The Sea: A Lifelong Journey of Faith Development

A sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

On September 25^th 2005

By the Reverend Hilary Landau Krivchenia

Readings:

Sermon

Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.  There was a moment in childhood while hop scotching or maybe leaping the sidewalk from square to square that I paused, looking down at the cracks and saw the sidewalk in vivid detail.  Each crevice, each crack in an infinite variation of patterns was a small world – full of significance.  The world around me was full of significance.  I knew it in that moment of play.  Play is the work of the child – the way the world is discovered and learned.  There are countless moments of discovery – some lifted moments when what’s discovered is profound.  What I learned in that moment remained grounding me, a turning point in my awareness of the world. 

Meaning is everywhere.  Meaning is everywhere because we are the seekers and makers of meaning.  Nietzsche and later Ernst Becker called us – homo poeta – humanity – or quaintly – man – the meaning maker.  In a cosmos that exists for its own sake we’re driven to find meaning.  You know those strange sticks, called water witches?  Maybe you know them as divining rods – sticks with which people could find deeply hidden waters, the source of life.  We, ourselves, are divining rods, we are so formed as to be ever seeking the deeply hidden, the source of life, the divine.  We are divining rods.

            From childhood to the present what have you divined, hidden within the dailiness of your life? After the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, the Great Pumpkin and Santa Claus were abandoned – except as holiday décor – where did you strike upon meaning?  We’re going to take a couple of Sundays with this question.

            First I want to tackle a couple of words or ideas so that we might speak a common language – or at least make an effort to.

            Religion – now that’s a word that’s earned a rather shabby reputation for itself. The word comes, you may know, from a Latin root religare – to bind, to tie back.  Thus, it means to bind the people back to a sacred center.  Some religious movements can tell you just what that center is, how to see it, say it, and be with it.  But that isn’t what makes a religion.  What does, are the ways that people connect to experience, reflect upon, and serve that center.  Religion is outward form: the rites, traditions, and ways of being.

            Many people are fond of saying – I’m spiritual – but not religious.  I bet most of us here have a rough sense of what they might mean -- yet it’s so vague and personal as, really, to be meaningless.  We just know that somewhere along the line they developed an intolerance for rites and traditions that they associate with religious life.

            Let’s look now at the word faith – also one that’s taken a beating.  At its worst people mean that faith is, as Mark Twain put it – believing what you know ain’t so.  Too often people define faith as something you have – faith in God or Jesus Allah – or that you lack.  Yet faith is something that every one of us has. 

            James Fowler, a critical figure in developmental psychology, has made some observations about religion and the human life cycle.  He says that these observations on faith are universal: common to Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, agnostics, atheists.   Faith is common to us all – because we’re in deep and signifying waters all our lives.

            Fowler says that “faith is an active mode of knowing.  It is a way of composing a felt sense of the condition of our lives as a whole.”  He says that faith is how we learn to trust, distrust, and sustain ourselves in the world.  Faith is always relational – there is always an-other in faith.  You may thinks that you’re here on your own terms, thank you very much and that you don’t need anything to help you get along.  Yet there’s your faith – a broken faith that anything outside of yourself is worthy of trust and confidence and that you are the only trustworthy agent, somewhere your trust has been fractured.

            Though faith and belief are intimately connected – they’re not identical.   On one level you could say that belief is the body of assertions that a person makes about the world.  You know – what do you believe?  But that’s vague too. You know how people ask Unitarian Universalists “what do you believe?  Well – there’s more to belief than that – the word comes from the German – be lieben – like liebe – dear – to hold dear.  Belief is what you hold dear.  Fortunately the heart is an infinitely large chamber!

