Getting Faith Right. Part One.

"I'm a Scientist! I don't rely on despair; I rely on knowledge!" - Does this sentence make any sense to you? Why not? It's because despair is a state of being; it's not about epistemology. Who would ever think about despair as a method for knowing? Yet the common "battle cry" of those who consider themselves hard minded is, "I'm a scientist! I don't rely on faith; I rely on knowledge! Faith, like despair, is a state of being. Again- how can a being state be considered a method for knowing?

Being states are complex and large; they involve mood and attitude and memory and experience and methods of knowing- like reason. Being states will condition our knowing, but they are not the methods themselves. Faith as such a complexity, is not specific to religion. And for that matter, is not specific to literature, economics, professional sports or even science. Faith is specific to any being who has an I-self, subject-object, past-future level of consciousness: in other words, faith is specific to human being, who on the basis of evolved biology, neo-cortex's and the like, act from a real capacity to be subjective. Compare this to the Canada goose; how much thought does a Canada goose put into being a Canada goose? How about you? Has your life been characterized by such biological automation? If you didn't believe in science, would you be a scientist? Or do you consider your act of becoming a scientist something as automatic as a Canada goose existing as a Canada goose?

You're comfortable with the concept believe, as in "I believe in the scientific method"; you can think of faith as a noun form of the verb form, believe. "I believe" is synonymous with the structure, "I have faith." "I have faith in the scientific method"; or on a bad day, you might say, "I despair of the scientific method."

Faith is a complex idea and warrants another viewing angle.

It's the time of Boltzmann and Darwin. The Niagara Falls were a summer vacation mecca where tight-rope walkers would stretch wires across chasms, and at 4:oo p.m., would perform their amazing feats of balance for tourists who would congregate along the fall's edges and watch a thrilling show (historically true). Imagine then, an acrobat having wowed the crowds on his wire, came shore side, grabbed a wheel barrow from his pile of props, rolled it up to you and asked, "do you believe that I can roll this across the falls without falling?" You reply "why yes fine sir! I do declare that you are the finest tight rope acrobat in all the world!" He says, "well then- hop in."

The acrobat could have also asked his question to you this way: "do you have the faith that I can roll"...and you would be faced with the same situation of having to decide how much faith you're willing to enter into, for the sake of a wheel barrow ride.

Faith can't make anything true or false, real or unreal. Kierkegaard talked about his leap of faith as a leap from a cliff into the abyss. The abyss is Mystery. And having known all the things around him that he could see, Kierkegaard was convinced that Life existed not in the constructs around him, but in the Abyss- and leaped for it. He saw his wheel barrow in Mystery.

Now- knowing how and where to find a wheel barrow is a different kind of question.

Fidelity and Nuclear Fear

I've never "known more" in my life than I did when I was in my early twenties and an evangelical, non-denominational, non-religious, unadulterated Christian. Luckily, how ever it came about, I strove to always be willing to let God be God; which caused me to learn that God doesn't always show up like "God". Which brings me to the point of this post: Fidelity. I didn't grow up churched. My attraction to Christ was something organic; his life gave form to my own felt experience of what life is all about. In college, I found the evangelical expression suiting my sense of fidelity and jumped in.

Let me just say something for the moment: we consider nuclear energy to be the most potent; and the nuclear bomb to be the most destructive. I would argue that even more powerful is Human Being. And one of the more powerful forces, even nuclear in nature is fidelity: as a "strong force" it's involved in the holding together of all the particular aspects that make up the "selves" we feel ourselves to be. So when we encounter something that looks to threaten our fidelity, the threat involves a loosening of a "something", that feels crucial to the holding our "nucleus" intact; and knowing what chain of events a disintegrating nucleus can begin, we work to ward off such triggering threats.

That said- as I got into my thirties, this is one thing I learned: The Christianity in which I trafficked valued fidelity with "God" and summed all the problems of the world, up to a lack of fidelity to "the truth". What they failed to realize however, was that they didn't have a corner on "truth" nor did they hold it on fidelity. I found plenty of non-Christian people who with "all their heart minds and souls" were seeking not just "the truth", but more importantly, a human presence in this world that could be called truly generative. Ironically, people who weren't part of Christianity, were acting in the way of Christ more than Christians themselves, who for the most part, were only interested in "treading water" while living in "this crappy place" until they could get to the "good place"- Heaven. I didn't see Christ in this Christianity: however, the fidelity that Christ exhibited, was the fidelity to which I aspired.

