Faithful Heretics
The Rev. Gail Seavey
September 13, 2009
“…how to live a good life is a problem not a precept,…religion and morals call for a creative striving and searching.” Sophia Lyon Fahs, 1926
Like some of you here, I sat through years of Sunday School Classes memorizing catechisms, creed and Bible verses. Where was William Ellery Channing when I needed him? He wrote, “The great end in religious instruction is not to form an outward regularity, but to touch inward springs,” 150 years before I was upsetting my church school teachers by innocently asking one heretical question after another. But I didn’t grow up a Unitarian Universalist.
This religion was the first to recognize that rote learning did NOT successfully teach children to live religious lives. Channing believed that teaching children to think for themselves was one of the keys to spiritual development. Our reasonable founders started asking questions and experimenting with new forms of religious instruction.
Channing developed a religious instruction that arose out of a new kind of faith. Many of us were taught, like Channing himself, that goodness or God was outside of us. We were encouraged to control that messy inside stuff that threatened to gush out as heresies and immoral behavior. Early Unitarians and Universalists thought that maybe that inside stuff was not so dirty and bad after all.
This different faith stance had a radical effect on the way they taught their faith. Channing believed that those inward springs flowed from original innocence, rather than original sin endowing people with the potential to be good. All people could discern goodness with their conscience, which they saw as a direct line to God. If people where free to use their consciences, they could act morally, even if their beliefs sounded heretical. Children, it followed, were to be encouraged to develop and nurture their innate gifts of mind, conscience and love as a means of growing their souls.
The Unitarian respect for reason and individual conscience encouraged later religious educators to study the new science of psychology. In the first half of the 20th century, Sophia Lyons Fahs revolutionized our church schools by creating curricula based on developmental psychology. She creatively used stories and the arts to involve young children in experiences rather than abstract concepts more appropriate to older ages. She discovered that a good developmental education helped stimulate the creative thought that led questioning young adults to develop the moral and religious basis needed for living a good life.
In the second half of the 20th century, the field of developmental psychology grew. Psychologists have studied the developmental stages of human growth beyond childhood and throughout adulthood. This has influenced Unitarians Universalists to speak of life-span religious development. That’s why we offer as many adult education classes on Wednesday nights as we do classes for children on Sunday mornings.
The human capacity to grow physically, intellectually, spiritually and morally have all been graphed and charted. Eric and Joan Erickson studied how children develop hope as infants, will and purpose in early childhood, competence in the elementary school years, and identity in adolescence. They found that human development does not stop there, observing that we have the potential to develop our ability to love in our 20’s and 30’s, our capacity for caring on our 40’s and 50’s and our capacity for wisdom in our 60’s and older.
Psychologists have the habit, influenced by the physical sciences, of charting human development in stages. They make it sound as if we develop one step at a time in neat, forever progressive, levels.
James Fowler, who studies faith development, has to admit that the human spirit simply will not be graphed so easily. He tries to organize stages of faith in a complicated spiral that is more easily danced than graphed.
Joan Erickson offered me an image that helped me see the patterns of human development more clearly. She said that our lives are like weavings. The day we are born, the warp strings are all laid out — the loom is all ready for the thread of life to start weaving in and out. Those warp strings include all of the basic issues of life, threads of hope and will, purpose and competence, identity and love there from the start. Imagine green warp strings for hope, blue strings for wisdom – and so on. At different times of our lives different warp strings are brought forward to form the surface pattern. In infancy our basic pattern of hope is woven, and we see lots of green, but the green warp strings of hope always under-gird the more dominant patterns in later life. It works the other way too. The blue threads of wisdom run throughout our whole lives, even if we don’t weave patterns dominant in blue until our latter years. How many of us have learned from flashes of innocent wisdom rising through the hopefulness of small children, for instance. As I speak further about stages of faith development, try to visualize dynamic overlapping spirals or a loom weaving complex patterns rather than a ladder from bottom to top.
James Fowler tries to ground our understanding of faith development by first defining faith. By faith, he does not mean a particular faith, like Islam or Universalism. He uses the word faith to mean our basic orientation to the world – our basic images, core assumptions about how the world works, and where our place in the world is. A person may be a member of one religious faith all their life, but their viewpoint of that faith – their basic faith stance – can develop and change radically as they grow into maturity. Fowler is talking about that dynamic faith stance.
He first describes a foundational pattern of faith formed in infancy that he calls ‘pre-stage.’ As babies and toddlers we form the basic images that will organize how we see the world later in life. Is the baby held when she feels alone? Is he fed when he feels hungry? Core images of trust and abandonment, courage and fear, love and deprivation are formed at this time. The faith development of infants is in the hands of their primary care givers. If there is a failure of love within those relationships, faith can be colored by patterns of isolation or hopelessness. Our church can offer support in two ways during this foundational stage. We are attempting to better support parents through our Flourishing Families and Relationships Programming. We also offer a safe, nurturing environment in our nursery so that those babies will start to develop images of a larger world where trust is experienced beyond the loving arms of parents.