During the Torah service on Friday evenings Jewish congregations will carry the Torah scroll around the sanctuary and sing “she is a tree of life to those who hold fast to her.”  To hold fast, to hold dear.  To believe is to hold dear – and you will know what people hold dear by how they treat the world.  We’re known by our fruits.  Lately this has been illustrated by our national portrait.  We have billions of dollars for war making and scant resources for health care, education, healing the addict, supporting our children or elders.  Now – we can debate policy from here to kingdom come – that it’s important to defend our borders, keep our citizens safe from violent attack, promote democracy – but no matter how we may claim we value human life, our collective national will shows that we hold war dearest.  It’s war that we trust will save us and care for us.  War is what we believe in.  We can put a nativity scene at the courthouse or Reihle Plaza -- in every public square – but it won’t change what this country really believes in – and it’s not the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, rabble rouser, champion of the poor, and Universalist.

            So – faith is your way of knowing the world deeply and being in relationship with the world.  Belief is that which you hold dear in the face of that knowing.  We are divining rods and that to which we point, we become and bring to fruition.

            Because of his work in developmental psychology, James Fowler evolved a theory that humans pass through stages of faith development.  I’ve applied a maxim to the theory of faith development: change is inevitable – growth is optional.  We’re not fated to mature in our faith – we can be stuck – fossilized – we still change – but only as the once living cells of our dear faith harden.  On the other hand we’re not consigned to a narrow path – we may sense at any time the scent that that Denise Levertov’s poem spoke of on the night wind -- the sharp smell of the sea ... and we may hurry toward it so that meaning pours into every small thing and our senses are enlivened, expanded and changed.  Rather than stages from age to that age I think of these as different phases which run into one another, keep no schedule, and appear, like so much else, more like a spiral where we revisit the same places again but from a slightly different vantage point.

            An infant enters life in vulnerability – the senses awakening.  Each experience shapes the infant’s forming ideas about the world.  Theorists may romanticize the spiritual lives of infants.  It’s true they lack the boundaries, the sharp definitions that divide the world from seamless unity into gazillion distinct objects – but that’s not the same as seeing on a deeper level and understanding a unity amid rich diversity.

Reading

James Fowler wrote about his infant daughter Joan:

“For several weeks between her fifteenth and eighteenth months my older daughter conducted daily a curious ritual. In our four room graduate student’s apartment she had a small bedroom adjoining that of her parents.  As early morning sunlight bathed the room, Joan would awaken, stand up in her crib, and through the open door demand her parents’ sleepy attention. When she was sure that we were both in attendance she began, in her tentative English, to name the various pictures and objects of furniture in her little room.  When she had named each of the eleven or twelve items she knew, waiting after each one to get our confirmation and praise, she then turned to other play and the day could begin.  Minimally, I believe, it represented a daily celebration and reconfirmation that external world was made up of dependably permanent objects and that she could, daily, reconstitute a repertoire of shared meanings with her parents.” Fowler, Stages of Faith, p. 122

            What is critical in infancy in particular and childhood in general is the establishment of trust, autonomy and self esteem – foundation blocks for faith experience and development.  What we’ll accept, explore, question, connect with will be run through these earliest of filters.  Fowler Says: “Future religious experience will either have to confirm or reground that basic trust.”  We’ll lean toward freedom or strict dogma, reach for a sail or an anchor depending upon the ways we are moored in our earliest stages of life.  We don’t yet have real structures of religious belief – parents and caretakers are like gods dispensing the power of life and death, of comfort and confidence or pain and fear. 

            I’m sure that no matter what influences us, we’re unpredictable.  We choose well or poorly, with love as the outcome or fear.  Still, Unitarian Universalist religious education is based on the idea that we can foster, from infancy through adulthood, an atmosphere of freedom, responsibility, and trust so that at all ages we know that our questions and doubts as well as our insights and answers are worth attention and respect. 

            The stages that follow are a synthesis of the work of Fowler, Thomas Groome -- a Christian religious educator, and the Reverend Eugene Navias a Unitarian Universalist minister and educator.  The Reverend Peg Morgan put these together in a useful chart that you may pick up a copy of at the back of the sanctuary as you leave today – if you’d like one.