In the context of my experience in religion, I have raised the issue of fidelity and involved it metaphorically with the strong nuclear force. But the metaphor extends to other contexts- even science. I think the physicist, Peter Morgan wrote well about our difficulty of fidelity under the last post, and I'd like to quote a paragraph here:

"With the increased complexity of our varied allegiances, it is difficult to be part of different groups. The commitments required in some churches are surely incompatible with the commitments required in some Physics departments. If one has a passion for a number of things, finding mutually compatible groups in which to exercise all of them fully may be very difficult. It may require moving to a different country to find a place where varied ideas can be pursued together in ways that are more-or-less compatible."

What I see through Christ's insights, is that fidelity entails fidelity to Life more than fidelity to forms; and that the essence of "idolatry" is adhering to a form instead of Life: even if the form goes by the name of Christianity. I wonder- how much of our incompatibility stems from our fidelity to forms over and above fidelity to life?

If we are to remodel what it is to be religious, it must be a place where all inquiry is supported, and Trueness is prized more than "the truth" as we seek to understand our lives of being human in this Life.

My inclination, has been to repel a religious sense of things; it's just felt too "religiony" for my taste. And yet, I have an experience with Life that I'm comfortable putting in a context of God, and I'm drawn intimately to Jesus' historical life. So a lot of my thinking over the last few years, was carried out under this idea: "If we could take Jesus' insights as well as other biblical insights, and remove them from a religious context, would they make even more sense?" For me, I saw "religion-icity" itself as a distorting factor: I recognized the elegance in life that can only emerge from complexity; I saw Jesus embodying that elegance; I saw so much of Christianity focused on maintaining a simplistic world view: Christianity made itself sure of a formula, but lost elegance.

But. It's not that easy. It turns out that we need context. Without some framework of some kind to give order to all the parts we encounter on a daily basis, we feel confused- if not lost.

I'm talking big-context here. We all belong to particular contexts in terms of families or professions or hobbies and the like. Still, we seek a framework that can give over-all context to our daily contexts. Science has fit a bill here. Because human life can be singly expressed in forms of the technological, Science is in a unique position to serve as big-context. Science isn't concerned with subjective experience and neither is the technological sense of life. In a "technological" world, business is something that centers on ideas of efficiency and machine metaphors; the idea that a business could be a place for us to create "soul" and meaningful lives feels new-age and soft to the "technocrat".

I think we're growing weary of life experienced so singly in the techno-consumer context, as well as recognizing that there's more to being human than meets the "scientific eye". There is something vitally important in our subjective experiencing that needs a proper voice again: a voice and place as credible as technology. To fit this bill, we need a concept as big as science and the only one that I can think of is the one of being religious: But we can't use it as is, we have to remodel it; our sense of being religious comes from developments that found their genesis in a whole other cosmology than what we know to exist today.

Over the next few posts, I'd like for us to develop this idea and see if we can find something useful.

Newton can get us to the moon, but can't make a world

Look around you, find something to focus on for a moment and come back to the page... when you did this, did you notice your eye balls? We usually don't. Notice the reading your doing right now, does the activity feel like its transpiring at your eye sockets or further back in your head? So let me ask you, we normally associate seeing with eyeballs, but in your experience, are you seeing with your eyes, or are you seeing by way of your thinking?

It was about fifteen years ago now when I came across a thinker whom I've grown fond of named James Hillman. Though rooted in the Jungian school of psychology, he's quite critical of his profession when ever it seeks to turn one's making of "psyche" -Greek for "soul"- into an administrative task rather than a living one. (No wonder I like him!) But anyway, I was reading him one evening and he said this: "we don't see with our eyes, we see with our ideas." Reading that line opened my eyes! "But wait a minute- your eyes were already opened. You can't read with your eyes closed!" I know- thats what I'm trying to get at. Hillman gave me a new idea about ideas and seeing; and I've looked at the world differently ever since!

Enter Newton- and why I'm writing under the matrix of complexity.

