"Leap of Faith"

A leap of faith, in its most commonly used meaning, is the act of believing in something without, or in spite of, available empirical evidence. The phrase is commonly attributed to the 19th century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard, along with his German contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche, are frequently credited with laying the foundations of modern existentialism—a school of thought that takes the human subject — not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, whole human being—and the conditions of existence as a starting point for philosophical thought. The Unitarian minister in my home church as a child, Bob Killham, called himself an existentialist, as have many other Unitarian Universalists then and today.

Kierkegaard describes believing in God as requiring a leap of faith. More concretely, he describes falling in love as a leap of faith experience, too. We don’t fall in love with based on empirical evidence. There just isn’t enough evidence—pragmatically—to justify the kind of total commitment true love asks of a person. Faith involves making the commitment anyway. For Kierkegaard, belief in God worked the same way: there is not enough empirical evidence and too much paradox to make it altogether clear whether God exists or not. Faith involves committing one’s spirit, energy, and imagination to the prospect anyway.

Whether such behavior is virtuous or wasted is hotly contested in theological and philosophical circles. Early American Unitarians like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were deists. They argued that reason and logic rather of revelation and tradition should be one’s basis for belief in God; for them, leaps beyond the empirical were always blind: blind faith. Not all Unitarian Universalists, however, are deists; for some of us the paradoxes implicit in religion quite naturally require a "leaps of faith" to understand—leaps they’re comfortable making. As the Unitarian Bernard Loomer—my favorite seminary professor—used to say, understanding religious literature and myth requires turning contradictions into creative contrasts—in other words, for Loomer (and Unitarians of the same ilk) faith and doubt are not in opposition so much as they are in creative tension.

Søren Kierkegaard thought this way, too. For him, to have faith is to have doubt at the same time; you can’t have genuine faith without doubt. In other words, faith and doubt are mutually arising phenomena; the two concepts imply each other. There’s no such thing as faith without doubt, or doubt without faith. As the Unitarian minister Robert T. Weston wrote (in Responsive Reading # 650 in the gray hymnal) “doubt is the attendant, the touchstone, of truth.” Doubt is the rational weighing of evidence, without which the truth has no real substance. Religious myth is inherently doubtful—there can be no objective certainty about any of it. Thus the blindly faithful are not truly faithful after all, they’re merely credulous.

Recognizing this, religious liberalism has always to some extent involved faith without certainty. Faith without doubt is not stronger than faith without certainty, it’s just more ideological.

Since doubt and faith are mutually arising phenomena—two halves of the same coin—objective certainty about religious ideas is impossible. Think of faith and doubt as qualities, habits of mind, attributes, or personal dispositions that people have, all of us in varying degrees. As Ruth Gendler writes in her whimsical The Book of Qualities:

Faith lives in the same apartment building as Doubt. When Faith was out of town visiting her uncle in the hospital, Doubt fed the cat and watered the asparagus fern. Faith is comfortable with Doubt because she grew up with him. Their mothers are cousins. Faith is not dogmatic about her beliefs like some of her relatives. Her friends fear that Faith is a bit stupid. They whisper that she is naïve and she depends on Doubt to protect her from the meanness of life. In fact, it is the other way around. It is Faith who protects Doubt from Cynicism. (1984, 1988, Harper & Row, NY)

Ruth Gendler’s recognition of faith as a quality is helpful. Most people, especially those whose religious instruction was orthodox, tend to equate faith with doctrine—and then to argue over specific concepts or terms. But faith has nothing to do with these things; faith is not a commodity we either have or do not have. Faith is, rather (as Sharon Salzberg relates in this morning’s Reading) an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience.

All this can sound rather abstract. Great religious leaders have tended to speak about faith in terms that are more concrete. Consider two parables of Jesus recounted in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.” [Matt. 13:31-32] I remember studying the wonder of seeds in my Unitarian Sunday school. It’s down right amazing that a tiny seed can attain the size of a big tree, with the power to sustain and assist other life forms. Jesus mentioned the example of the birds, which come to its branches and perch there, even building nests on it. This is like the seed of faith. If we plant this small seed of faith in our lives, it will grow big enough to benefit others, just like the birds, which benefit from the branches of the grown mustard tree.