Throughout life we keep our own versions of the ritual that Fowler’s baby girl engaged in: calling forth and testing the world.  I remember the unease I experienced when I chanted: step on a crack break your mother’s back.  That it never happened made me skeptical about all sorts of myths and made my world more predictable.

            As the child enters toddlerhood a worldview begins to take shape.  They’re aware of their dependency and this leads them to want to adopt the stories that please those they depend upon but also to chafe at this dependence.  They have rich imaginations and the stories that they can tell you are fabulous.  They’re trying to match their observations of the world with a limited power to express them – and they speak in a symbolic way.  

I remember an episode of Star Trek in which Jean Luc Picard is stuck on a deserted planet with a being whose entire manner of expressing himself is metaphorical – so that he tells stories to talk about everything – and because Jean Luc does not know and understand the stories he is at a loss to understand the rich expressions of the being he has encountered.  They have to fight until they each learn to use their stories to understand one another.  Often our children will come to us with a puzzling story.  We try to get them to clarify – but they are being clear to themselves.

Reading:

Interviewer asks the child – who is Freddy, aged six a child who believes in God:

Interviewer: Do people ever talk to God?

Freddy: Yeah.

Interviewer: How?

Freddy: Well, God can hear them, but he’s in signs.  He doesn’t talk

The interviewer mis-hears Freddy:  He doesn’t?  What kind of songs does he sing?

Freddy: He sings songs about – I don’t know really.  But he’s in Signs, Signs like stop signs.

Interviewer:  stop signs? Can you guess what kind of signs he might send?

Freddy: Like Peace Signs.

Interviewer:  Peace Signs?

Freddy: Yeah.  That’s all I know about that. P.127-8

Sometimes we’ve shared enough with them that we intuit their meanings and other times our children give up and rely upon the stories we give them, the symbolic language that they know we’ll understand and approve of.  This phase – said to last to about the 6^th year is a time of creativity and imagination – if we allow it.  Sally, a child Fowler interviewed at 4½  used her imagination because although her parents did not believe in God she was affected by television programs in which people did. 

Interviewer: Is God real to you?

Sally: Um…. Yeah, sometimes I think it’s real.

Interviewer: What does God look like?

Sally: He doesn’t look like anything.  He’s all around you.

            Pretty deep for 4½.

            This phase is followed by the time of life in which – perhaps because children are so eager to learn – they’re soaking up the stories around them and taking them on with literal fierceness.  They don’t want to spend time on nuance – but to get to the next new learning and to belong to the larger group that will help them make sense of their stories.  Children are just beginning to comprehend the impact of their actions on others and begin to develop conscience if they’re given time, space and respect to really think.  Peg Morgan says this is an important time to stop them in their headlong absorption of everything and get them to ask “whys” about right or wrong – give them the opportunity to develop real conscience and not simply a desire to follow the rules.  Many people come to Unitarian Universalism saying they had questions as a child, but were told not to ask them at church or at school.  Somehow they held fast, believed in the importance of those questions so that years later they arrive here – questions still fresh within them.

            An adolescent religious life in some ways deepens the earlier phase.  While it can be rebellious more often the spiritual lives of adolescents and those stuck in this phase are anchors in the storm of life.  From the 12^th year until later the desire is strong to follow the authority of adult leaders – those who count – which can be measured lots of ways – from the minister, to the football coach, to the gang leader. 

Reading:
Linda is a fifteen year old interviewee.

Interviewer: What does it mean when you say that you are going to go to heaven?

Linda: Well, nobody really knows. It’s supposed to be paradise.  And I guess I’ll find out sometime.  But, see, I don’t want to ask too many questions like that.  I always wanted to… well – lots of people have really done research into religion and they’ve gone insane, you know?  I’ve never wanted to go that far into it.  I just want to do what the Bible says.  Lots of people think how the earth stared and everything, I, only. …. There’s a limit to me.  I know that it started from God.  And I don’t ask anymore questions, you know?