The ideas we see through, feel private to us. But in fact, they are part and parcel with the ideas that we develop publicly: we call this culture. And just as you didn't notice your eyeballs as you scanned about the room, you rarely notice the cultural ideas (your "eyes") as you make sense of the reality bubbling about us. In this case, I would offer that one of our foundational cultural ideas through which we expect reality to conform to, is the long held scientific idea that all things in the universe can explained by Newton's three laws of motion: the physics bound in the game of billiards- simple balls; simple bumps; simple geometry.

Scientists have been leaving the world of Newton for awhile as they recognize that the world is much more complex than a moon shot- even at the cellular level and below. In fact a growing branch of science refers to itself as the science of Complexity and was born from realizing things like the "butterfly effect", which point to patterns of cause and effect that can't be simply traced: it's a realization that reality is requiring us to see it differently.

The thing is, individuals are nimble, cultures are not. Changing our sense of culture based reality is hard work. But cultures aren't monoliths that happen as mountains do, they emerge from individuals -you and me and all of us- bunching up with ideas through which to see and make a world together.

Some fundamental questions we have to ask ourselves are, what is it that we want to see? what are we looking for? and what can we see? "We Are The World" is more than a title of a song to raise funds for places suffering destitution: it's a complex idea of human reality.

My brief travelogue into complexity

By cultural standards you could say that I'm a weird man. Not in any creepy way- you'd think me quite congenial. "But there's a story arc; and that for anyone who's serious and adept, they should fit into it" you'd say, and wonder why I don't. Perhaps you'd think of me as a gad fly, a dilettante even, as you try to understand why such a congenial and decent fellow such as myself hasn't fulfilled the proper story of career and acquiring. Well, without feeling any offense from you- after all, culture is our invisible structure of reality, I would begin my answer to you, "it's complex..." and assure you that while I've been involved in different worlds of work, one thing that I have not been, is a dilettante.

Actually, I'm a serious man. At about the age of twenty, I came across a prayer offered by Solomon, who in a moment like finding a genie's lamp (but only getting one wish) didn't ask for wealth but instead asked for wisdom. For what ever reason, that prayer sucked me in. Totally. You see dilettantes don't seek wisdom, they flit from it. My moving from a work world to another didn't entail from flitting flights but from needing to raise my two sons as a single parent and making a world where I could not only tend to my job, but tend to them as well.

So with my one wish I asked for wisdom; thinking that like manna, it was going to simply rain down on me from heaven. Instead, what I got were questions and whiffs. Often times, the questions led me into intellectual thickets and bramble- deeper into the valley and away from the peaks; honest questions have a way of doing that. But what was so cool was that even in those times when the thickets tangle and the valley's shadow conspired to keep me in their grasp, there was always a whiff for me to catch, and following it led me into new clearings and new vistas. And, of course, we all know- that along with new vistas come new questions!

There isn't any one formula for wisdom to show up and I certainly haven't bottled it; it's only now that I can look back and see a pattern. If you were to ask me where I was going even five years ago I wouldn't have been able to say. Outwardly I would stammer off some ideas, but inwardly I was saying clearly, "I don't know, but I'm following this scent and somehow I trust it."

Following those whiffs led me into worlds; and worlds are comprised of their minds and their culture. This means that in my lifetime, I've thought in the minds of art, theology, engineering, sales and marketing, psychology, spirituality, and in the large categories of mind: Dad, Business, Science and Religion. My prayer for wisdom led me into a bunch of minds other than my own native one. As a young artist, I considered science and business as containers for people who were too flaccid for the creative venture: Having lived in these minds, I realized first hand how utterly creative these "foreigners" really are.

Here's the take away I want you to have from this brief travelogue of my aspiration for wisdom: Human Being is in its very essence, a complexity- an amazing, confusing amalgamation of needs and expressions that are physical and spiritual; we have a need to be uniquely individual as well as to easily fit in; we want a place to be strong and effective and a place to be weak and recuperate. As difficult as it may be, to be endowed with all this complexity that is the Human life, we have to fight our tendency to reduce our living to a formula; whether those formulas come from economics, science or even religion.

We've been living through a time of formulas. But life is deliciously complex. Our time, is calling us into wisdom.