The parable of the leaven immediately follows. [Matt.13:33] “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.” The baking of bread was a common task in the time of Jesus, familiar to his audience, all of whom understood the powers of yeast and how it functioned in the baking of bread. They knew that yeast when added to kneaded flour changes the nature of the flour, transforming it and making is rise. Leaven, Jesus suggests, is similar to faith. With even a modicum of faith in the creative and sustaining powers of the universe and our own capacity to access those powers, our lives will be transformed. With a little faith that there is meaning in our struggles and that things will all turn out for the best, our minds & hearts are creatively changed—for the better. In her poem “A Prayer,” Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes,

Refuse to fall down.
If you cannot refuse to fall down,
refuse to stay down.
If you cannot refuse to stay down,
lift your heart toward heaven,
and like a hungry beggar,
ask that it be filled,
and it will be filled.
You may be pushed down.
You may be kept from rising.
But no one can keep you
from lifting your heart
toward heaven---
only you.
It is in the middle of misery
that so much becomes clear.
The one who says nothing good
came of this,
is not yet listening.

“…no one can keep you from lifting your heart toward heaven—only you. It is in the middle of misery that so much becomes clear. The one who says nothing good came of this, is not yet listening.”

Well I remember early in my career—1981—in the midst of a divorce, struggling at work (and for very little remuneration), primarily responsible for the care of a two-year old, and feeling mighty strung out. It was April. I found myself walking along Monterey Avenue in Berkeley, about two o’clock in the afternoon, thinking about how little money I made and how broken my life seemed to be…when…suddenly I had what can only be described as an epiphany. I looked up, saw—and smelled—the magnificent magnolia trees booming all around me on either side of the avenue. I felt the warmth of the sun and a lovely breeze off the Bay. I knew that my daughter was sleeping contentedly; that there was food in the refrigerator, and that would be food in the refrigerator tomorrow. And the next day. Somehow, deep down, I knew at that moment that I had a viable contract with God (or with Life, or whatever you want to call it); that while I would never be affluent, I would never be completely broke either, and never really hungry; that if I kept at it and continued to work faithfully at being the best minister—and the best father and the best person—I could be all would be all right, and not to worry. I’ve returned to that epiphany a hundred times; it has sustained me through many dark hours. “The faith that stands on authority,” wrote Emerson “is not faith.” It’s following directions. But what happened to me on an April afternoon in my early 30s came from someplace deep inside—so deep and so resonant that I have followed its direction ever since…and through plenty of uncertain times. After smelling those magnolia blossoms, I never turned around and looked back. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “Faith is taking the first step when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

According to Sharon Salzberg, faith means making the decision to no longer stand on the sidelines of life but to grab it by the horns, “leaping directly into the center of our lives, our truth, and our full potential.” In other words, faith is having the courage to act in support of our truest, holiest desire, the will to try it, and the confidence that achieving what we most deeply desire is possible. What this means in a practical sense is that the opposite of faith is not doubt and it’s not heresy; the opposite of faith is indifference. It’s letting others dictate the pattern and direction of your life, letting circumstance determine what you know in your heart of hearts to be true, letting the breath of life slip away without caring enough to be creative, to say or do something original and new that only you know how to say or do. Faith is finding a way to be yourself as truly and honestly and unselfconsciously as possible. As the early Hassidic sage Rabbi Zuska once said, "When I reach the next world, God will not ask me, 'Why were you not Moses?' Instead, he will ask me, 'Why were you not Zusya?'" It takes faith to become yourself, to listen to your still small voice within, not the voices of the hundreds of others who want you to be just like them, or like somebody else.

Over the course of my career I have been asked to write and conduct a number of memorial services. I did one yesterday. I am always honored to be invited in such an intimate way into families’ lives and at such critical moments in their lives, especially when the deceased is someone like Jan Folick or Peggy Butler, people of genuine faith who found their own way in life, not as solipsists but as creative, original, collaborative participants in the ongoing story of life. Wow! How cool is that! How inspiring! How sacred! Faith exemplified. Through hardship, through illness, through many a tough time. They may be pushed down from time to time. They may have been kept from rising. Nevertheless, each one of them found a way—whatever their theology may have been--to keep lifting their hearts toward heaven, and to find, in the midst of their struggles, something good. And to make that something good known to others. And thereby to sustain them and give them hope and a vision of human grace and dignity that cannot be gainsaid. Theirs (and many others we have known) were lives of faith; transformative lives that, by virtue of their originality and authenticity, transformed the lives of others who beheld them. Like leaven, like a mustard seed, they sustained the world by becoming truly themselves in service to life, love, art, community, and good works. They were faithful. And their faith made the world a better place, and brought faith to others.

Let us go forth, and do likewise. Amen.