Update on this week’s post on faith

Well, yesterday brought an unexpected lesson on faith that illustrates what I was trying to share in my post from earlier this week.

What I had been trying to explain is that faith is something we actively do in order to bring about something that we cannot know will happen. Since the future is entirely unknowable, every little action we take requires a grain of faith.

Well, I was at my parent’s home yesterday with my parents, my children, my sister, her husband, and their baby daughter. We were expecting a fun day of playing, going for walks, and some photography. Every decision and action we were making over the course of the morning was because we were exercising faith towards that hope we had a fun day ahead of us.

Well, in a span of 20 minutes, our day went from goofing off like this:

to spending the next several hours in an ER letting doctors work their skills and know-how on saving my toe:

So, while our faith actions that morning had been towards having a fun Saturday with family, our faith actions suddenly had to change to getting me to medical experts who we had hope could properly dress my wound, and then getting me to a pharmacy for medicine that we had hope would keep me from extreme pain, and keep infections out of the wound.

I think similar things happen with our spiritual faith as well. We have a responsibility to develop faith that there is a living Savior who cares for each of us personally, but then we use other ideas to try and buttress that faith, and unfortunately we sometimes use wrong ideas. In Mormonism we often talk about the Book of Mormon being the “keystone of our religion.”  The idea of a keystone is that it is the most important piece for holding an arch together, if the keystone falls out the rest of the arch will fall.  The converse is that the keystone is also held up by other ideas, if too many of those other ideas are weak or false, then the keystone can’t be held up.  Other important keystones could include the atonement and the idea of gaining knowledge through revelation.

The problems start when we in religions try to hold up the keystones of our faith with ideas that aren’t true.  We believe that Christ is our Savior, but then we make some assumption that since we learn about Christ in the Bible, everything in the Bible must be literally true.  When biology and geology prove that Earth isn’t 6000 years old, then suddenly an untrue belief that we held winds up cutting us off from a true belief.  This is where churches find themselves losing millennials.

This is why faith needs to be more of an ongoing personal action as opposed to an abstract thing that we passively possess.  We need to recognize that we, using our finite brains, create false assumptions supporting our own faiths.  Faith is something that we can’t know is true, but we hope is true, and yet IS true.  Just because we find our that a premise we used to originally support our faith was untrue doesn’t mean the thing our faith is in is also untrue (in fact, if you’d like more assurance of this, you can learn more about this specific type of logical fallacy).

The greatest Spiritual lesson from my Secular graduate program

In the Fall of 2008 I was in the final stages of applying to my graduate program.  I’d finished my GREs, submitted my application, and just had my interviews left before I would know whether or not the University of North Texas would let me try and become a counselor.  The interviews lasted almost and entire day and consisted of several group and individual discussions.  At last we were all brought together into a classroom with the professors to ask any additional questions we had before the day’s activities were over.  I asked the one question I hadn’t asked all day: “How long does it reasonably take to graduate?”  It was a 48 hour program (I opted to take 60 when the program was reaccredited half way through), at 12 hours a semester was 4 semesters a realistic goal?  The professor who answered was very straightforward:  “No, 4 semesters is not realistic.”  He then elaborated–he didn’t talk about prerequisites and internship placement, and all that stuff that truly did make it unrealistic–he said that we as students needed to be with them longer than that so that they would have sufficient time to change us into the type of people we needed to become in order to be good counselors.  He went on to explain that we would leave this graduate program different people than when we started.  He said that the

program didn’t push people towards change, it was just a natural process that resulted from learning how to help people through therapy.  He kept on going and talked about students who had, as a result of their program, gotten divorced, changed friendships, cut ties with family, changed religions, etc.  He said that we wouldn’t all experience such dramatic transformations, but that we would be changed nevertheless.

Well, here I am 5 1/2 years later, still married to Laura, still in touch with close old friends, I have mostly good relationships with my family members, and I’m still Mormon (although I had previously written about a time that my strength in my beliefs was momentarily weakened)…     So, what changed in me you might ask?

The answer to that, in one word, is Faith.

I never thought of myself having a relationship with a word, but I have a formed as deep a relationship with the word “Faith” that many people feel towards entire beloved novels or ongoing television series.  Just like people can learn more about a book from reading it time and time again, or a TV show by going back and re-watching the first season, I learn more about faith every time I read something new about it or even take a minute or two to contemplate it.

So what kick-started my love affair with this word.  Well, my graduate program prided itself on encouraging students to know, understand, and adopt one of the great theoretical approaches to counseling.  Oh how I struggled with that.  I tried out all of my teacher’s favorites: Adlerian, CBT, Person-centered, Choice, etc., and none were a good fit.  I eventually was painted into a corner and declared that I was Existential!  To which my professor and graduate advisor said “no way,” that I couldn’t be that theory until after I graduated, at which point they suggested I check out a few books on Gestalt Therapy.

It was reading through these books that I began to finally understand what our teachers talked about when they said they wanted us to be connected to a theory.  I liked this Gestalt stuff.  It added light to me and my understanding.  It provided framework and justification for the approaches and techniques we were being taught to use as therapists.

