The world around us, and even our lives, can be disheartening and troubling at times. There are personal crises and public ones. We look out the window one minute at sunshine and the next all is dark around us.
The world brings terrible things to our front door, like disease or fear of terror.
Many of us who believe lose touch during these times with God and with faith.
Or just the opposite can happen. We find ourselves in very good places, surrounded in comfort and personal peace, and we forget about the faith that carried us in hard times.
What are the signals of losing faith? And what is the process of gaining it back?
MIKE GHOUSE, President, Foundation for Pluralism and speaker on interfaith matters, Dallas
Everything around us is created with a balance; whether it is matter or the life, there is a built-in balance in everything we see, feel or experience. We have come to trust the system to continue to be in balance, and have also learned to give room for the anomalies, but when that balance is lost severely, we despair. We feel insecure about our own space, food and nurturance and lose faith in the very system.
Nature performs its role consistently as if someone has planned it precisely. We see the sunrise on time, moon orbiting on its given trajectory, changing of the seasons, and plants producing food and oxygen. Indeed, everything is put together cohesively, and each element of nature performs as a cog in the giant wheel no matter how tiny or ‘speck’ it is. However when the built-in anomalies go awry, we see the Tsunami or the devastating floods in Philippines; we despair and lose faith, particularly if our loved ones are lost.
On the life side of the equation, our own bodies and all the elements of its composition are designed to be in balance, and a degree of self-balancing (healing) is built into it, and of course, like all elements of creation, our bodies also have developed the room for anomalies, and we despair when our health goes out of balance.
The emotional, man-manageable aspect of the equation is an open field. We have the ability to manage it and also lose it, and much of it is in our hands. It’s the breaking of hearts, divorces, cheating, betrayals, child abuse, slavery, bigotry, terrorism, wars, holocaust, genocides, massacres, accidents, injustices and all other factors that make us lose faith in the system (God).
How do we regain our faith?
It comes with the hope that we can trust the entire system again, and feel secure about our space, sustenance (food) and nurturance (loved ones). The built-in balance comes to operate to restore that faith.
For the religious folks, that built-in balance is the belief in a God who manages the entire system, and the faith that he will restore the balance or in Rev. Moon’s words, connecting back with the lineage. Those who do not believe in a “God” but believe that nature takes its own course of self-management also find hope and a restoration of balance within their souls.
Regardless of how we see God, there is a common system for every one of the 7 billion of us, and his love has given us many religions and spiritual masters to give us faith, as facts alone don’t make the life. All religions serve the same purpose – to restore balance within and with others.
Part of the credit for this write up goes to two Urdu Language Poets – Muzaffar Warsi’s song “Koi to hai jo Nizam-e-hasti chala raha hai” and Brij Naryaan Chakbast’s couplet “Zindagi kya hai anasir mein zahur-e tarteeb,: Maut kya hai ini ajza ka pareshan hona.” More details will be at TheGhouseDiary.com
RIC DEXTER, Nichiren Buddhist area leader, Soka Gakkai-USA
In a letter to a disciple, Nichiren said “Worthy (wise) persons deserve to be called so because they are not carried away by the eight winds: prosperity, decline, disgrace, honor, praise, censure, suffering, and pleasure. They are neither elated by prosperity nor grieved by decline.”
It may be difficult to recognize the truth of the matter while in the depth of tragedy or the high of victory, but the real message here is that these eight representative circumstances are as temporary and changing as the wind.
Last Friday we saw some straight line winds blow through town. While the winds were blowing I witnessed a century old tree uprooted, while nearby another tree bent nearly double, then righted itself when the winds stopped. The real question it seems not to be “Am I losing faith?” but “How deep are the roots of my faith?”
Perhaps the most difficult challenge we face is figuring out how to strengthen our faith when we feel the least faithful. It is like the story of the man shot with the poisoned arrow. Before he would allow the doctor to remove the arrow he wanted to know who poisoned the arrow, why it was shot at him, what kind of arrow it was and how could they prove to him the antidote would work. Waiting for the right answers, the man died.
One step to reawaken the faith we fear we are losing is to reach out to our community of believers. It is difficult to admit weakening faith in ourselves. It is even more difficult to admit it to others. Fear of being seen as weak (disgrace), fear of being judged (censure), are nothing more than our own negativity trying to prevent us from overcoming our problem. A truly good friend will likely see in your struggle, their own, and will work to help you.
