Person of faith? Or faithfully agnostic? Pt 2

I ran across a quote in a book by Gordon Kaufman called In The Beginning... Creativity which relates nicely to Wednesday's post on faith and agnosticism.

"I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view."
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

I cannot speak to the context of this thought, and what it says to me may be as far from Wittgenstein's intention as it can get, but it says a great deal from my point of view. It's almost a mantra for us faithful agnostics. Those of us who have strayed from traditional belief systems with the strong conviction that belief systems are inherently flawed, but still view things in terms of "faith" or "spirit."

I embrace the notion of being faithfully agnostic because I've learned that I do not have any other option. I, and I believe many others are as well, am incapable of looking at something without thinking of it terms of my own faith. What is missing for these people is a place to practice faith that is based more on question and mystery than it is on conscious deity. The end result is that one can't turn their back on the church or other faith organizations without a certain amount of loss.

Churches, all churches, offer something to their congregation, and people attend a particular church depending on their need. Many need the comfort of a cosmic plan, the idea that someone is watching our back, others need the comfort of community, of belonging to a group, still others wish to be challenged on how to live their life and think about it in terms of spirituality and faith. Often, however, we find that many churches offer an answer to loneliness, or the promise that Jesus will take care of their problems, and those problems will be solved once someone really places all their faith in Jesus.

This is a comfort I can relate to. I wish I could feel like someone else is guiding me through my life and helping me deal with the day to day, but I don't believe that is the case. I don't believe that, and I experience a small death of a god I grew up to believe in. I did not fully give up on this god until adulthood, but I had an experience that left me questioning the nature of prayer, and the protective god at a very young age.

We had a series of Christian cassette tapes when I lived in Oklahoma, called Psalty the Singing Songbook. It was about a giant, blue, walking and talking hymnal that had adventures with kids singing songs and solving their problems through prayer (but most often it was figured out through teamwork, but I digress). In one instance they sang a song about praying, and a boy gave a little story about how he had lost his baseball and he tried to find it, but couldn't. So he got on his knees and prayed, and when he opened his eyes his baseball was right in front of him.

Well, I didn't have a baseball, but I did have a dollar coin that I got at a coin show. My family has a history of collecting coins, and this one lived in my pocket for a long time so I could show it off, and inevitably, it was lost. I searched, and I was incredibly frustrated by this, and in a moment of desperation I remembered that song. So I got down on my knees and prayed, in a location where I thought the coin might be lost, and where god could most easily direct my sight to find it. And when I opened my eyes... no coin. So I tried it again, and again, and again, and each moment the idea that god would take care of my problems died just a little bit more.

When realizing that in many senses, we really are alone, we almost want that promise that faith organizations (it's not limited to Christianity...) make, to follow this simple plan, and you're life will be ok, and for so many we find that all these organizations can do is wrap the same empty box in different paper. So where are the communities of people that don't claim to have the answers, the people that can't give us the comfort of an all seeing deity, but of a community that all has the same problems in life and the same questions of why we're all here.

I can't word it better than Wes Nisker's quote in the July/August issue of Utne who says "Just imagine how good it would feel if we all got together once in a while in large public gatherings and admitted that we don't know why we are alive, that nobody knows for sure if there's a higher being who created us, and that nobody really knows what the hell's going on here."

It's comforting isn't it? It's a comfort and support from real people, and a comfort that doesn't come with empty promises. It's a comfort that actually can offer the feeling that we aren't alone, but it's not because of a distant, untouchable deity, but from the power and support of community.