David O'Hara

In an earlier post I wrote about this question people often ask me: “Why are you still here?"
And I mentioned that there are three main ways that question usually gets asked:

• Why I am still a Christian when the church is in decline and religion has let so many people down?
• Why I am still a professor when academia is expensive, in decline, and falling into disrepute? And
• Why I am still working towards sustainability when the money is plainly elsewhere?

In this post, I’m going to talk about the first of those questions. I will write more about the others in later posts, and you can find some of my other writing about those topics elsewhere on my blog.

“I Still Believe”

Years ago a band called The Call had a song called “I Still Believe.” Michael Been sang of still believing through and despite wars, lies, storms, and a sense of being lost at sea.

I don’t know what inspired his song or what he believed in, but the song speaks of a kind of moral courage in the face of calamity, betrayal, and loss. 

He lived long enough to see a spectrum of moral and natural evils; what would it mean to cling to belief in such times? 

Been’s song will have to speak for itself. (I’ll recommend along with it his song “Become America," by the way.)

For me, belief is not about thinking I have chosen the right party. It is about reminding myself that I am not God.

Sentences like that are fraught, and I can imagine the sputtering objections from orthodox theists and from anti-religionists alike. Let them have their moment to speak. Each probably has something good to say, after all.

Rather than trying to convince others to join my view, I will simply do what people in my tradition have done for a long time: I’ll tell my story. You decide whether any of it resonates with you.

Practices Of A Community That Does Not Believe It Is God

Years ago, when I was working as a campus minister, a friend gave me a book by Eugene Peterson entitled Working The Angles. It was about the way that scripture, prayer, and preaching fit together. 

One of Peterson’s main points is that those three practices are interdependent.

• Preaching without scripture and prayer is simply offering an opinion, and it’s dangerous both for the preacher and the listeners. Both of them might mistake it for immutable truth, for example.

• Praying without commentary (commentary is another way to think about preaching) and scripture means praying without community, which can lead to loneliness and solipsistic despair. 

• Reading scripture without commentary and without prayer reduces scripture to an academic exercise, separating the scripture from the life of the community. Scriptures ought to have something nourishing to say about our life together.

The Divine Is Not My Tool, But Liturgy Can Be

Peterson was writing for pastors and lay ministers like me, but his idea is relevant for all of us.

Whether formally or informally, we all form opinions about the divine, community, inherited traditions, and our mutual obligations. That part is unavoidable. 

The big question is what will help us to form healthy opinions about these things?

Liturgies - the things we do together, regularly, as practices of faith - help me a lot. ¹

Too often we have seen politicians use the divine as a tool. I often cringe when politicians end their speeches with “God bless America,” as though it were punctuation or a rubric to let us know to applaud. 

Is it a priestly benediction? Or is it perhaps a public prayer? (Sometimes I hear “May God bless America,” and I prefer that one slightly because it feels more like an expression of hope.) Or is it, as I suspect, a kind of virtue signaling? 

It has become part of the political liturgy, although I think it has become detached from anything that would give it substance. 

It’s a sign that has lost most of its significance. 

Through Thick And Thin

Liturgies can become thin over time, like clothes that have been worn too long.

Political liturgies, which are often tools in the hands of those who wish to wield power, are even more susceptible to wearing thin. Unfortunately, like metal that has worn thin, they can still cut us and make us bleed, but they don’t do much to heal our wounds. 

Peterson’s triad of scripture, prayer, and commentary has a parallel in another text I read around the same time that urged pastors to engage in three liturgical practices that no one else would see: resting, tithing, and fasting. 

I admit I am not a natural fan of these three things. Each one involves giving up something I want for myself. 

But each one of them is good for me. 

Each one reminds me that I am not God, and they remind me of my place in the community. 

Each one is a thick practice, not a thin one. 

And each one promotes health for both the individual and the community.

• Tithing and almsgiving is a regular reminder that we are worth more than money can ever measure
• Fasting is a reminder that appetites should serve us, not the other way around
• Resting is a reminder that our life is not our job or our career or our productivity 

One of the reasons I’m “still here,” then, is that my practices of religion remind me that I am not God.

