What Do You Believe?
Jan K. Nielsen
What do you believe?
What is it that keeps you going?
What gets you out of bed every morning
and leads you to do what you do?
When so much around you seems to be changing,
what is it that remains constant?
When too much in the world, or in your life,
seems to be falling apart,
to what, or to where, do you turn for answers?
What guides the big decisions of your life?
The question of what we believe
is one we don’t usually answer early on in our lives,
once and for all.
Life is a school, the saying goes,
a “wisdom journey,”
and with every season,
comes the possibility for growing in wisdom.
With every trial,
with every challenge,
life offers us the chance to become wise.
The hardest situations we face in life
can sometimes teach us the most.
We hear this truth in the words that Sarah read for us
from singer Jimmie Dale Gilmore.
Experience, he says, is sometimes the only teacher.
It was only when he give up what he calls
his “self centered” life,
and began to learn another way to live,
that Gilmore learned, he says,
that Jesus’ teaching,
“It is better to give than to receive,”
was not just an empty platitude,
but a truth.
He knows that truth now, he says,
“not by faith, but by experience.”
We can learn the most enduring truths
through what we experience in this life.
Belief through direct experience
is a part of our Unitarian Universalist way of faith,
another strand of our spiritual DNA.
We Unitarian Universalists can carry
what you might call a “stubborn streak.”
I’ll say it plain:
we can get a little antsy when someone tries to tell us what to do
and we can out and out rebel
when someone tries to tell us what to believe.
It’s just the way we are wired.
The story of our faith
is filled with the names of spiritual rebels,
people called heretics, and worse,
for their refusal to accept someone else’s beliefs,
people like Francis David,
who died over five hundred years ago
for his belief in religious freedom.
Our way of faith sets us apart from religious traditions
that expect, even require, acceptance of a creed,
or a set of beliefs written by someone else.
We want to ask questions,
to make up our own minds.
In the front of our hymn books,
we name the sources of what we call
our “Living Tradition” of faith.
Ours is a faith not set for all time,
but living, growing, evolving, alive –
truly, a living tradition.
The sources of our faith include,
among others,
Jewish and Christian teachings
and wisdom from the world’s religions,
but the very first named source of our faith reads:
‘‘Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder,
affirmed in all cultures,
which moves us to a renewal of the spirit
and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.”
Our spiritual ancestors of the 19th century,
including Ralph Waldo Emerson
and the New England transcendentalists,
rejected the notion that
belief, or faith, can be received,
and insisted, instead, that beliefs, and faith, must be found.
Those brave souls stood up and said,
“Don’t hand me a ready made set of beliefs.
Don’t hand me any creed and expect me to accept it,
line by line, no questions asked.
Let me find out what I believe, they said,
through what I can discover, and know, first hand,
by direct experience.”
Another way to say it
is that in life we earn
our faith, our wisdom –
(and don’t we humans sometimes wish it was easier than that).
Think back through the years of your life.
What wisdom have you earned?
What faith have you found?
What do you believe?
Have you ever tried to say it out loud,
or write it on the page?
Both of today’s readings come from the new book,
just out, called This I Believe II,
a second collection of the essays
heard on the National Public Radio program,
This I Believe.
I’d love to hear, or read, your stories,
your own answers to the question:
What do you believe?
The program always ends with the question;
What would you say?
One of the ways we can discover what we would say,
what we believe
is by listening to the story of another.
We don’t always give ourselves credit for what we’ve done
and what we’ve learned.
Maybe we keep it tucked inside,
close to the heart,
but we don’t often take it out,
where it can be seen and heard.
What we hear in another’s story, though
can help us tap into our own
and maybe inspire us to put it into words
and maybe even share it with others.
So what about you?
What would you say?
What do you believe?
The very word “believe” can be a roadblock for some of us.
We can hear the word and, in a way, go numb,
as our minds leave our stories and our experiences behind
and run all the way back to a rigid set of beliefs
we may have long ago rejected.
I have run that race myself.
