On Meaning and Faith

I've been wondering lately about those who are convinced that religious systems have lost their "meaning" or relevance in our society.

In many ways the initial approach to religion in general begins with an effort to "correlate" experience with religious symbols. To find a correlation is to find out what a particular religious symbol or ritual expresses about our condition and our quest for meaning and significance. This correlation allows the religious symbol to be imbued with or connected to human meaning.

One thing I have found about this method is that it tends to be a one-way street. Meaning flows from experience into the symbol. The religious symbol is an empty bucket waiting to be filled with human experience. Unless a participant judges the symbol worthy of experience and engagement, then it is lifeless or irrelevant.

You may wonder why am I considering this in Lent?  Partially because our world is filled with symbols and a constant critique or evaluation of them. What I want to challenge here is this notion that our efforts to find meaning are just a one-way street: that meaning starts with human experience and it fills up those empty symbol-buckets. 

In our modern or postmodern era, we seem to have abandoned the notion that some meanings can only be discovered through immersion in and mastery of the symbols: symbols which carry meaning and revelation while also pointing beyond us. That is to say, some meanings are inaccessible to us until we come to master the intricacies of the faith and language. In simpler terms, there are some things about "God" that we can never understand until we become mature in the faith, until we become skilled followers of Jesus. 

The idea here is that faith, the set of symbols and rituals, opens us up to new realms of meaning. There are things we learn about love, joy, peace, sacrifice, kindness, sin, reconciliation, failure, marriage, friendship, life, death and fulfillment that we could not discover all on our own. 

So there are truths about all these things that we discover because we are willing to learn to practice this thing called Christianity. I've been at it year after year and decade after decade. Sometimes I've made speedy progress. And sometimes I've been stuck for long periods of time, running in place. But there are things about life that I've discovered and have been able to experience only because I've been immersed in the Christian tradition. And my hunch is that there is much more waiting to be discovered for all of us.

The key here, for us to consider in Lent, is that mastery in faith is necessary and different for all of us; and, it cannot be achieved overnight. To be religious, then, is learning to become competent, to be persistent, to interiorize a set of skills that allows us, in ways we can't all on our own, to have more subtle, varied and richer experiences. There are some meanings that only the practice of the faith can reveal; perhaps that is what Jesus meant when he said he wants for us abundant life.

To become a Christian involves learning the story of Israel and of Jesus well enough to interpret and experience ourselves and our world in its terms. Because I follow Jesus I have been taken to places in the world and in my heart where I never would have gone all on my own. I am who I am because of the One I follow.  

May we all immerse ourselves in rediscovery and recommitment to being people of The Way, a people who speak the mother tongue language of love, grace, mercy and peace.

A prayer from Walter Brueggemann:

We have learned to speak almost every language except our own.

We are well schooled in the language of hate

and of fear

and of greed 

and of anxiety.

We know the language of domination and excessive deference.

We understand completely the grammar

of liberalism and conservatism,

rhetoric that is revolutionary and reactionary.

But we are strangers in a strange land.

Teach us afresh to trust our mother tongue of praise and grief.

We thank you for our speech teachers,

of many mothers and fathers

in many times

and many places

and many cultures--

all of whom know better than do we

the ways of truth that heal and of life

that enlivens.

Be your true word on our lips and receive our utterances back to you.

We thank you for our mother tongue come in the flesh.

Amen.