And as simple and silly as that might sound, I have found it to be a huge help throughout my life. 

Don’t get me wrong: when I was a kid I got a newspaper delivery route as soon as I could so I could be out the door on Sunday morning before my family went to church. They couldn’t ever find me, and when I was done delivering papers I had the house to myself until they got home. 

Nowadays I’d still rather wake up early on Sunday and go stand in a river casting a fly rod, or go mountain biking or hiking. In other words, I don’t attend services because I think they’re nice; I attend because doing so is good for me, and I think it’s good for others when we show up together.

And it’s good for me in the way breathing is good for me. It’s not enough to take a very deep breath and hold it for a few weeks; it’s far better to breathe in and out regularly, all the time.

The Calendar And The Rhythms Of Life

The church calendar offers me seasons of feasting and fasting, jubilation and lamentation, quiet waiting and loud celebration.

As Byung-Chul Han has pointed out in several recent books, the alternative of life without ritual and without seasonality is life in which every day has the weight of all eternity on it. He calls this “the hell of the same.”

The church calendar is the opposite of that. It’s like a sampling of the heaven of differences. Just as the calendar offers seasonality, every service is a short walk through the history of the long community of faith, considering the scriptures together, offering commentary, and praying together. 

Every service includes lamentation and confession, and every service includes a renewal of the bonds of community in a meal taken together.And every time we get together we sing together, we speak together, we listen together, and we affirm one another’s forgiveness together.In other words, whenever we gather we are reminded that we are not God, that we are all on the same level, that we need one another, and that we hope together that there is more than the best we have been able to offer. 

Together we consider what we have done and what we have not done, and we ask ourselves: what then should we do to share the good things we have received?

As I wrote in a blog post a few years ago, prayer orients me and prepares me to live as I think I ought to live. And given my propensity for not doing what I ought to do, prayer allows for constant course correction.

I know from many conversations with friends and students that all of this sounds fine for me, but there are a many good reasons for others not to believe in a God. Fair enough! If that works for you, I’m glad.

Believing A Little In Order To Avoid Believing Myself Too Much

But before we move too fast, let me offer Cicero’s account of the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, and his reason for choosing to believe, and what that has meant for me.

Chrysippus worried that he didn’t choose to believe in some god greater than himself, then by default he would believe in himself as the ultimate arbiter, since his own mind was the greatest mind with which he had intimate familiarity. Some have said that we are indeed condemned to believe in ourselves, finding ourselves thrown into the world without a compass or guide.

Chrysippus seems to suggest that we can choose to imagine a world that is charged with wonder, one where things happen beyond our understanding, one that invites us to inquire, one that has glimpses of beauty that transcends what our eyes can see. 

Consider the Manatee

This world really is charged with grandeur. The more I examine our fellow creatures across the kingdoms of life, the more I wonder about the world. 

The octopus and the squid seem to see as we see - with binocular vision - but their sight developed convergently and independently from ours. Do they see what we see, and as we see it? Could it be that their whole chromatophore-dappled body is a visual organ and not just the eyes? 

Or consider the stingray, which is a vertebrate like us. Does it see as we do? One funny thing about the stingray is that its eyes are on top of its body and its mouth is on the bottom of its body, so it likely never sees its food, but senses it (maybe thereby seeing it far more vividly) with electro-sensing ampullae than with its eyes. 

Or consider the manatee. Its vision developed along with ours as our mammalian relative, but its eyes are on the sides of its head. It might be that it uses its whiskers for finding its food far more than it uses its eyes. Manatees are slow, lumpy foragers just doing what they can to get by each day. Which is to say they’re a bit like us.

I could go on. Scallops have many eyes but no brain. Most bivalves seem responsive to light, but don’t even have eyes. A scorpion seems to know when its body is covered under leaf litter even though there is no sunlight and it cannot see its whole body. How does it know these things? Is its whole body an organ of perception? 