Typically, children from ages three to seven entering the first pattern, approach faith through intuition and imitation. Pre-K and Kindergartners are powerfully influenced by the examples of those around them. They are developing their imaginations, forming basic images and stories that help them unify and grasp the world of their experience. Stories organize the world around the child, who, in their eyes, is always at the center. Their stories are unhampered by reason or logic. At church, we tell them stories and encourage their imaginations. Many churches fail children at this age by encouraging images of terror and destructiveness. Unitarian Universalists sometimes fail by trying to reason them out of some of their fantasies. We do better to go with the fantasies and set a good example in our own actions, for they are just as taken by imitation as fantasy. They will do as we do, not as we say.
Children usually move into the second pattern about the time they enter elementary school. They start to identify with certain stories and images, and they take them very literally. They also start to see that other people have feelings and view ethical behavior as mutual fairness: I won’t hit you, if you don’t hit me. Unitarian Universalists have grappled with how to meet our children’s needs at this mythic literal stage. We tend to be impatient with adults who still take their symbols literally. But it is appropriate for children to go through a mythic literal stage. When these children ask us if there is a God or a heaven or hell, they need stories, not facts. During their elementary school years we need to tell them strong stories that we identify with on a poetic level. We, as their examples, need to know what we believe and use our creative powers to make those concepts real for our children.
The fourth pattern often forms in early adolescence. The young person still takes there stories literally. But they start to see it as their own personal story, which explains their past and helps them imagine a future. They become acutely aware of what others think of them, and want very much for their story to be acceptable to everyone. They try to synthesize the contradictory information they get from school, the media, their friends and family. This is a conventional, conformist pattern.
Many adults pattern their faith like this for the rest of their lives. Most churches function well within this pattern of convention and conformity. For many people it takes a serious clash or contradiction between valued authority figures to move to another stage.
Others experience that ‘leaving home’ emotionally or physically moves them into a fourth pattern of individuality. They step outside of the stories that have shaped their lives and start to examine them objectively. They define themselves as individuals rather than being defined by the group and learn to use reason to develop a capacity for critical reflection on their actions and beliefs. They analyze their myths and stories. No longer taking them literally, they often stop telling stories all together.
Unitarian Universalist function well within this pattern. We may be one of the few churches that do. We help each other reflect on our self-identities and our beliefs. But all strengths have their inherent limits. We can place excessive confidence in the conscious mind, in critical thought, and the rational worldview.
Our unreasonable unconscious often pulls us into the next pattern. The stories, symbols, dreams, feelings and paradoxes that are unexplained by reason gnaw at us, while our artistic creative selves press us toward an even more inclusive life stance.
Pattern five is a faith of integration. We have broken through old myths and reduced them to concepts. Now we learn to integrate the rational concepts with new stories. The point of view shifts to a more multidimensional and organically interdependent reality than most rational theories or accounts of truth can grasp.
Within this pattern, we reclaim and rework our past. We try to understand the deeper meaning behind our childhood stories; we may even rebuild foundations of hopelessness laid when we were babies. Unusual before mid-life, this pattern forms when we know that life in not what we planned. Letting go of control, alive to paradox and apparent contradictions, people with this viewpoint strive to unify opposites, both intellectually and in actual experience. They start to become free of the confines of tribe, class, religious belief or nation. Here they can stand in the midst of our culture’s most powerful stories, while at the same time seeing them objectively as partial.
Fowler calls the sixth and last pattern Universalizing Faith. These unusual people live, in their day-to-day actions, inclusive community. They are committed to justice and love, passionately striving for a transformed world, a world made over, not in their own image, but in images that stretch us all beyond our perceived limits. Mystics from every faith tradition – such as Muslim Rumi, Christian St. Francis, Unitarian William Ellery Channing (in this later years) and Shaker Mother Ann Lee, come to mind. They are often experienced as subversive because they live for values that challenge culturally imposed separations of class, gender, race, or nationality. These people are ready for fellowship with persons at any of the other stages and from any other faith traditions. They remind us of the good in people at each and every state of human development, and to honor all of those threads within ourselves. These people are not perfect however. Maybe we can never completely rise above our cultural conditioning. All of us, even our saints, need community to balance our human vulnerabilities and limitations.
Each pattern of faith development has its strengths and limits. We live on a vast loom, full of colorful images that we weave from our cultures stories and our experiences. We are the loom, the warp, the weft, the weaver, and the cloth whose patterns emerge with infinite variations. But in the end, the pattern is always woven from our hopes and will power, purpose and competence, identity and love, caring and wisdom. And those multicolored threads rise and fall across the surface creating patterns shining with beauties that we can all see. As a faith community, we covenant to encourage each other in our spiritual growth, which will continue to develop and grow, evolve and change throughout our life-span. We can always learn from one another.