My sermon today is titled “What I Choose to Believe and What I Really Believe.” I think if you look askance at the title and don’t think too hard, you get a pretty clear idea of what I want to talk about today, but if you look at it head on, like English teachers do, you can’t help but wince. You can’t choose to believe something; you either believe it or you don’t. It can’t be intensified. It makes no sense to really believe something, nor to sort-of believe something. If you wrote one of those in an essay for my class, I’d bust you up good. To believe something -- I almost said truly believe! -- is powerful. When you say you believe something, you imply that you’re ready to act on that belief. “I believe abortion is murder,” means you’re ready to fight as fervently to protect zygotes as you would be to keep an armed assailant from killing your neighbor. “I believe God watches over me and intercedes on my behalf,” means you will throw caution to the wind.
Degree of belief and power of belief are worth considering in some contexts. It’s important when trying to predict what behavior we can expect from a group of people. It’s a complex relationship, but only complex because the relationship allows for contradictory beliefs. We, the Aristotelians among us -- the annoying body of us who are bound to logic (I didn’t say logical) as an ideal -- cannot abide contradictory beliefs. To knowingly hold contradictory beliefs -- to believe God watches over you and intercedes on your behalf but also to believe that you should have insurance -- is untenable, it’s fingernails raking over a chalkboard, it’s . . . well, pretty awful.
I sound pretty tight-you-know-what, right? I am, but I’m not that bad. Let me illustrate. One Christmas season, my son Steve, probably aged 5 at the time, told me he thought there was no Santa. I talked with him about it, then confirmed his revelation. He was cool with it; it was time. The next Christmas season, then, I was surprised that Steve seemed to believe as fervently in Santa as he had before his revelation a year before. I asked him one day, gently, in a conversation, about his revelation the year before. He said, yeah, he knew, but believing in Santa was more fun. And you know what? I didn’t argue with him. See, I’m not that bad. I don’t take candy from kids, at least not my own, and I don’t poke holes in everyone’s beliefs just because I believe they are not grounded in logic.
I idealize logic. But I know it usually doesn’t carry the day for anyone, and is even less likely to when a belief in question is one that identifies who one is. The basic tenets of Catholicism, Judaism, or Islam, for example. I was raised, more or less, Protestant. We weren’t big churchgoers, but Protestant beliefs were definitely in the background. And in dem days -- I was in elementary school in the sixties -- the basic tenets of Christianity were, if not taught in schools, at least assumed to be true. Still, I was less connected to Protestantism than most, so shaking a lot of the beliefs was not so difficult when I went off to college -- really, for me, even before -- but even now, forty years later, their ghosts are with me. Here are some of the friendly ghosts (I’m happy to report the unfriendly ghosts of guilt and eternal damnation don’t reside in me), some of the things I choose to believe, sometimes, when I want to, when I need to, but that, nah, I don’t really believe.
I like to believe that God (I’m going to use masculine pronouns when referring to God because, dammit, that’s what we did) -- He has a special love for me. And you. And him. And her. And for each of the billions of people on earth, and the billions of people who ever were on earth. A special love for each of us. I had to include everyone, because that just makes sense. If He has a special love for me, He must have a special love for everyone, but what’s important to me is that He has a special love for me. He holds me in the palms of His hands. [Sing.] Isn’t that a nice thought? I don’t know if you, those who don’t believe this, can let yourself go in the belief for a moment, but if you can -- doesn’t it feel like you’re a kid reveling in the love of a parent? Maybe if you weren’t so lucky to have loving parents who protected you, this isn’t so powerful, or maybe it is because you missed it when you were young. But it’s powerful for me. I believe this most when I’m lonely, or when I hit a spate of bad luck, or when I make a spate of mistakes.
I like to believe that God answers prayers. I don’t believe this very often. I don’t really think about it very often, but when I do, I need help. When my mom was dying of cancer. Trying to understand my father after his death. My divorce. Bleak, confusing times like those. I didn’t know what else to do but to send out some kind vague plea to God. I don’t recall asking for anything specific, but I had to believe that He’d hear me, and that speaking to Him was important.
I don’t really believe these things. They don’t make sense. I’ll say more diplomatically that to me they don’t make sense, but as an Aristotelian, I really believe that they just don’t make sense. You might see it differently. I believe logic can give us all the answers if we have all the data, but I never said I was a perfect practitioner of logic, so if you disagree with me regarding these beliefs, I’ll grant that you might be right and I might be wrong. And if anything hung in the balance until we settled our disagreement, then we should debate. But I don’t think much does, and though I place a high value on truth, it’s not all I value. I value you, whether you agree with me or not. I value your integrity, who you are. I value beauty. I value peace.
