On Faith Development

Nineteenth century Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing once brazenly remarked that “the great end in religious instruction is not to stamp our minds upon the young, but to stir up their own." Extending this tradition, notable liberal religious educators like Sophia Lyon Fahs and Angus MacLean have insisted on the latent spiritual potentialities of children and their innate capacity for moral development. Importantly, faith development does not derive, on this view, from the mere absorption or ingestion of pre-packaged doctrinal truths, but rather from an embodied and experiential engagement with life in all of its fullness.

The danger with this approach lies in its tendency towards an empty subjectivism. Without effective structures and support, the child flounders helplessly and gains but a paper-thin understanding of her own religious heritage.

Might there be a middle way? In the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, we read: "In the temple of the mind is the Ambrosial Nectar of the Lord; through the Guru's Teachings, we drink it in" (175). I want to suggest that this scriptural fragment adroitly balances the competing claims of freedom and responsibility. It affirms the ripe sacred vitality inherent in all, which robust religious guidance allows us to pick and cherish.


Print this post

Decisions

Recently, I have been immersed in a groundswell of decision-making. Through prayer and introspection, I have attempted to discern God's voice, wooing me in one direction or another. Such deep listening is hard and tiring work.

Then, the other evening, while ensconced in the rhythms of Gurbani at the Gurdwara, I suddenly realized that my focus had been largely misplaced. God was in the outcome, more than in the decision itself. It was my responsibility to choose, knowing that God would accompany me either way. As we read in the Sri Guru Granth Sahib: "That bride, who is absorbed into the True Guru, shall never become a widow" (53).

God will be there, always, blessing the unworthy with virtue.


Print this post

A Prayer of Returning

[Written for the new Board transition service of the HDS UU Ministry for Students]


Let us pray:

O Holy One: ever known, yet unknowable –
You who give voice to our words,
And reconciliation to our fragile shortcomings;
You who move our hands to action,
And move our action to what is right and good;
You who provide the thoughts we think,
The sensations we feel,
The compassion we share with one another.
All is Yours; We are Yours; and You are in and with all.

Over the past two months,
We have lost and gained,
We have departed and returned,
We have forgotten and remembered,
We have mourned and rejoiced,
We have scattered and reunited,
And we have come together, on this day, in Your witness, O Wondrous One.
We have gathered to recommit, to reconfide and to reordain ourselves, in Your name,
To the holy work of tearing down walls of estrangement
And building up a fellowship of mutual care and respect.

Gathering as a people of trust,
As a community of deep faith in the bold marvel of life,
We offer up this space as an altar to the gentle thrashing of transformation.

May we grow out of self-absorption and self-importance,
May we sprout into service of this ministry and its audacious purpose,
May we listen more attentively to Your small, still whisper,
As we fall into the future –
May You carry us,
So that we may carry You.

Amen.

Christian Theology: Wickedness

The saga continues...

Having worked with victims of sexual and domestic abuse, Mary Engel has witnessed suffering in its rawest forms. It is from this wounded community that she is "sourced" (D. Williams). Engel proposes a posture towards questions of theodicy that addresses "wickedness," which serves as the catchall term for both corporate evil and individual sinfulness. She initially considers three possible constructive theodical solutions:

1) Sin as distortion of feeling: self-denial, self-blame, moral callousness
2) Sin as betrayal of trust: breaking the sacred bond of trust
3) Sin as lack of care: avoiding responsibility and distorting the self's boundaries

Returning to the crucifixion as the violent slaughter of the God-Made-Vulnerable, Engel arrives at the following working definition: wickedness derives from the "distortion of the dynamic tension between freedom and dependence, or the lack of consent to the dependence and fragility of our lives."

In many ways, I quite like this provisional theological suggestion, as it incorporates both autonomous and systemic factors. I suspect, however, that post-colonial theorists might wrestle with the very concept of consent, which privileges a seemingly Western notion of empowered individual agency.

Either way, Engel is clearly on to something. I was particularly moved and disturbed by the poetic verses that opened her piece. One excerpt reads:

I have been raped
be-
cause I have been wrong.

To me, this points to the most convincing answer to theodical inquiry: we cannot solve the problem of evil unless we learn to live with God in solidarity.

Wickedness is real and belies any totalizing explanation. The most we can hope for is concursus Dei. Or, as Bonhoeffer intuits, "only a suffering God can help."

Amidst suffering, all of creation walks with God in a constant "movement toward metamorphosis" (Song). Between the act of violence ("I have been raped") and the transition to meaning-making ("cause I have been wrong" - admittedly distorted, I might add), God clears space for us just to "be-" - with the smallest (Gutierrez), with the Great Companion (Duraisingh) and with all-else.


Print this post

Christian Theology: The Cross

I continue this series of posts on Christian theological reflection with an entry on the meaning of the cross. Admittedly, these gestures reflect an inchoate effort at translating traditional Christian symbolics into a language more familiar to my Unitarian Universalist parlance. This dialogical engagement is of utmost importance, I believe. Not only does Christian rhetoric claim significant currency in our culture, but the Living Tradition traces its rich heritage in and through Christianity's winding legacy.

