What Is It That I Believe? by Rev. J.D. Benson, Sept. 20, 2009

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What Is It That I Believe?

by Rev. J.D. Benson, Sept. 20, 2009

         I was on-call one day when a chaplain colleague of mine stopped me in the corridor. This staff member, a Catholic priest, told me about a patient on his unit whose wife was happy to hear there was a chaplain of her own faith at Georgetown. She asked him if I might visit. She felt her husband was particularly depressed and she thought if I could make a visit perhaps it could help. I agreed to follow up. As I was on call I figured I’d have time after my usual rounds to the pediatric transplant unit and the thoracic/cardiac step-down, barring any emergencies that might delay.

         Chaplaincy in a hospital is a wonderful ministry with many opportunities to work with people of different traditions and I am always especially pleased to be called upon to serve one of our own. I went on my way that day visiting infants and their parents, toddlers and young children hooked up to tubes and wires like the Nintendos they played with. When I was done I found myself heading toward the ICU and my Unitarian Universalist visit.

         As I walked down the long corridor from Main to the Critical Care Building I passed an occasional nurse or tech or a team of health care providers wheeling a patient toward the step-down. I also found myself thinking about a ministerial candidate I’d met about a year before who had spent a few months working in a hospital. “I don’t know what we as Unitarian Universalist ministers and chaplains can bring to patients in the way of hope” I remember her saying.

         While I had immediately thought she was wrong, her words stayed with me. I don’t’ think we bring hope; perhaps we help to uncover the hope that resides in the patient or family member or staff for that matter. This day I would have another opportunity to see what hope there may be revealed in an encounter between this Unitarian Univeralist minister and chaplain, and one of our congregants in the hospital.

         When I reached the room on the Intensive Care Unit, the patient, I’ll call him Tom, was sitting up in a chair, his wife close by. Tom’s lap and torso were draped with a sheet, an unintentional toga-look to it, and Tom appeared to be very low energy. Somehow in that cramped space we were able to get a small chair in so I could sit right across from Tom, take his hand and look into his eyes, and he into mine.

         Tom seemed to hesitate to break the silence at first but with a few starts and a little encouragement he told me what was going on for him. He told me the story of a friend of his, Sam. Sam had been deathly ill. Like Tom, Sam was committed and very involved for many years in his local church. Sam, in what was the 11th hour of his life, told Tom that while he was still committed to his Unitarian Universalist church, he felt let down by the tradition in his illness. Tom told me that he found himself in the same position now that his friend Sam had been in some months back: his health in a precarious state and without anything to hold onto. “Without anything” sounds like “without hope”, I said. And he replied, a bit tearfully, “Yes, that’s right.”

         Tom and I talked a while and as we did we discovered that he feared he wouldn’t be accepted among his friends at his congregation considering the specific questions he was grappling with. His search for truth and meaning was inhibited in the context of his religious home. He felt there were implicit conditions for acceptance, and because of this he avoided his own deeply felt needs to speak aloud these things he wondered about. This was depressing him, clearly disempowering for him. It made him doubt alternately whether he was in the right religious home or whether he had a right to question and explore his beliefs and expect support for doing so.

         I assured him that his search was very much ok and very much affirmed in our principles. For us, beliefs aren’t what holds us together in our movement; belief is not the glue. It is not that we all believe the same thing or think the same way but if we have any beliefs at all it’s that we are better off when we don’t all believe the same things. We get closer to the Truth that way and, perhaps most importantly, in sharing the journey. And I suggested too, that sometimes we falter in our efforts to live our principles, sometimes we fail to make room for other people’s search AND for our own. It’s us, you and I, and we can change that, and Tom and I did, at least for a time, together.

         Through our conversation that day and in a additional few visits, Tom grew in confidence and in hope that his search for truth and meaning was a wonderful thing and in living his own truth—doubts and questions included—he could take refuge in his own understanding, wherever it might lead him. He could read, and think and discuss whatever he was… intuiting…. conceptualizing….. feeling. Whatever might hold truth for him he could sit with at least with me, with his wife, and eventually, with a couple of close friends by phone from his hospital bed.

         Even though they weren’t set and firm, the exploration itself was affirming. He could assert ideas he hadn’t felt free to express before, like “what is the nature of the Divine?” and “what happens at the end of life and maybe, could there be a beyond?” and this helped to shift something in him toward a greater sense of peace, of serenity just openly asking the questions. He seemed to feel more in sync with himself. It helped him, with eyes wide open, to feel more integrated, less compartmentalized, less alienated from his own ideas, more in touch with his hope.

