Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Familiarity of Faith


Amazing isn’t it. How when you’re going to write about something for your next entry and someone sends you a note and suddenly your focus for the entry changes. This is exactly what happened today. I thought I wanted to talk about faith (duh, what’s the name of the website) but also a specific aspect of faith—pausing before responding to another person’s comments and how this demonstrates faith. But the exchange told me that what I really wanted to present for consideration was familiarity of faith.

By familiarity of faith I mean the perception that we have faith in something simply because we expect it to be a particular way since it has always been that way. Think about the sun rising in the morning. In all of our collective experiences it has always happened. Collectively we all agree that it will happen again when morning arrives. But that’s the circular reasoning since morning is when the sun rises and that’s how we define morning. There is a danger here of missing the focus. It is not really faith in the sun rising tomorrow. It is the expectation we hold that it will happen: assumed, assured, and predictable. Where is the faith?

There is no faith involved in this aspect of our perception. It is an assumption existing independently of our actual faith activities and adventures. Perhaps as children we questioned our parents or teachers about the sun rising in the morning and were told to have faith and it will happen. At what point did we cease having faith in the sun rising and it became a banal statement of expectation? How did we move from expectancy and involvement of faith into a world where personal involvement was not necessary and we still called it faith?

The major religions of the world, or some call them faiths, teach an interesting formula of involvement and detachment for faith to occur. Faith requires the looking forward to possible outcomes and the perception that the specifics have already occurred. This allows for both detachment and involvement but they are used to moderate each other, not to define them. This is where the problem with familiarity of faith occurs. The detachment exists, but it is not truly detachment it is rather a type of unrecognized boredom that has no content of interaction with the future. The involvement that brings my expectation of outcomes is not part of the process. The future is perceived as the status quo moving forward in time just as each day moves forward, but there is no expectancy of different possible outcomes.

As a result, mountains remain where they are. Students of religion and disciples of dogma doubt the reality of the miracles occurring in other faiths; unfortunately this perception contaminates even their own.

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