“ANIMAL FAITH: THE BASIS OF ALL BELIEF.”[1]

INTRODUCTION: Back in 1775, the city of Lisbon, Spain was hit by an earthquake. Two-thirds of the city was destroyed. And because it happened on All Saints Day, churches were crowded with worshippers, upon whom cathedral domes toppled and giant stones fell, killing almost 30,000 people.

Voltaire wrote about this disaster in his Candide, pointedly noting that most of the brothels – filled with prostitutes and adulterous men – were spared, but not the devout who were in the churches! His point was clear: Where was the God whom those in the churches were worshipping when they died?

Miroslav Volf, who teaches at Yale Divinity School, offered the above in the context of a dinner conversation he wrote about, when he sat next to a television reporter from CBS.[2] The recent tsunami had just struck Southeast Asia, killing close to a quarter of a million people, and was the topic of his table’s conversation.

Discovering that he was a theologian, the reporter asked him, “How can one believe in a good God in the face of such destruction and suffering?” More specifically, what about the children who were lured onto the beaches by the fish left exposed in the shallow water just before the tidal wave roared back in at such phenomenal speed? Why? How? Who?

But we don’t have to return to 1775 or travel to Indonesia to find instances that seem to call into question the most basic of faith assumptions. There are such incidents happening here in our community, even in our church – things that don’t seem right or fair…incidents that should not be happening in a faith-based Universe.

I remember the treasurer from a Unitarian Universalist congregation at which I pastored. Several years earlier, they had worked with a fertility clinic hoping for her to become pregnant. Finally, they were successful and she gave birth to a beautiful boy whom they named Jacob.

Her emotional investment in Jacob was so intense that she was unwilling to leave him with a babysitter. But then one day a wonderful event happened at work. They decided to celebrate. Her husband convinced her it would be okay to leave one-year old Jacob with a trusted neighbor’s teenager, who had been raised with brothers and sisters and whom all the neighbors said was very dependable and great with kids. And she lived only a few doors down the street, where her mother would be available, if needed.

So after giving instructions and leaving phone numbers, Janet and Ed left to celebrate their good fortune, and to have dinner at a restaurant a few miles away – just the two of them. But while they were eating, the manager of the restaurant came up and told them they had an emergency call. It was their babysitter’s mother, who was almost hysterical. She said her daughter had gone in to check on Jacob, and realized that he wasn’t breathing. She had called 911 and then called her. The mother asked Janet and Ed to meet her and her daughter at the hospital.

Janet told me that as they raced to the hospital, she prayed to God and promised him that she would do anything, give anything, go anywhere, only please, don’t let Jacob, her baby, her only child die.

But when they arrived at the hospital and rushed into the Emergency Room, they learned that Jacob had been pronounced “Dead on arrival.” The initial diagnosis seemed to be SIDS: Sudden Instant Death Syndrome.

A few days later at the funeral, though it was all somewhat a blur, Janet said that the minister tried so hard to convince them that it was all a part of God’s plan, and that Jacob was now in heaven with Jesus. Janet said she grew more angry and bitter with every word. She had prayed and promised that she would do anything, go anywhere; only please, do not take Jacob, her baby. All to no avail.

So where was God? How could God permit something so wrong…so unfair!

I.

            For just a moment, let’s look at that question, but from a different perspective than most discussions about the existence of a good God. Namely, how and from where did that whole understanding of God arise…especially the God who is blamed for earthquakes and tsunamis…SIDS and the death of little children?

If you would, go back with me please to a time unlike any we know. More than 4 billion, 999 million, 900 thousand years of evolution have transpired, give or take a half billion. In evolutionary time, millions of unique species have come and gone. And we’ve advanced forward in time to only 100,000 years ago – a mere blip in geologic time. A species known as homo sapiens sapiens begins to appear, perhaps in Africa and/or Southwest Asia. That’s our ancestor, of course.

It was also a time when life was viewed much differently than we do in the Western world, where we divide the world into animate and inanimate. To them all of life was considered alive. Much like modern physics, there were no such things as inanimate objects. Everything was infused with life, whether human being, animal or plant.

Further, every phenomenon – a sudden shadow, the thunder’s clap, an unknown clearing in the forest, the big rock over which a hunter stumbled on his way to find game – every incident in life was seen as having life-filled portent.[3] Never at any time was any part of life thought to be just a rock, just a shadow, just a thunderclap. Rather, it was all infused with the wonder and mystery of it all. Consequently, all that existed was addressed as life-filled.

I’m told that many Native Americans on this continent saw life in the same way. That explained in part why they would never have killed non-threatening animals for the sport of it.

Certainly, they would never do as one of America’s senior Marine commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lt. Gen James Mattis. He said in a forum in San Diego last Tuesday on strategies for the war on terror, “Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight. You know, it’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people.”

Since I first began voting on my 21^st birthday, I’ve voted for Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, but I’ve never felt so utterly betrayed than I have by a government whose top generals brag about their god being bigger than the Muslim god, or that they think it’s fun to kill other human beings, or that both of our senators in Florida – one Republican and one Democrat – voted to elect the theoretician of prisoner-of-war torture, Alberto Gonzales, as Attorney General of the United States. And no one suffers any consequences – except their victims!

The failure to value the lives of others bespeaks a theological and philosophical understanding of the world as an “It” – an object – where not only human beings, but water, grasslands, forests, and the very air we breathe, are not nearly so important as the almighty corporate dollar of the right wing American rich and powerful.

To early humankind, nothing was an “It.” Every single existent was a life -- a “thou” to be addressed with respect.