Belief to most of us isn’t the solid, hard, impenetrable monolith it is to an Aristotelian. It has more functions, more important functions, than to reveal truth. I recall a good friend of mine finally able to lean back into this after spending forty years of his life trying to get everything from logic. He did what some of us came to call a backward conversion. You know how many of us UU’s are disaffected Christians? My friend converted to Christianity from UU-ism, and into a charismatic fundamentalist sect. But when he converted -- wait, a sidebar about the conversion. [Tell Eric story.] But when he converted, he tried to justify his conversion logically. And he couldn’t. His witness, which was important to his sect, was weak. He’d argue using the Bible as his sole source, which gave him no traction with those who don’t believe the Bible is the unadulterated word of God, I’m sure you know. Slowly, he let this go, though, and became a happier guy and, probably, a better witness.
Many Christians (and I’ll assume believers of other cosmologies as well) seem to understand this. A popular Christian pop song is called “I Choose to Believe.” Its chorus?
I Choose to believe
And never give up hope
God is good
He's in control
I'll keep the faith
I trust in His way
Even when His face is hard to see
I choose to believe
Googling around, I found a lot of this phrasing, “choose to believe.” Elder L. Whitney Clayton at the last General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints gave a presentation called “Choose to Believe.” Author Stephen King said in an interview in Rolling Stone, “Religin is a dangerous tool, but I choose to believe God exists. It makes things better.” There was a reference to something evangelist Kenneth Copeland said, but I didn’t think I could stomach reading that.
Is it so wrong to choose to believe something rather than have that belief confirmed by logic? I say no, so long as that belief doesn’t interfere with others. It can create so much beauty. T.S. Eliot (I can’t have a sermon without mentioning Mr. Eliot) pretty much chose to convert from UU-ism to Anglicanism because, he said, the beliefs and rituals helped him jump a synapse between a worldly and a spiritual existence. His poetry and plays following his conversion in 1927, the content and tone of his work shifted. As much as I like Eliot, I won’t claim to be an Eliot scholar, so I’ll throw this out there, my own observation, without confirmation for from the literati. I always thought his work after his conversion was more beautiful and hopeful (though no more or less artful) than his earlier work.
Believing what a community believes expediates social interaction and strengthens social ties. In 1969, Vern Bengston, a professor of social work at USC, began a study of 350 families that ran four decades. His research confirms that people activate their social needs more than they activate their logic when it comes to faith matters. The study, culminating in his book, Familes and Faith: How Religion is Passed Down Across Generations, looked at, among a few other things, faith transmission. HIs central conclusion (he had a lot of interesting conclusions other than this, so get the book if you’re interested) was that family bonds matter.
Bengston conducted the research, I’m assuming (I’m not in a position to critique his research), as dispassionately as a researcher should. In fact, he himself was not a believer in the faith of his family of origin. Until he was 67 and winding down his research, when he had what could only be described as a charismatic experience when he visited an old church in Santa Barbara on Easter. He didn’t report that in the service he attended the pastor was especially persuasive in his arguments for a Christian cosmology, but simply that he had a spiritual experience that made him a believer.
I haven’t had an experience like that, but since Eliot and Dr. Bengston, so firmly grounded in logic, can have them, I try to stay open. The limits of logic are astounding. I think we’ve got the process down pretty well -- major premise, minor premise, conclusion -- but we have so little data that it’s going to take us forever (I mean, forever) to figure it all out. I feel like we’re working on a 20 trillion piece jigsaw puzzle of our galaxy and we’ve only found a hundred of the border pieces. Is there a shortcut? Maybe. Maybe that’s what Eliot and Bengston and billions of others have found. And a shortcut to what? This jigsaw puzzle of the galaxy -- if we’re to truly see any part of the picture we need the whole picture, if we insist on the puzzle analogy. But maybe, if all I want to do is feel connected and affective with my communities (which is pretty significant) -- family, Harlingen, the region, the state . . . -- maybe I don’t need that puzzle as much as I think I do.
My father used to say -- turns out he was quoting Unitarian and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. -- your freedom to swing your fist stops where my nose begins. I believe we need to, and as UU’s we do, apply this to the beliefs of others. Mostly the cosmology someone believes in does not affect us. Peace.
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