After we look at the origins of the word “believe,”
though, we may hear something else.
We may hear ourselves being invited
to return to the stories of our lives
and to all that we hold closest to our hearts.
The Latin, Old English and German roots
of our word “believe”
are all words meaning “love.”
“To believe” can mean “to hold dear,”
“to belove.”
What I believe, I give my heart to.
What I believe, I give my life to.
What I believe, I do.
Belief can be understood to be almost inseparable
from what we do;
our beliefs emerge
from the interwoven stories and experiences of our lives.
True believing emerges out of the doing.
“I believe in dancing,” Robert Fulghum proclaims,
and his goal, he says, is to
“dance all the dances as long as (he) can.”
Maybe, like him, there have been times in your life
when you weren’t so sure you wanted even to try,
either literally or metaphorically, to dance,
times when the fears of both
appearing foolish or a failure
kept you on the sidelines of life.
I think most of us have been there.
Maybe right now
there is something calling you to go out
and give to the world,
but you’re holding back, resting on the sidelines.
The sidelines can seem safe,
but when we never step out onto the dance floor of life,
we can quit living
and die a slow death inside.
Robert Fulghum’s belief in the power of dancing
emerged not from thinking about dancing
but from the doing –
from his experiences of taking first one step,
then another, and another.
We can dance with our bodies
and also with our souls.
Maybe you know the story of Sister Helen Prejean,
who writes, “I watch what I do to see what I really believe.”
While I was in Divinity School,
we were required to watch the movie,
“Dead Man Walking,”
based on one of her books.
Her story has inspired me.
Sister Helen decided that in order to live
Jesus’ teaching to “love thy neighbor as thyself,”
she needed to widen her circle of loving care.
“ . . . (O)ne day I woke up (she writes)
to Jesus’s deeper challenge to love the outcast,
the criminal, the underdog.
So I packed my stuff
and moved into a noisy, violent housing project
in an African-American neighborhood in New Orleans
(which) soon led me to Louisiana’s death row.”
There she became a spiritual adviser
to the inmates awaiting their deaths.
Listen to her story:
“For over twenty years,
I have been visiting people on death row,
and I have accompanied six human beings to their deaths.
As each has been killed I have told them to look at me.
I want them to see a loving face
when they die. I want my face to carry the love
that tells them that they and everyone of us
are worth more than our most terrible acts.”
Sister Helen’s is a powerful statement of belief:
a belief in the worth and dignity of every human being,
a belief that every one of us is worth
more than the worst that we do,
a belief in the power of love.
Sister Helen’s beliefs
were not handed to her by any outside authority;
her beliefs instead emerged out of the doing -
out of her direct experience, out of what she did, day to day, step by step.
There is more to Sister Helen’s story.
“ . . . I knew,” she writes,
“that being with the perpetrators wasn’t enough.
I also had to reach out to victim’s families. . . .
It was a big stretch for me,” she writes,
“loving both perpetrator’s and victims’ families,
and most of the time,
I fail because so often the victims’ families
interpret my care for the perpetrators as choosing sides – the wrong side.
I understand that, (she says)
but I don’t stop reaching out. . . .
The only way I know what I really believe, (she concludes)
is by keeping watch over what I do.”
We can learn from Sister Helen’s story.
Neither the pain of rejection,
nor the fear of appearing a fool or a failure,
have shaken Sister Helen’s belief in the need to reach out
with love and compassion.
If she can do what she does, I have told myself over the years,
surely I can keep giving, keep caring, keep loving,
no matter what.
I have nothing to fear, I realize,
and that frees me to stay off the sidelines,
to keep on, no matter what.
Call it belief. Call it faith.
Whatever you name it,
it comes from the doing, day to day, step by step.
What about you?
When you look at your life, what do you see?
What does your life say about you?
In the days to come, keep watch over what you do.
To what do you give your heart?
What do you hold most dear?
What do you believe?
The Universalist Church
West Hartford, Connecticut
January 25, 2009