The thing about Gestalt that won my affections towards it was the idea of awareness as a constantly flowing river. It deemphasized the idea of a deep submerged subconscious and instead look to understand that our conscious is only capable of handling so much awareness at once and that the way a person shifts awareness from one things to another becomes a matter of habit and learning by adolescence and early adulthood.  The counseling theory is that by training someone to understand their cycle of awareness will bring about a natural change towards a better life, as opposed to symptom identification and management of other theories.  (I’ve just tried to condense Gestalt into a single paragraph, please forgive me the oversimplification.)

As I learned more and more about this idea of awareness, within me sparked the memory of something I had not read in over a decade but sounded familiar:

If men were duly to consider themselves, and  turn their thoughts and reflections to the operations of  their own minds, they would readily discover that it is faith, and faith only, which is the moving cause of  all action, in them; that without it, both mind and  body, would be in a state of inactivity, and all their exertions would cease, both physical and mental.

These words come from Joseph Smith Jr.’s Lectures on Faith. Now in Gestalt, the idea of awareness is what drives people to action.  To see more of the parallels: continue to read Joseph Smith’s lecture:

Were this class to go back and reflect upon the  history of their lives, from the period of their first recollection, and ask themselves, what principle excited  them to action, or what gave them energy and activity, in all their different avocations, callings, and  pursuits, what would be the answer? Would it not  be that it was the assurance which we had of the existence of things which we had not seen, as yet?— Was it not the hope which you had, in consequence of  your belief, in the existence of unseen things, which  stimulated you to action and exertion, in order to obtain them? Are you not dependant on your faith, or  belief, for the acquisition of all knowledge, wisdom,  and intelligence? Would you exert yourselves to obtain  wisdom and intelligence, unless you did believe that  you could obtain them? Would you have ever sown  if you had not believed that you would reap? Would  you have ever planted if you had not believed that you  would gather? Would you have ever asked unless you  had believed that you would receive? Would you have  ever sought unless you had believed that you would have  found? Or would you have ever knocked unless you  had believed that it would have been opened unto you?  In a word, is there any thing that you would have  done, either physical or mental, if you had not previously believed? Are not all your exertions, of every kind, dependant on your faith? Or may we not ask, what have you got, or what do you possess, which you  have not obtained by reason of your faith? Your food, your raiment, your lodgings, are they not all by reason of your faith? Reflect, and ask yourselves, if these things are not so. Turn your thoughts on  your own minds, and see if faith is not the moving  cause of all action in yourselves; and if the moving  cause in you, is it not in all other intelligent beings?

Over the next few weeks (especially since I had a research paper due on the topic) I was consumed with understanding more about both the Gestalt view of awareness, and finding a truer understanding of faith.  Faith no longer felt abstract to me–something hypothetically stronger than belief, but less than knowledge–it felt more like a moral obligation.  In fact, the more I understood about faith, the less knowledge I realized I actually had.

As living beings constrained to living in the present who can have no true knowledge of future events, whether one second from now, or a million years from now, faith is absolutely necessary in order to make any decision about our future.  Anything from an innocuous choice about what groceries to purchase for dinner (we don’t know if something will prevent us from getting home) or major decisions about who to marry (we don’t know if our companion will remain the same person in the years to come).  As I began work professionally as a counselor I began to see what the earlier Gestaltists saw: people who either through habit or choice could not let their awareness touch on their biggest fears and insecurities about the future.  Through the lens of faith (not even in a religious sense), I could see these people as having not having faith or convictions that their choices could bring about a better future.  I just found myself amazed at the parallel lessons I was learning from men of science from the 1950s and a self-proclaimed prophet from the 1830s.

Now, for you readers who do not share my religion, I’ll grant to you that you don’t have to accept Joseph Smith as a prophet, but I would hope that you could at least find some appreciation in his thoughts and philosophies.

The value that this understanding has brought to me in my life is that it provides me with the perfect tool for self-evaluation.  If I am experiencing anxiety or stress, I can look within myself and try and understand what I’m fearful about, where is it within me where my faith is weak and my fear is impeding my action? I can then decide whether my faith is insufficient and then act, or I can realize that I’ve put my faith in the wrong thing and need to fix that.  After all, the prophet Alma taught that for faith to work, the thing we have faith in must be true.  If we have “faith” in something that is untrue, then it is not faith, it is simply belief, and it is a belief that will someday break.

For me this makes faith far more intentional and somewhat risky.  It is easy to have faith in things that have been proven true in the past.  As Aristotle taught that tossing refuse into the street would produce rats, he could replicate that result, although his understanding of the mechanism was completely wrong.  As we understand more, the exercise and risk of faith lessen.  However, having faith in something that is completely unknowable is still very risky.  I cannot prove the existence of an eternal Christ-the-Savior empirically, but I still make decisions with the assumption of His existence.  Recognizing the room for doubt in that arrangement actually makes my decision to act in faith more personally powerful and meaningful.

I am hopeful that the thing I have faith in will prove to be true.  Which I suppose is what the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews meant when he said that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”