         And I had to ask myself, as I remembered that ministerial candidate’s question a year before about what hope we bring to Unitarian Universalists as ministers and chaplains in particular, I had to wonder how it is that sometimes we may inadvertently stifle one another’s free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

         Contemporary philosophy and religion professor Kevin Twain Lowery talks about what he calls a “maturity of beliefs” in his book of that title. He claims that if we learn to hold our beliefs in new ways, open to intellectual exploration and to the notion that, to paraphrase him, each of us holds a piece of the truth, we will be more able to freely explore and develop, to ripen our beliefs. Lowery contends that in our immaturity there are two extremes—equally problematic ones---with which we hold our beliefs.

         On the one hand, some people approach the matter of religious, spiritual or philosophical beliefs from an extreme of skepticism, an extreme which overvalues being skeptical in and of itself using faulty assumptions in their “logic” in the first place, rendering their “findings” self-serving and nothing more, tending to dress up negation as if it were logical and sound even though the assumptions undergirding their “NO” often are not. The other extreme, a position of “blind faith” or naïveté won’t allow a person to explore their beliefs from an intellectual perspective because to do so threatens old comfortable feelings. To explore these would risk destabilizing them and their “rightness” above all other beliefs.

         In essence Lowery asserts that if we can hold our beliefs---not as absolutes but as “reliable”-- they are proven in a way that matters, by how trustworthy we find them to be. Do they help us to make meaning in our lives? Does our approach lead to strengthening our faith-that is, our view of life and how to live---making our commitment deeper, more honest, even if we must accept a lack of certainty. If a person finds that his or her beliefs are indeed reliable, and that she or he can be open to growth and change over time—then we are mature in our faith, that is, mature in our approach to living and how we hold our beliefs.

         Sometimes we do this with extremes of skepticism born of a fear of the consequences of “blind faith” or past experience, perhaps, of faith stances that have not been ‘reliable’. We are proud as Unitarian Universalists of saying “we are not asked to check our brains at the door.” But do we sometimes fail one another and ourselves by insisting on our rules of engagement, our faith stances, even our beliefs, worshipping as some of us may, the false God of something we call rational thinking but that simply serves to shut down our own and other peoples’ exploration of the Divine? When it comes to spiritual or religious matters, how do we find a place for intellectual discussion about our beliefs that does not look to false standards or “proofs” for things that are not verifiable beyond our individual sense that they are for us, reliable?

         With Tom in mind, and Sam, I offered a workshop last year here at church: What do I Believe? It was experiential, very much process-oriented. On a Saturday in March, 25 of us gathered for about 5 ½ hours, including lunch, and explored our individual beliefs through the vehicle of various activities. Participants made personal timelines that included important events and important people, one’s various religious affiliations over time, personal beliefs over time, and other particulars--an exercise adapted from one in the workbook, Building Your Own Theology by D*** Gilbert.

         Workshop participants also explored through other activities drawn from other sources. In one they contemplated the question: what were the messages they grew up with about a variety of topics: Religion, Spirituality, Culture and more. They noticed how gender, generation and other variables impacted what those messages were. They discussed what of those messages they have kept from among those initial family and community messages and what they had rejected, let go of and changed.

         They shared how they each respond to people they meet who feel differently than they about one or another of the topics. And finally, we had time to create and share our individual visions of Heaven on Earth: what would it look like, what were the elements, and which of these elements in our individual Heavens on Earth could we increase in our lives right now, an exploration and discussion which, if I’m not mistaken, influenced the sermon series for this year. Participants in the workshop were surprised. They learned about one another. They learned about themselves. There were wonderful “aha” moments. There were tears shed. There were hugs and there was consolation. There was JOY, joy found, joy affirmed! There was discussion and support.

         Some group members continued to meet in subsequent weeks twice a month to continue the conversation and focused on, among other things, our Seven Principles. People reported that looking back at what they believed over time helped them to clarify what they believe today. Some reported that they felt safe for the first time speaking honestly and openly with other people about their questions, doubts and hopes theologically. Some reported getting closer to people they didn’t know before and in a way that seemed to matter. We’re planning to offer the workshop again. Flyers are available in Fellowship Hall and the workshop is listed in the program guide: you: you’re invited!

         Now when I think about the ministerial candidate and her lament about “hope” I think about Tom and many of the workshop participants, who, it seems, found in their Unitarian Universalism during these encounters, much reason to have hope in the warm and loving embrace of our living tradition, our principles, in beloved community.

What do UU's Believe?

• Our Principles and Beliefs

• "Always Seek Out Joy," an I Believe Statement by Heather Crombie