With or without that good friend, the path to reawakening is to reconnect with the roots of our faith. Reflect on why you took faith in the first place. The theology or philosophy and the scripture of a tradition help explain the why, and maybe how it works. The fact that you have seen it work is what sticks with you. Remembering those things can be the first step to remembering that those things came about through faith.
DARRELL BOCK, Executive Director of Cultural Engagement, Howard G. Hendricks Center for Christian Leadership and Cultural Engagement, Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies Dallas Theological Seminary
Signs of losing it: Lack of desire to fellowship with God during the day or in worship and prayer or a lack of a desire to be with his people. Lack of concern about accountability for how we act.
Gaining it back: Renewed sense of trust in God, reclaiming time with God and his people. Commitment to honoring God in what we do and how we do it. Reflection on the wonders of God, his goodness and his creation.
DANIEL KANTER, First Unitarian Church of Dallas
Faith is not something we either have or don’t have at a moment’s notice. It is a lens on life that we either cultivate or ignore but it seeps under the surface of things always because faith is more than belief. Every time we measure what we trust, how our loyalties are changing, or how we understand the world we are engaging in faith exercises which challenge us to change. Every time we have doubts about the world or ask whether we believe the same things we did last year or last week we are in essence taking faith seriously. If we think of faith as something we have like currency then we have lost its intent; that we only fail if we fail to wrestle with the meanings of our lives.
CYNTHIA RIGBY, W.C. Brown Professor of Theology, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary
First I’m certain that losing faith does NOT look like doubt. To doubt is to hold tight to what we believe, begging it to come through for us in relation to the circumstances we encounter. “Lord, I believe,” a man once said to Jesus, when Jesus asked him if he thought Jesus could heal his child. “Lord I believe; help me now my unbelief.” Doubt starts with faith and wants to end there, too.
Second, I’m increasingly sure that faith can also include skepticism. “How can this be?” Mary asks Gabriel, skeptical that she, a virgin, can bear a child. “How can a person climb back into the mother’s womb and be born again?” Nicodemus asks Jesus, skeptical that such a thing can be accomplished. It is possible that skepticism can actually advance faith insofar as it invites us to wonder about how impossible things might be made possible by God.
So then: Faith includes doubt, and may also include skepticism. But it is not hospitable to apathy. Signs that we are losing faith include not doubting (wrestling with what we believe) and not being skeptical (wondering in the face of impossibility). When we lose faith, we stop reading, praying, studying, questioning, conversing, and arguing. We shrug our shoulders. We give up on trying to figure out how it is that God is present in a world so full of pain.
How do we get faith back? I’m not sure we have the capacity to do it on our own. I am consoled by the fact that we cannot achieve faith; it is faith that lays claim to us. That said, what we CAN do is position ourselves to receive. We can create spaces in our lives to pray and to think, to converse and to learn, to read and to worship, to be as well as to do. In those spaces, the hope is that what we believe will be renewed and that we will again be filled with wonder, love, and hope.
LARRY BETHUNE, Senior Pastor, University Baptist Church, Austin
If “faith” is reduced to “belief” – a cognitive process of agreement with certain ideas, then losing faith means changing your mind about what you think about God. The danger of defining faith this way is how it requires you to be close-minded and resistant to any contrary evidence. It presumes brains as small as ours can contain God. It also requires an unrealistic human perfection since believers cannot be wrong about a single idea about God without jeopardizing their whole system of belief.
Such “faith” is all in your head, and leads you to hold the more rigidly to ideas that may turn out to be just plain wrong (if not also destructive). The believer is not free and God is not free to be different from what we believe about God. Christians love to point out the biblical Pharisees as an example of this rigidity of belief and trust in their own intellectual constructs so that they opposed God’s voice in Christ, yet fail to see how they have made the same mistake over and again through history.
If “faith” is defined in the Jewish context of Christian origins as “faithfulness” – trust in God that leads to consistent action – then losing faith means losing trust and turning away from the spiritual path. Keeping faith is, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, “a long obedience in the same direction.” It is not without belief, but humble in being open to correction. It is also more than just belief, a more holistic spiritual focus that includes head, heart, community, relationship, and action.
Such faith is not a rigid orthodoxy of beliefs to be memorized and followed without question, but a spiritual journey of constant discovery and correction. To be sure, faith as “keeping faith” is no easy journey (though no harder than trusting science or personal opinion or other sources of authority), but constantly tested by real life experience and open to learning from it. As Richard Rohr puts it, “We do not think ourselves into a new way of living, but we live ourselves into a new way of thinking.”