Faith Works 11-7-20

Faith Works 11-7-20

Jeff Gill

Believing in other people is faithful work

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Faith is often criticized as being ungrounded, not proven, someone's purely imaginary beliefs without a source that can be independently confirmed. And sometimes, that's what faith is.

Or, he said with an eye to the Christmas season ahead, "Faith is believing when common sense tells you not to." Hat tip, Doris Walker (don't worry, it'll come to you).

Rationalists like to condemn faith as always being that sort of emotionally driven, secondhand sort of attitude, not a way of using your mind to truly understand life and circumstances.

Yet we people of faith like to come right back with the reminder that much of life has to be taken on faith. I've never been to Russia, or Africa, or Poughkeepsie, but I believe they all exist. There's a webwork, a larger context of facts and inferences and (this is the big one) trust that allows me to believe in upper New York State, even when I've never been farther up the Hudson than Wappingers Falls.

For a Christian, our faith is grounded in stories from scripture, history and tradition in the life of our church community, and many would say the guidance of the Holy Spirit, which is exactly the kind of subjective statement that frustrates hard core rationalists. You can't see or smell the Holy Spirit, so when someone says "my faith has been guided and affirmed by the working of the Spirit" they might retort with Scrooge (I do have Christmas on the brain, don't I?) to his ghostly visitor "You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

Our senses and even our thoughts can be misled. And beyond the conflict between faith and rationality, you have different worldviews which can be in conflict. My beliefs about where the universe comes from, even before a Big Bang, and where it's going, even beyond the strong likelihood of entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics that I learned in high school, may not keep me from enjoying physics, even as another physicist might be a Buddhist and another down the lab bench an atheist. Worldviews can overlap and interact, even when they have some pretty strong differences beyond their respective margins.

Which is why I've been thinking for a while, and want to say now, that it is good for anyone's faith to learn about and even be challenged by someone else's worldview. This is one reason The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sends their young people out on missions, and why as a non-member I always enjoy conversations with their elders and sisters who are serving on one. They're not afraid to have their faith tested and they've gotten some basic training in how to challenge your assumptions, too.

But I'm not telling you to go hunt up a Mormon missionary (feel free if you want to!); rather, I just hope you can make a specific effort in the next few days and weeks to have a conversation with someone with a different worldview than yours. I'm betting they're not hard to find, and social media makes it even easier, despite COVID restrictions. Most people love to be asked about their worldview, and if you show you're willing to sincerely listen, they're almost certain to be willing to hear yours, as well.

Smarter people than me have pointed out that we live these days in a time of ever increasing "sorting." There's more I'd like to say about this, but in general, is that a worldview you'd take on faith from me? We view media that's in line with our assumptions and listen to others who reinforce what we already think, and even political lines are drawn to lump like with like.

Our nation, though, has a faith, a worldview built into our founding, and is inscribed on the Great Seal of the United States: "E pluribus unum." Or in English, "out of many, one." This country is designed around a faith that from our diversity, we can find unity. It can survive and thrive if we reach beyond our familiar understandings, and listen to those of the other, and think about how they have come to believe that, whatever that is.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; his worldview isn't that unusual, but sometimes it seems like it might be. Tell him about how you've learned from the worldview of someone else at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.