belonging to a group or believing a set of intellectual truths…[it] never depends on

whether we say the right words or practice the right ritual, but whether we live the right

reality.”12

I have spoken of “taking a stance.” We commit to it, and live it as best we can, but we

can never prove to anyone, or conclusively demonstrate by logical argument, that it is

true. All I mean by “true” here, and all I can say in defense of my basic orientation, is

that kindness and compassion seem to me consistent with how I understand the world,

and they give me the experience of a rich and meaningful life. No evidence — other

than the quality of our own lives and joys — exists that will convince someone otherwise

who holds that life is given meaning by power, or wealth, or endless fun. You just be-

lieve it, or you do not; you just live according to it, or you do not.

Having committed to that stance, I do not feel equally committed to any particular parts

of my tradition that are concerned with propositional beliefs. Where my tradition’s mythi-

cal constructs support my love stance, they help me immeasurably. Where they do not,

I just ignore or reinterpret them. Like Rohr, I consider the goal of my spiritual and reli-

gious life to be living “the right reality,” not knowing something intellectually. Accord-

ingly, I try to base my life on the premise that “God is love,” and take that to be a myth-

12 Robert Rohr, OFM, Yes, And...: Daily Meditations. (Franciscan Media) 2013.

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ical statement that giving and receiving love are what really count to give our lives

meaning, and create true community. That is what I mean by “having faith.”

* * *

I freely admit that many people, both in an out of the Church, cannot accept that as

“having faith,” and I have often been accused of being a crypto-atheist or hypocrite.

But, I know that my use of the word is consistent with most of the world’s people over

most of human history. I do not feel I am hypocritical or an atheist. In my opinion, the

word “atheist” means so many things to different people, that it is not very useful, and if

invoked at all, must be carefully nuanced. “Atheism” means not believing that god ex-

ists, but we need to ask which god is not believed in? There are a whole bunch of

“gods,” which many Christians worship, but I do not, such as the one who sends some-

one to burn in hell for all eternity for not being a baptized Christian, someone who may

never have even heard of Jesus, or the God who inflicts cancer on somebody. With re-

gard to those so-called “Gods” and others like them, I am a committed atheist. I do not

believe in them, and do not think anybody should. I believe in a God of love and mercy.

* * *

More tricky for many to comprehend, however, is what I even mean by the word “God,” in the first place. Here, again, I am working with anthropological and philosophical con-

cepts I have internalized as part of my training and experience. They play a large role in

my day-to-day religious practices, such as prayer, meditation, and worship, but are not

simple to describe.

As I stated earlier, there are many notions of “reality,” and different cultures hold differ-

ent visions of what the world is like and how to live in it. This is not a difficult idea for

many modern people to grasp; we are increasingly aware that we Americans and, say,

many Asian societies hold quite different notions about the world, and different values

regarding proper conduct. Some sociocultural theorists have developed the concept of

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“multiple realities” further, in a way which has been very helpful to me. In order to de-

scribe this approach, we need to explore some rather subtle philosophical territory that

can be obscure to those who first encounter it.

Based on the work of a Viennese phenomenological philosopher, Alfred Schütz, the in-

fluential American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, elaborated an analysis of how human

beings, even when firmly within their own cultural world, do not always function through-

out the day within a single conceptual frame for what is real. Every day, we go into and

out of what he called different “perspectives.” The idea here is that we all have a vari-

ety of perspectives that guide our actions, such as the “common sense perspective,” “the philosophical perspective,” the “scientific prospective,” and the “religious per-

spective.”

The most basic one for us all, in which we live most of the time, is the “common sense

perspective.” In it, we take things as being just what they seem, and deal with them

practically and pragmatically. In contrast, in the “philosophical perspective,” we ask the

theoretical question of whether things are, or are not, what they seem. For instance, a

philosopher in his study may, within this perspective, speculate very seriously on

whether the world actually exists “out there,” or whether, as Berkeley once said, it

might be all an illusion in his mind. On his way home from his office, though, the

philosopher had better not walk in front of an on-rushing truck, on the basis that it is not

real, but just an illusion in his head. At that moment, even a philosopher needs to be

firmly within the common sense perspective, and recognize that truck would run him

down with disastrous effect.

In this essay, I want to focus on what Geertz called the “religious perspective.” He de-

fined it as placing everyday life into a larger symbolic reality that gives it meaning and

offers answers to such perennial questions as why bad things happen to good people,

why the good die young but the wicked prosper. I mentioned this earlier as an issue for

all religious traditions. The language of the religious perspective is myth, hence it re-

sponds to the problem of evil, not with the language of the scientific perspective, but

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with mythical statements, such as “we will be rewarded or punished in the next life” or

“all will come right in a coming reincarnation,” or “God has a greater plan,” or “God

knows what we do not know.” Whenever people participate in beliefs and rituals, they

are in the religious perspective, and their thoughts and actions are phrased in myth, and

thus can differ sharply from their — equally genuine — daily common-sense convictions

regarding science and a normative universe of cause and effect, which are phrased in a

very different register of speech.