The world is full of creatures who perceive the world differently from how we perceive it. Ours is not a wholly divine point of view; it’s just one that sort of works for us.

What do we fail to perceive because we think too highly of a few of our own organs of perception? What do we miss when we think too highly of our own opinions?

Hold Good Things In Your Heart And Mind

Blaise Pascal wrote about just that. Opinions abound, and for most of them we can find some justification. We can find reasons to believe and we can find reasons not to believe. Sometimes we must choose where we will commit our time and energy and love. This ain’t easy.

In another and better known passage, Pascal suggests that we can simply weigh the consequences and choose to act like we believe. This has been much criticized but I think he is not altogether wrong. The critique usually runs along the lines of: Which god should we believe in? And if there are infinite possible gods, we cannot choose.

I like to compare Pascal’s choosing to believe to the choice of how we orients ourselves to our beloved. If we choose to think of them as the author of the last thing that they did that offended us, that resentment and rancor will grow and become their image. If on the other hand we choose to think of their best qualities, those things will grow and become their image in our hearts and minds.

In other words, we don’t change them or make them into something they are not, but we do wind up changing ourselves, and the way we give our love.

We cannot control other people, but we have some control over our own ruminations. And I cannot tell you what God is like. But I can tell you that when I contemplate the best things I imagine in God, I find myself growing in love, glad to be considering such things. 

As Paul of Tarsus urged, whatever is true, noble, right, good, lovely, admirable, praiseworthy - think about such things. I find that doing so makes me eager to imitate them in my interactions with others. No, this does not make me perfect or holy. But it does remind me that I can do better, and it prods me into trying to do better.

In other words, I’m not sure I can tell you which god you must believe in. But I’m with Chrysippus and Pascal in thinking that there are some things that I know I don’t have enough of, like wisdom and love.

As much as I can I’m going to worship the God I hope to be the God of wisdom and love. And I find that as I do so, if nothing else, I am more attuned to my own need to be wise, and to love more than I do.

Hope That Is New Every Morning

Because I constantly mess up when it comes to things like wisdom and love. I find I need grace. I need new beginnings. 

Years ago when someone asked me why I believe, I told her about the solace I found in faith, and about how I found models of familial love in some people of faith I knew, and how I found healing from some things I had suffered. 

Oh, she said, you came from a broken home, so you need religion to provide a family. I come from a healthy family, she added, so I don’t need religion. And that was the end of the conversation. 

Maybe she was right, but I wanted to tell her that I was describing only the symptoms of something bigger. I still find I need new beginnings each day, and, as the passage in Lamentations says, when life has been hard, God’s love never ceases, God’s mercies are new every morning. 

It’s comforting to imagine that I cannot exhaust the possibility of having new beginnings every day. Could that be abused? Of course. Does that empty it of power and meaning? Not at all. Any good thing can be abused; it is up to us to try to make good use of good things, and to help others to do the same.

Religious organizations and religious people will screw this up repeatedly. That doesn’t empty the religion of value, any more than those who abuse painkillers empty painkillers of their value. If you’re in pain, allow someone who has access to safe and well-dosed painkillers to treat you, and to diagnose and treat the cause of the pain. 

Several famous figures – Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche all come to mind – ² have described religion as an opiate or as a medicine that provides compensation for what we have lost. They’re not entirely wrong. But religion is more than a painkiller; it offers a diagnosis of our condition, and it offers a community of healing.

Church As Hospital, Not Church As Country Club

To put it differently, communities of faith aren’t country clubs for those who have already made it (most of them are faking it anyway) but they are sick houses where the sick care for one another. 

If you’re worried that a church might be full of hypocrites, sinners, and unbelievers, you’re right: every single one is full of nothing but hypocrites, sinners, and unbelievers. That’s why the church is there.

Thing is, the church is one of those few places where you can say so out loud without violating the principles of the place. In fact, every service we all confess our sins aloud, together.

In my church we say it like this:

“Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you  in thought, word, and deed,  by what we have done,  and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.” ³

The aim is to cover all the bases, and not to leave anything out.