As for the cross:

1) The Cross as Exposure: despite the darkness that covered Golgotha (Matthew 27:45), the crucifixion-event served as a form of illumination. In this way, it was God dwelling in the dark clouds (1 Kings 8:12). The cross cast a spotlight back on the world of violence that nailed Jesus to those beams. It exposed the raw hatred, power-fetishes and brutality simmering below the facade of empire. It pierced the Real and, in so doing, demonstrated the contingency of the Symbolic (Zizek) - the radical possibility of egalitarian re-configuration. Rosemary Reuther refers to this process as the unmasking of idols and proclamation of the good news of "abundant life in loving mutuality."


2) The Cross as Verdict: rejecting Jesus' invitation to conversion into solidarity with the downtrodden, the political and religious authorities cast their verdict. The antagonists in this violent drama should not be overlooked. In this way, the oppositional "verdict of the Father" (Barth), as signified by the resurrection, calls those who encounter the living Christ to similarly oppose the politics of empire and dehumanizing orthodoxy of calcified institutional religion in our time. "The cross means human beings rejecting human beings," C.S. Song writes. This is true. But we, as religious enthusiasts with an eye on current events, must not forget that the perpetrators were those alleging political treason and religious blasphemy.


3) The Cross as Mystery: the most haunting scene of the crucifixion narrative undoubtedly centers on Jesus' desperate cry for God's presence amidst isolation and estrangement. This scene tempers the well-intentioned tendency to view the Calvary story as a triumphalist cosmic victory over evil. As Rosemary Reuther intuits, the horizontal evils plaguing human history are often cast aside amidst enthusiastic fervor surrounding the vertical action of the "god-man" satisfying God's supposed wrath. We cannot succumb to this interpretive temptation. Rather, the disturbing absence of God during periods of the crucifixion-event testifies to God's mysterious and unknowable nature. On the one hand, "God means to put an end to all the crosses of history" (Boff). On the other, we must neither romanticize suffering nor arrogantly claim secret insight into God's will. At the end of the day, "God cannot be owned" (Countryman).


Print this post

Christian Theology: The Human

I offer some cursory reflections that bubbled up from the Christian theology course I am currently taking at EDS:

Lactantius once wrote: “since humanity is the image of God…the strongest bond which unites us is humanity.” This perspective tempers, I believe, the misreading of stewardship in terms of exploitation. Rather, redemption involves bringing the image of God to its fulfillment despite the reality of sin - and doing so together.

On questions of theodicy, I am inclined to preference the analogy of sin as a power which holds us captive (much like evil in Greek tragic theater) over and against viewing sin as a hereditary disease or guilt passed down from generation to generation. In this way, I am skeptical of Pelagius’ overly generous faith in humanity’s good works, while similarly cautious not to allow the human mind to crumble under the weight of Augustinian pessimism. Here, I appreciate Delores Williams’ characterization of sin as estrangement from the source of one’s Being, which in the womanist context maps onto a loss of identity and, by extension, connection. Tying the notions of imago Dei and sin together, I arrive at Migliore’s stopgap: “Being created in the image of God is not a state or condition but a movement with a goal.”

It is through grace, then, that we hold fast to, and walk with God (concursus Dei) towards, the promise of pleroma – sharing in the fullness of God’s life in community, in restored and faithful relationship, with oneself, with others, with nature and God. Or, as C.S. Song puts it, “Our world expands!”

Print this post

Faith in the Play of Life

I have long since wrestled with the Hindu notion of "lila" (play) as a description of divine action in the world. The idea of Shiva sporadically indwelling in human-like form to playfully and teasingly court a devotee, before unexpectedly disappearing back into the divine realm, both intrigues and troubles me. In some ways, the description seems apt. Despite our rigorous attempts at taming and controlling the natural world, humanity remains a helpless bystander of raging hurricanes and shifting teutonic plates. The awe-fulness of the Holy never fails to stunt our feeble efforts at domesticating nature's raw force - Kali, the Dark Mother, always slips through our clasped fists. At the same time, I want to believe that we as humans participate in, from time to time even co-direct, this game. Much as Radha's love for Krishna sustains the deity's existence, so too we are the hands of God. Is there not a certain reciprocity, a mutual dependence, an intimate relationality?

One of my favorite verses in the Sri Guru Granth Sahib reads: "Naked we come, and naked we go; in between, we put on a show" (1238). Life exhibits a playful quality - if you watch humanity long enough, you have to laugh at our bizarre eccentricities, our foolishnesses, our absurdities. And yet, life also contains a sense of spectacle. Moments of grace that take our breath away. Moments of disgust at the violence and hatred and bigotry.

In today's shabad, we are exhorted to witness and praise the "wondrous play of the Lord" (SGGS 407). I am inclined to suggest that faith, that audacious act of fides, rests precisely on our trusting in such divine lila.


Print this post