It is important to realize that moving in and out of different perspectives is a completely

normal aspect of daily life. When I am engaged in social science, and discussing reli-

gious beliefs in an anthropological setting, I am in the scientific perspective and I con-

sider the word “God” to refer to a mythological personification of whatever the believer

holds to be the most essential truth of reality, the foundation of what I have termed that

person’s basic orientation or stance. Accordingly, for me, “God” denotes the mythologi-

cal personification of love, compassion, and unconditional affirmation. But, then, the

question immediately arises of whether it is not rather silly for me to pray? What am I

doing, addressing words to a mythological personification? The answer to that seem-

ingly glaring inconsistency is that — when I pray, attend a Eucharist, or preach in a

parish church — I am not in the scientific or philosophical perspective; I am in the reli-

gious perspective, one might say I am “in the myth.” There, God is not a personifica-

tion, but a divine reality, with whom I can share my concerns and hopes. Among other

concerns, I pray every day for my sick friends, and ask that their suffering be, at least,

endurable. But, when I then go to my computer to write an essay or an email, I am back

in the scientific or the common-sense perspective, where I understand very differently

what was going on when I was holding a sick friend in my mind, with concern and hope.

I see no contradiction or paradox in this, merely different perspectives, different sym-

bolic frames of reference.

So, that is another way in which my theoretical training in anthropology and philosophy

undergirds my religious faith and practice, and helps it stay real and important to me.

However, I also can easily see why people might think of me — from their common

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sense perspective — as a crypto-atheist at best, or hypocrite at worse. I can only say — in the style of the philosophical tradition of pragmatism — that it works for me, and I do

not feel a bit like a fraud.

* * *

I would like to invoke the insights of Richard Rohr one more time. He says that we hu-

mans live inside a cosmic humility, a holding pattern in which ambiguity, inconsistency

and brokenness call for a response of love and caring, rather than insisting on dividing

reality into good guys and bad guys — and by such humility, we make solidarity with hu-

manity; it is the doorway to wisdom. Rohr writes:

There are, as I have been arguing, two approaches to the meaning of the spiri-

tual-religious journey: one ends up all about morality and sees religion’s purpose

as monitoring and policing society in regard to its morals and, thus, its righteous-

ness. One must be right and good. This was precisely the strand in ancient Israel

that Jesus warned against so consistently. He never said, “You must be right,” or

even “You must be good.” He preached rather that “You must love one another,” and that “God alone is good.” The demand for certitude and and the need for

perfect answers, for Jesus, was the exact opposite of faith, and it produced arro-

gant and smug people instead of humble and loving ones.13

That rings deeply true to me, and speaks of what I believe to be the moral sickness of

the modern West. We are likely to invoke high principles to justify our behavior,

whereas, in fact, the social ethos, politics, and religion of so many of us are all about

cerebral explanations and justifications for our doing exactly as we wish. All too often,

we are arrogantly and falsely self-assured, and generally unwilling to admit when we are

wrong. And we sense no need to apologize, because “We know the truth!” As I men-

13 Richard Rohr, OFM, Jesus' Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount (with John Booker Fisher and J. Feister). (St Anthony Messenger Press) 1996.

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tioned earlier, many pious Christians say Jesus was a kindly fellow, but we have to live in the “real world.”

Over the centuries, and in all the world’s religions, the great spiritual teachers have

taught that ignorance comes less from what we do not know than from what we think

we do know. We Americans are deeply committed to winning, climbing, achieving, per-

forming, and being the best. In that light, proposing that kindness and caring are the key

to a healthy and good life — as did Jesus, the Buddha, Muhammad, and so many oth-

ers from very different traditions — is, in our society, revolutionary and completely

counter-cultural. It is no wonder that those of us who take that stance can seem to those

who do not, to be out of touch with their “real world,” misguided, irreligious, and spiritu-

ally sick — or dishonest and hypocritical. Different fields; different grasshoppers. We

live in different “realities”; we hold to different “truths”; and we march to different

drummers. Not so much because we observe different traditions, but because we take a

different orienting stance.

* * *

I close with a poem by Khajeh Shamseddin Mohammad Hafiz-s Shirazi, a fourteenth-

century Persian Sufi mystic, generally known as Hafiz, who was praising the love-

stance:

I

Do not

Want to step so quickly

Over a beautiful line on God's palm

As I move through the earth's

Marketplace

Today.

I do not want to touch any object in this world

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Without my eyes testifying to the truth

That everything is

My Beloved.

Something has happened

To my understanding of existence

That now makes my heart always full of wonder

And kindness.

I do not

Want to step so quickly

Over this sacred place on God's body

That is right beneath your

Own foot

As I

Dance with

Precious life

Today.14

Those were the words of a Muslim in Persia almost seven hundred years ago, and they

spring from a very different tradition, as well as a very different time and place, but they

represent the same fundamental orientation — the same “faith” — as mine, a Christian

in America today.

14 “Today” by Hafiz, from The Gift: Poems of Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master, translated from the original Farsi by Daniel Ladinsky. (Penguin Compass) 1999.