We confess both our actions and our thoughts, and even our words, because words matter.

We confess both the things we did and the things we ought to have done.

We think back to what Jesus said about the two greatest commandments, and we confess that even when it’s boiled down to something so simple as that, we still have not kept either one. 

We are all on the same level, no one has it sorted out, no one gets to walk away and say well, I sure didn’t do anything wrong. 

There are no gradations of purity here, and no one gets to say yeah, I did this one little thing wrong but thankfully I’m not as bad as that jerk over there. 

We frame our errors against the goodness of God, and recognize that if we are quibbling over whose errors are greater or lesser, we are missing the point and failing to help one another strive towards doing better, towards loving God and neighbor as we should.

I feel like I ought to say more about this idea of loving God, but for right now I won’t. Well, I’ll say a little. Remember what I said earlier about not knowing who or what God is? I do have an inkling, and I try to better understand that inkling. I try to know God better, not in an academic way, but in a whole-life way. Whatever else love means, if love doesn’t involve caring attention, it’s probably not love. So I am trying to pay attention to God, and to do so with care.

And as I said about confession, I need help with this, because I’d always rather pay attention to my own interests. I’d rather sleep in than go to church. I’d rather hoard my money than give it to the poor and the needy. I’d rather gorge myself daily than fast and allow myself to remember the hungry and our common lot.

One of my grad school professors once said that she was opposed to the idea of purity. At the time, I thought of purity through the lens of my faith, and thought of it as something to strive for. Over the years I’ve come to see (I think) more of what she meant and I have come to agree with her. 

It’s too easy for us to imagine that we have somehow come up with the ideal version of purity, and then to enforce that on others. Too often we do this through shame, or through writing laws against the alleged impurities of others. Which is a way of saying we don’t all stand on the same ground.

Religious people are not immune to this temptation. Far from it! Thankfully, any religion that has even a glimpse of what Chrysippus was talking about has a reason to doubt their own notion of purity. 

We are not the final arbiters, and we are not the ones who have the clear vision of the world. The best we can claim to have is hope that someday we might see more clearly together. And religion (wisely, I think) puts off that someday for a very long time, lest anyone think we finally got there. 

Recently someone advised me (not for the first time, and probably not for the last time) that religion divides us and so we would be better off making culture without religion. 

I am very doubtful about this, and purity is one of the reasons why. Even as religious service attendance has declined in my country, calls for purity have not. And they come from all sides. I’ve heard well educated liberals and conservatives alike saying that people on the other side of a debate cannot be good people. Too often I’ve even heard folks calling for the death of their opponents. While I don’t think every opinion should get a warm reception or even a public platform, I am reluctant to say that there is any person who is so wrong that they fail the purity test that allows them to continue to live. 

If I need grace, others probably do too. If I need more love and wisdom, I imagine others might feel the same as well. And I hope to God that I’m not the highest standard of grace and love and wisdom out there. 

Listen To The Stories Others Tell

I hope you can see that what I’ve said here about my own story has parallels in other religions. That is, I’m not writing this to try to get you to convert to my party so we can team up in laughing at other religions. You are of course welcome to join me at services if you wish. But I know folks in other traditions trying to continue to practice a belief because they think their tradition offers a good counterpoint to the temptation of thinking we have our lives sorted out.

My point here has been to tell some of my own story. Part of my story is a belief that it is worth listening to others' stories as well. I’m writing this to tell a story, and stories aren’t competitors in a zero-sum game. Stories accumulate the way words in a dictionary do, slowly gathering each other and shaping each other in a community that grows and shifts over time. Stories are ways of bearing witness to what we have seen - and to what we guess that we don’t yet have eyes to see.

If you’ve got a story to tell, try writing it down, and thinking through it. That’s commentary.

And as much as possible, do it with a thoughtful community that will critique you and give you a tradition of guidance. Scriptures at their best are attempts to do that across generations.

And if you’re able to eke out even a tentative, modest prayer to a god like the one Chrysippus hopes for and imagines, you might find that helps you remember that you also might not be God.

Consider the manatee.