"Our Faith Is Not Belief"

Rev. Bruce R. Russell-Jayne

How did you get to Northern Hills Fellowship?  We each came a different way - some drove up an icy driveway and over a few hills thru residential streets while others dodged big trucks on the freeway - before we all converged on the little church on Fleming Road in Springfield Township.  These various routes to Northern Hills might be understood as a metaphor for the spiritual paths that brought us here, each of us from a different direction.  It’s always interesting to hear what people are looking for when they decide to check out our church.  As Reverend Muir said in our reading, when we share stories about our spiritual paths, even though each one is unique, one very common theme in virtually all of them is the need for a spiritual life that makes sense.  People come to Northern Hills seeking something of vital importance to them and their families - a way of dealing with life’s important issues.

In the stories of our spiritual journeys, in the part that comes before we sought out a UU church, more often than not, there’s a time when we tried to live according to some religious belief system, and at least part of it didn’t work out for us.  UU churches are filled with people who have left other churches.  UU churches are a little different in each region of the country partly based on the people coming in from whatever is the dominant religion in the area.  Northern Hills has people from several church backgrounds with the most prevalent being Catholic.  In my last church in Utah we had a large number of former Mormons.  We do have some life long UUs, and we hope to grow many more, but most of us got here after having tried to live with a set of beliefs that we had found untenable.

I grew up Southern Baptist.  I was a pretty darn good one, too - learning all the bible verses, singing in the choir as a teen.  We went to church Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday evenings every week, and we sat in the second row.  At a youth rally, I was asked by a charismatic minister to consider going into the Baptist ministry.  I almost did; I thought saving souls could be an honorable profession, but something held me back.  There were a couple of Baptist beliefs I just couldn’t accept.  I thought I might have to figure out church doctrine better, but I knew I wasn’t ready to hold myself out as an example of how to live the Christian life.  I wasn’t unreservedly a true believer.

Then, when I was 19 and a Sophomore in college, my father died.  I was just talking with my best friend from high school this week about my dad’s funeral.  We five kids were sad of course, and we were worried how our family would survive without a father.  I thought I might have to drop out of school.  But, we were also relieved he was gone.  I know this sounds bad to say, but he drank every night of his life and we were all afraid of him.  Because he drank, he was not welcome in the Baptist church, and church doctrine said my father was going to Hell.  Now, as abusive as he had been to our family, I still couldn’t accept that.  I didn’t have an argument saying why the church doctrine was wrong; I didn’t know an alternate way to think about the afterlife.  Deep in my heart I simply couldn’t believe he was condemned to Hell.  I knew he had some good in him, I knew he struggled mightily with his demons, and I just needed him to be in a better place.  That was my first heresy, and it finally led me to leave the church.

My story, like many other UUs, goes on from the place where I felt like an outcast to a place where I really wanted to replace the beliefs that didn’t work for me with ones that would.  In later years I looked in several places for an alternate belief system, but it seemed each one had holes in it, not necessarily the same ones as in  Baptist doctrine, but still deal breakers for me.  Then I found a Unitarian Universalist church which said, “You don’t have to believe things that don’t make sense to you.”  “Well, that’s quite a relief,” I said, “tell me more,”  deep down hoping they would lay out the perfect belief system for me.  “No,” they said, “If you want one of those, you must find it for yourself.”  “Oh, that’s more than a little difficult,” I thought.  I had been searching for some time and hadn’t found such a system.  Long story short, I kept on seeking, all the way into seminary.  Even there I never found the perfect belief system - Oh my - but I found something better.  There I learned to think differently about belief systems.
:::
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ,  in a statement made at a press briefing relating to the absence of evidence linking the government of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups famously said, “There are known knowns.  These are things we know that we know.  There are known unknowns.  That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know.  But there are also unknown unknowns.  There are things we don't know we don't know.”  Although his statement was criticized as a tortured use of the English language, I will have to admit, his semantics and logic were impeccable, and maybe inadvertently he gave us a logical argument for being more cautious before starting a war in the future.  Secretary Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns are one of the big problems with belief systems which refuse to change.  We know there are questions for which we don’t have answers, and we know there will be more in the future.  If our faith, our sense of who we truly are and how we must live, is based on a rigid set of beliefs, how can we trust that it will be able to handle the unknown unknowns out there?

UUs are often called heretics by those who know we don’t accept all the tenets of their faith.  This has been so for centuries, and we’re actually right proud of it.  Galileo Galilei wasn’t a UU, of course, but I will claim him as one of our heroes in the long line of heretics who prepared the way for modern Unitarian Universalism.  In 1633, when summoned to Rome by the Inquisition, he was confident charges would be dropped.  He was a favorite of the Pope, well-respected in intellectual circles, and the most famous person in Europe.  But, as we are well aware, his confidence was not born out.  After months of grueling interrogation, the exhausted seventy year old man was convicted of heresy, and he renounced his scientific discoveries as errors.  James Carse, in his book, The Religious Case Against Belief, says: “The common view of this notorious event is that it demonstrates the inevitable conflict between religion and science: on the one side is a set of fixed beliefs, resistant to the slightest modification; on the other side is the open and free inquiry into the nature of the the physical world.”

