On the witness stand: The Value of a Living Faith
[In Memory of my Daughter, Deborah Elizabeth Shepherd, 1974-1983] by Robt Shepherd
I am a christian by background and by faith, but many of my earlier preconceptions have matured through time and experience, or been shaken by circumstance -- such as the death of our daughter through childhood cancer.
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But this page I want to be a psalm of hope and of faith for all who read it. My intent with this statement is to reach out, to share, and to exclude no one in an outlook I hope will be embracing and not-rejecting.
"Blind unbelief is sure to err," William Cowper wrote. Faith is a great capacity which is ours to nourish, or neglect. It may also be a gift, a grace, which some poor souls are fated to have in meager quantity - a great loss to themselves.
Just as science has learned that right-brain activities and left-brain activities are not in competition with each other but are each indispensable to our full potential as human beings, even so faith, imagination, creativity, beauty, and the worshipping dimension are all important to us -- not less than are reason, logic and intellect.
This is not to say science and logic are not important. "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use," said Galileo. I agree with him. Our creator made us to ask, to seek, to inquire, to wonder. What are our brains for, if not to use them? Are not unused capacities like buried talents, a theft of our divine inheritance?
Albert Einstein wrote:
"The most beautiful and the most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand in rapt awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms -- this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness."
One of the best discussions of the emotional factors underlying the appeal of religion is to be found in the books of Eric Hoffer. I especially recommend The True Believer, and The Ordeal of Change. As an impetus to progress and material advancement, Hoffer has high praise for the Western (i.e. Biblical) concept of a transcendent God. Hoffer also provides fine insight into what attracts many people to cults and mass movements. I find his discussion along these lines very elucidating.
On a personal note, there are probably as many facets of my own religion that turn me off as that inspire me. I am often offended by narrowness and rigidity, by exclusiveness and intolerance (of wayward ones). I am turned off by a doctrinaire obsession with ideology at the expense of compassion and ethics. I dislike "litmus tests" of political correctness (or religious "acceptability"). I am also bothered by hard-sell and aggressive proselytizing. Hoffer makes the interesting point that often, the less firmly we are convinced of something ourselves, the harder we try to convince others of it (thereby compensating for our own lack of certainty).
Religion inevitably preoccupies itself with theology and doctrine. Yeah, at some unquestioning level I could probably assent to the creed of my forefathers, or the "standard" first six councils of the early church. But that's not REALLY what lifts my soul. I hope you will think about it, too, in your own case. How much was the meek St. Francis concerned with dogma? How much was Ghandi, or Tolstoy, or Mother Teresa? There was more of the good Samaritan in them than the religious ideologue.
The mystic in me says:
"There's not a friend like the lowly Jesus, no not one. No not one."
But I am blessed to see how closely some of these others, like Ghandi, St. Francis, and such, have trod in the same path of service and practical blessing to mankind. They in some sense embodied The Sermon on the Mount.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes the point that "God" has been evicted from one realm after another (science, economics, government, medicine) till in modern life there is just one domain left for Him -- the soul, the psyche, of the individual human person. And THAT after all, is the one area that was legitimately his all along. THAT is the one area he asked for, appealed for, and insisted on. There is an area within us that still cries out for GOD, for idealism, for vision, for the illimitable.
To dream the impossible dream
to fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear with unbearable sorrow
to run where the brave dare not go.
To right the unrightable wrong,
to love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary,
to reach the unreachable star!
This is my quest,
to follow that star,
No matter how hopeless,
no matter how far;
To fight for the right without question or pause
To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause!
And I know, if I'll only be true
To this glorious quest
that my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I'm laid to my rest.
And the world will be better for this
That one man scorned and covered with scars,
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable stars.
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Our beautiful daughter
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