Freedom and Limits: the Creative Parodox

The complexity embodied by a hand crafted tapestry points to a paradox found in creative power: the very act of creating is an act of establishing limits. Think about it- the tapestry maker limits herself to this scene and not that one; these colors and not those. She's also has to work within the limits of her time and her place; a time and place that had sophisticated colorants and materials- a time and place that evolved from her cave drawing ancestors. Without limits, nothing can be made let alone exist: without limits generic atoms can't form into proprietary molecules that event-ually make up dyes and thread.

But the highest form of freedom is to be unlimited isn't it? You'd think so but it's not. This is why I referred to it as a paradox within creative power. (Two things to clarify here: I'm using "creative power" in place of "creativity" because in our culture, creativity has been domesticated into an aptitude of being able to make crafty doo-dads. In reality, creativity is a deep power unique to Human Being ((and God)). Secondly, paradox simply put, is a contradictory structure that still works, but though it works, it just shouldn't oughtta be, it goes against our sense of things- para: outside of, dox: what is within our common sense of the world. In contrast to paradox then, orthodox is the way something fits rightly into our sense of things.) So if nothing can exist apart from limits, then freedom has to be about something other than being limit-less. If this be the case, then what would happen if we began to think of freedom, not as freedom from limits, but- going boldly into the creative paradox- we began to see freedom as our capacity and ability to interact with limits in a way that creates more creative power and prowess?

Case in point. In today's political environment, those on the far right have churned freedom into a frothy battle cry. And at the core of this battle cry is their blind worship of "free markets" in a way that demands a market place freed from limits; that any sort of limit only handcuffs the market. But what in our world could this actually mean if without limits, nothing can exist? Such blind cries make a lot of heat but little light- and ultimately, are probably more destructive than creative. A truly creative market place interacts skillfully with limits rather than trying to abolish them. A truly free market place, if it is to be truly free, has to be free from dogmatism- a belief in an idea regardless of its coherence to reality: such blind worship makes for gods that are incoherent to reality.

Another case in point. We are limited by our need for water; yet we're free to interact with this limit and we've done so brilliantly in the shape of modern plumbing. I read somewhere that about 90% of our health today doesn't stem from modern medicine but from modern plumbing: our ability to bring clean water in and remove our waste so efficiently has played the lead role in ridding the diseases that plagued the generations before us. Plumbing, as mundane as it seems, is a stellar example of our creative power provided by the life made from limits.

And while we're talking about limits in the context of water, what do we who are so adept with water do in the parts of our world where the limits posed by water and its lack threaten "our Other's" existence- let alone their well being?

Limits. Without them atoms remain generic hovering blobs- if that. With them, atoms get to participate in something as amazing as water. And if they become fortunate enough to participate in a human being such as yourself, they get to participate in a world that you, whether you like it or not, are helping create.

Tapestries and Velvet Elvises

The etymology of the word complicate is very telling: it originates from the experience of a tapestry, both in the looking and the making. Contemplating a hand made tapestry or Persian rug, provides a lot of insight into what I'm trying to convey through my use of the concept of complexity in this blog.

Looking at a well made tapestry is a true wonder of complexity. The rich colors, remarkable details, and the complicated designs and themes, are all carried out without the use of Auto-Cad, industrial dyes or computer-numerically-controled (CNC) sewing machines. What a leap from our cave drawing in France some thousands of years ago. And of course, who can resist the urge to look at a tapestry's back side, thinking that we'll be able to see how such a piece of majesty is accomplished, only to see even further, just how complicated a tapestry truly is? Complexity in this case, doesn't lead to confusion, it leads to beauty and wonder.

Now, compare the tapestry displayed on the museum wall to the black-velvet paintings displayed outside an old dinjy white van parked on an abandoned street side lot (often sharing the space with a van selling gulf shrimp). We might fashionably gag and chide the brash colors made bold by their black fury canvas, but you have to admit that the images are quite striking- you turned your head and looked didn't you? I did and I still shudder.

So a black-velvet painting (bvp) is striking, but is it beautiful? Recognizing that a post modern thinker would strive to find a way in which to equate a bvp to a tapestry, I would say that the main difference between a tapestry and a bvp is a matter of complexity: a tapestry draws us into wonder and deep regard for the life we're involved in. A bvp on the other hand, lacks such complexity and can only briefly titalate. And as to our regard, the best it can solicit from us is our sense of kitsch.

I would ask here now, when you look around at the culture that we've made together, does it look more like an inspiring tapestry, or does it look more like something kitsch?