There are some problems with this line, however.  Galileo accepted the church’s authority on matters of faith, and the church wasn’t really worried about the facts of science Copernicus discovered and Galileo added to.  The deeper issue, one which threatened established doctrines, was that Galileo “accepted nothing as a settled conclusion.”  His work to define the motion of the planets was recognized by many learned people in his lifetime, but he was not content to have contributed new understandings to our body of knowledge about the earth and planets.  He “never gave up on attempting to discover what was yet unknown about them.”  He felt there would always be more to learn, that no theory or belief was beyond challenge.  “What drove him, in other words, was not his knowledge, but his ignorance.  He knew that he did not know.”

To be called ignorant is usually an expression of contempt.  We normally link Galileo’s scientific process with the Enlightenment philosophies which followed, so it may seem unbefitting to associate him with ignorance.   To explain why I think to call him ignorant is not to dishonor him, I’ll draw a distinction between different types of ignorance.  The first, ordinary ignorance, a simple lack of knowledge or information, cannot be held against anyone - especially if we don’t know we don’t know.  A second form of ignorance, one which can be comforting but also much more dangerous than ordinary ignorance, is willful ignorance.  There is something we don’t know, and we choose not to learn about it.  I may sense someone doesn’t like me, but if I don’t ask why, I can avoid the possibility of a confrontation.  The people behind the Creation Museum choose to ignore much of the scientific evidence of evolution.  Another kind of willful ignorance is knowing something but pretending not to - we sometimes call this denial, other times simply lying.  Will we ever know for sure if they knew there were no weapons of mass destruction?  Well, let’s avoid politics this morning and leave that question for the historians. 
:::
Galileo’s inquiring attitude was just the opposite of willful ignorance.  Carse calls it “higher ignorance.”  Higher ignorance begins with the realization that the more we learn, the more we see what we don’t know.   There are always more mysteries still to be solved.  Learning motivates us to learn more and more, but eventually we see we can’t know everything.  Coming to an awareness of this constraint on the human condition can precipitate a spiritual crisis.  How do we accept this limitation of our ability to get to the bottom of things and to solve our problems?  If we can puzzle out a mystery, fine, but what of all those we’ll never fully understand?  How do we cope with fear of the unknown?  How do we become comfortable with mystery?   The resolution of this crises can lead in a couple of different directions.  One is to an acceptance of a belief system that purports to have all the answers; another is to an acceptance of our ignorance.

Mystics and philosophers have long contemplated on the incompleteness of human knowledge and concluded we cannot ultimately know everything.  They have some tips on how to embrace the fact that we must live with mystery.  First we can be taught there is no shame in simple ignorance.  In fact, it is a blessing which drives us to explore our world and to look for answers.  The process of seeking truth and creating meanings for our lives is a process of awakening which brings many rewards.  Second, like Galileo, we can learn to to appreciate that there is always more mystery to explore, and for our entire lives we can take delight in the process of searching.   That there really can be no end to mystery and that we are part of it is indeed divine.

To be sure, embracing mystery contains some risk.  Some believers accept that no matter how good their belief system, there will be unanswerable questions.  “We may not know why someone suffered a tragedy,” they might say, “but I’m sure God knows why, and I trust he provided the proper solution.”   While their “faith has uncertainty, even outright doubt, woven into it, nevertheless, they embrace the risk of a leap into the unseen...The believer who says “Nevertheless” has learned to practice higher ignorance.   For the spiritual eclectic, the agnostic, or the atheist, who may not feel God intervening in everyday affairs, it may be harder to trust that whatever is beyond our knowledge is the way it is supposed to be.  But that just means we have to live with a little more uncertainty.

When we feel awed by the magnificence of the natural world - looking out into space, down into the Grand Canyon, or deeply into the eyes of a loved one, we can come to understand how wonderful the universe is - whether we know all about it or not.  We are so blessed to be woven into the interdependent web of all existence.  Knowledge of the way things work can help us appreciate them, but our direct experience of the world, even without understanding how everything works, is the core of a spiritual life.   True knowledge remains capable of being corrected, rectified, or reformed.   Choosing to hang on to beliefs as if they were absolutely true for all time in defiance of error or inaccuracy, is willful ignorance.  This way of being in the world, believing meaning is fixed, is very different from the UU way.  We affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, in which knowledge is unfinished and open to our creative contributions.  In this way  we take comfort in what we know and delight in the mysteries of the universe.