June 2020
Faith to me can be like a four-letter bad word, it immediately conjures up dogma in religion. It says you don’t have to do anything or make attempts to improve your situation, just have faith and believe what you are told. All will be “okay.”
The UU Pocket Guide has a quote from theologian Paul Tillich who writes, “There is hardly a word in the religious language both theological and popular, which is subject to more misunderstandings, distortions, and questionable definitions than the word ‘faith.’”
I am a worrier. I admit it. I can’t get away from it. I worry about my future, the future of my family and friends and the future of the wider community, including our own congregation and extended out to our country to the entire world.
I can’t help but think about all of the current political divisiveness, the endless wars, the people who have so little they are concerned about when they will eat again. I worry about children, particularly who are unfortunate victims caught in the craziness made by so-called-adults.
I tell myself often, have some faith that things will work out okay. Be open to what is and what will be, you can’t control everything.
Someone once told me that it is clear I long for peace. This is true, I want peace in my own life and I want peace in the wider world.
What you may ask is: what this have to do with having faith? Well, I think that is my point. I know that to continue to move forward and to have a meaningful life, I have to have faith that we will get through whatever is plaguing us somehow.
While in my final years of college and preparing to graduate, I became overwhelmed by sense of lack of purpose, anxiety about what my future may hold, and general weariness about the world. Having quit going to church as a teen, I decided (to my astonishment) to try it again. When talking to my mother about this, she told me that she thought it would be a good idea. She said she had always regretted that raising us as Unitarians, because she did not raise us with a sense of faith. When I was puzzled by her remark, she said that she felt we did not get a sense that everything would work out “okay.”
To tell you the truth, not only was I confused– I was mad! You mean to tell me that if I just have faith that everything will be okay? That it is just a matter of thinking or feeling and I would not have had so many struggles in my life?
My mother grew up in a conservative, fundamentalist, Christian home. She was taught that if you place all faith in God and accept Jesus as your savior, everything will work out fine. God has a plan for you– you just don’t know it yet. My mother left that religion soon after graduating from college because she found that what she considered was “blind faith” was not longer working. She saw too much discrimination and mistreatment.
To get a sense of my mother’s upbringing, picture a poor white family who moved from the city down a short street from my grandmother’s own mother and father to a small plot of land on the far outskirts of town. Dad (my grandfather) was a traveling organ builder and piano tuner. The family joke was he came home long enough just to get my grandmother pregnant– they had nine children and grandma was mostly left to tend to the small little parcel of land on her own. There, they had been growing what she could and raised a cow and a few chickens. She was lucky to be able to get help from the farmer who lived across the road. This was in Wichita, Kansas during the Great Depression and just after.
Although I don’t subscribe to my mother’s family’s religious beliefs, I always marvel at my grandmother’s unwavering faith in God.
She always believed God would do what was right and would provide for her in the end. She sent her little bit of money to TV preachers and praised them and Jesus everyday. She lived a hard life, but she persevered and believed her reward would be in heaven: she only had to put her faith in God.
I believe it would be easier to be more like my grandmother– just accept what I’m told and expect an almighty entity to make my life work for me as they see best, I remain and am committed to my UU tradition because it gives me freedom to search for myself.
My faith does not lie with some old man sitting up in the clouds manipulating the strings to decide what to do to whom.
Over the last few weeks I find myself wrestling tremendously with the idea of having a sense of faith, a sense that things will be okay, a sense that we as a society will get past this.
I’m talking about the murder of George Floyd by a policeman — someone who is to uphold the law and protect everyone. I’m talking about the comments I see from various people who minimize what happened and want Black people to just get over it.
And I’m talking about the fear and anger in many of us– the reality we see and the dismissiveness of our lives. The fear that they — whoever “they” might be — will be coming for us. Black and Brown people who can’t hide their skin color, who can’t skip into hiding because we stick out. And I’m having, like many of my Black and Brown sisters and brothers, flashbacks to the 1960s and the image of water hoses on demonstrators, and I will tell you that I am scared.