I’ll find out later on.

As Unitarian Universalists we hope that our young people learn some respect for authority in this stage – but not over much.  We’re eager that each person should keep intact their freshness and imagination.  It is a deeply mythic stage in which the stories that have been learned are interpreted literally.  Often this is used – as is so much else in adolescence to decide who counts, who’s saved or good enough.  Peg Morgan points out that this is a valuable time for young people to have some autonomy in youth programs and to interact with other youth who are also in this stage -- it takes them out of the cycle of cooperation and resistance and gives them space to be creative in their faith. 

Reading:

Linda Continues:

Linda:  I have felt times when I doubted God. But then I realized that it’s just me.  I’m walking away from God.  I have like, at times, like this people-need to be close to someone like God.  You need to be so close and you need to have something to wake up to every morning. I mean .. and have a feeling that it’s worth living.  I think people who live, go to work, come home, go to sleep, go to work, you know – it’s just a regular routine, so that I think that people should just believe in God and just follow him.

            There’s no guarantee that anyone will move on from this phase of faith development – if a person’s trust in the world is broken, the stories they have been given may be the anchor to which they cling.  Questioning foundational stories and rules may seem terrifying and threatening – something to protect yourself and your children from.  We’re surrounded in this society by those who remain in this stage – dogmatic.  Now these stories aren’t always religious stories.  I’ve known – in my own family – people of good hearts and minds who saw the devastations of the 20^th century and decided that science was the only safe model for life – that nothing was to be held dear but the laws of science and the rules of the scientific method.  Faith is, as Fowler says “an active mode of knowing…. a way of composing a felt sense of the condition of our lives as a whole.”  I remember how appalled my mother was when I decided to major in Philosophy.  To entertain the soft studies, to run the risk of emotion could be to unleash the hounds of unreason and deliver humanity back into the hell we once called “The Dark Ages” or more recently – the New World Order.

            The exercise of faith is integral to us as breathing.  The real questions we are faced with stare back from the cover of our hymnal – is this a living tradition, is your journey a living journey? What do you show by your fruits?

            The signs of our faith – our faithfulness in our world to this world --  are not always so easy to measure. But perhaps you would take some time – over the next weeks to look into your life, your actions, your words, and your thoughts, and you may begin to see those guideposts that mark the place where you have passed on your journey. 

            We are but partway on our exploration of the journey of faith.  Still – the smell of the sea remains around us.  Most of you here have chosen a living journey – or you would not be in this church of the living journey today.  You are here not to adopt the beliefs of the minister, the beliefs of the person beside you, nor to follow a sealed gospel– but to write with your lives a living gospel – you are here because you have wanted to widen the path to the sea. 

            According to the stage theory which we are following, the next stages are all too often left unexplored.  And yet for Unitarian Universalists they seem, to me, to be the most compelling.  We even remind ourselves with our fourth principle: the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Let us shake the dust from our shoes and head toward that depth – you can feel the pull of that tide in countless wonders and tragedies of living -- when you grieve or are pierced with joy.  Beside you sits a person deep and feeling, complex, quirky, marvelous, unique.  From meaning we emerged, in meaning we live, and into meaning, into history and the record of life and choice we will die.  All around us is meaning and wonder, all around us is that which sustains us and challenges us.  In this season, as the days shorten, as the cycle of holy days begins with Rosh Hashanah in a week, as we gather in to begin our own season of re-covenanting – the sea of life, source of life beckons us.  Calls to us as water calls to a divining rod, as meaning calls to the heart, and the heart cries back in longing.

As we move through this season and study the seasons of our faith journeys – no two of which will be identical, every step will move our pilgrim feet closer to meaning – to our individual meanings and our shared meanings -- every step will move our pilgrim feet closer to life.