The killing of George Floyd has left me feeling faithless. I am trying to find my faith somewhere, feeling instead numb and heartbroken, at times unable to have conversations with friends, not returning phone calls, not wanting to engage in conversation — feeling frozen and stuck. What will bring me out of this?
I’ve turned off the TV. I am not watching news other than snippets of news online. Exiting quickly, entering back into my own silence contemplating my way out of this.
And yet… and here is where my sense of that word comes in, that sense of faith …
And yet! I see a coming together different from the past.
To paraphrase noted director Spike Lee, I am thankful for all the number of people of all faiths and colors who are protesting the killing of George Floyd. The Amish in Minneapolis who stood in support of protesters; the few programs I see of people of all backgrounds protesting, some being arrested. People of various religious traditions speaking out publicly in support of protesters. Other countries where people are protesting — Poland, Britain, Ireland, Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, Mexico, Italy, Syria, Australia. This is what gives me hope in our humanity and yes, faith, that maybe, just maybe, this time people will wake up and stand up for those disenfranchised in whatever way they may be.
According to CNN News, in Poland, residents in Krakow lit candles at the American consulate. In Australia, people gathered in Perth to hold a Black Lives Matter protest as well as demonstrating against the treatment of minority groups in Australia. CNN also reported that in Ireland one marcher, Anna Herevin, reported being angry and frustrated, showing solidarity with the US while taking a “united stance against endemic racism which is a global threat.” Protesters in Ireland were also reported to have chanted, “I can’t breathe.”
While I feel a sense of togetherness, I also question all of us, why do we have to keep doing this? Why does it seem as a never ending need to protest against the mistreatment of historically disenfranchised groups? This is a question I am not sure any of us can answer.
I feel the need to turn to our UU faith to persevere. I like to describe us as rooted in the tree called “religious freedom,” with many and varied branches that give us many different ways to define what faith is to us. These branches have offshoots and leaves of various sizes and colors. Pick as you feel that which speaks to you!
This is the beauty and the difference of our tradition: make your own choices from the tree of religious freedom. We are all rooted here and welcome and safe here and your journey onto those many branches and shoots and leaves is your own to choose. You may move about the tree, as on your journey, when you find there is something for you that works better, that fits with your heart and soul, and you may take parts of each with you to your continued journey. And this tree grows on and on as we all continue our own search.
This is what I believe our UU faith means.
Right now, I find myself clamoring for another branch, another shoot, another leaf somewhere that will help to restore my faith journey. And I believe whether you are directly affected or an ally to People of Color, you may be looking for another branch too.
All of us, not sure where to go, what to do, and trying to find the right spot on that tree together.
Id like to close by reading a poem entitled Every Third Thursday by Rev. Joanna Fontaine Crawford. This poem resonates with me as it speaks to my own search and my own sense of what my faith means to me. And, I see some of the branches on our tree of freedom in our faith.
“Every third Tuesday, I am a Buddhist
I empty my mind and lighten my heart
And try to let go of attachments
Every other Friday, I am a Christian.
I look for the least of these
And try to love God and my neighbor
The full moon of the month finds me Wiccan;
I honor the dual nature of God
And find my rhythm as maiden, mother or crone
On the 15th of the month, I am humanist
I respect science, integrity of fellow humans
And all that we have learned and have made
Every fourth Wednesday, I am Hindu
I take a breath, and understand that what is unfinished now
Will remain for me to continue…next life
On alternate Fridays, I am Jewish
‘Y’varekh’kha ADONAI v’yishmerekha,
I tell my children, softly touching each head
And the Thursdays and the Mondays, and the Saturdays and Sundays,
And all the other days in between
Find me reading, or listening, or watching
Philosophers, Muslims, Mormons, Baha’i and more
Fill my heart, touch my soul
And yet…
The one thing that none of these provide
To me
Is the certitude that they are The One
They lend me wisdom, sing to my heart
Cause me to question, help me find answers
Make me more me
And at the end of the day, every day,
I am Unitarian Universalist.
In parcel and in pledge
And with all my heart, all my soul,
All my mind and all my strength
I honor this faith
I hold it close
As it lets me run free.”
– The Rev. Joanna Fontaine Crawford is minister of Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Austin, Texas.