Recently, while Amanda and I were having dinner with the Smiths, Patricia told of an incident that arose over their four-year old Dylan’s wanting to eat a Chicken McNugget. Most of the Smith household is “vegetarian,” but they were at a birthday party, which was being held at McDonald’s. And Dylan decided he wanted to eat the meat of a chicken – a Chicken McNugget.

So rather than arbitrarily saying, “No,” Patricia told Dylan, “Okay, you can eat one, but first you have to bow your head and thank the chicken.”

So Dylan closed his eyes and bowed his head for much longer than she thought he would. Then he opened his eyes and said that he had decided he didn’t want the Chicken McNugget.

Though only four, Dylan has an awareness that many of us who are older do not: That all of life is precious and should be treated with respect.

It was in this context that the ancients addressed the Mystery of life: The full moon that rose in the sky…the cloud that passed over that full moon…the rain that fell so hard and so long it caused floods to wash away everything in its path…the fire that was only a spark, but suddenly took on a roaring life of its own, and devoured all that was in its path. Or the fragility of life: the babies who died at birth and the mothers who joined them…the fathers who died from their encounter with a wild beast while on the hunt…all of life is precious and to be treated with awe and respect.

In our Western world, in the 17^th century, in what we designate as the start of the modern age, Rene Descartes articulated an intellectual model of life – I think, therefore, I am. Not so for early human beings. Thinking was a luxury. And mere being was always a tentative matter…a moment-to-moment equation that could never be solved…only lived, by trial and error.

II.

There was also that which early humanity shared with its co-residents on this planet. They all had what Santayana called “an innate confidence in the created order.” Somehow, that arbiter of existence so crucial to their survival was also supportive of their struggles to live and to bring life into the world. They were in fact living a faith-filled life – a confidence that their efforts to survive would succeed…their efforts to create a family would be sustained…they would find food…they would outlast the floods, the famines that scorched the earth, and the almost daily upheavals of death and life and hunger and pain.

III.

But with the onset of civilizations, life began to change. Religion spawned temples, and priests and worship. They were an attempt to being into the foreground of consciousness that innate faith which we all possess. The more we work at it, the more sensitive, kind and caring we hope to be. It is “to accept the limits and settings of one’s life and to adjust to them in a self-conscious way.”[4]

What are those “limits,” those “settings of one’s life” that we must self-consciously adjust to? It’s a little bit like one of the liturgies of the church, which is a part of many Christian funerals and memorial services. The minister says over the deceased:

The Lord giveth…

And the Lord taketh away…

Blessed be the name of the Lord.

To acknowledge that “The Lord giveth,” is to witness to the reality that life is a gift. We had nothing to do with being birthed. And life, however short or long, was a blessed gift. Hopefully, we lived it to the max. We loved, and hoped and gave…we suffered, and cried and lost. But we lived! And to say, “The Lord giveth…” is witness to our recognition that life is a wondrous gift.

To proclaim that “The Lord taketh away…” is not to imply that there’s a deity somewhere “up there” who’s playing dice with the Universe. This person gets blessed; this person gets zapped: eenie, meenie, minie moe. No, a thousand times, no! Rather, “The Lord taketh away” is an acknowledgement that none of us lives forever. To receive the gift of life is to be incredibly blessed, but we receive that gift with a very important caveat: Life will not last forever. You, I, every living person, will one day die, or as we like to say, euphemistically, we too will pass away. It may be a tragedy when it occurs. It may be unfair. Or it may be a gentle passing into that night. But it will happen. Be sure. “The Lord taketh away.”

The question of faith is this: What do we say in response to the gift of life that has an unknown time limit on it? We say, “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” And by that we mean we are deeply appreciative of the gift of life, and we also acknowledge that we knew it was not going to last for ever. But what a ride! How grateful we are. “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

CONCLUSION

One of the things I realized when I first became a Unitarian Universalist minister was that my vocabulary immediately shrunk. The language of divinity…the phraseology of spirituality…the grammar of faith…were all verboden. I still remember when the president of one of the congregations where I was minister, insisted that I go visit an engineer who was upset that in my printed sermon I had capitalized the “S’s” in the phrase, “the Spirit of the Sacred.” I was supposed to convince him that I was not a “closet theist.”

I realized later that I was not willing to accept that kind of stricture. To be Unitarian was not synonymous with atheist. Certainly if we countenanced pagans, we had room for theists, whether in or out of the closet.

More importantly, it seemed clear to me that religious language is one of the languages critical to the vocabulary of existence. Its myths and stories and liturgies tap into a depth of meaning and inner exploration that very few other languages do.

When I accepted that, I confessed to myself that I absolutely loved to hear the Islamic call to prayer. I loved it when Haneef offered it last week to start our service. I also found that invoking the Trinity before prayer – “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” – as I did at the hospital when asked to pray with a young Catholic couple I met on the elevator. It was an invocation that gave the prayer that followed a special uniqueness. I felt very deeply that the Psalms and the prophets contained insights to living that were wondrously rich, whose words I loved to quote. How handicapped it was to be so linguistically challenged. I couldn’t do it. I also felt as deeply that the Buddha, Lao Tze, and many others could be put into the pot of contemporary humanism and atheism and stirred together and the result was overflowing richness.

So I guess the question is, do we stand dumb before the Universe? Do we hover on the precipice of this brief existence we call life and refuse to recognize that within us are some of the same forces which birthed the moon and the sun, the Earth and our solar system, the galaxies and even, possibly, other Universes, in the incalculable immensity that looms so large before us? Are we to view life as mere accident…material phenomena, which are to be ignored? Or are we to search within for a Way – whether Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Lao Tze, Buddha, Confucius, or any one of so many Ways? Do we seek to give voice to that faith which every species possesses: an innate self-confidence in the created order, or religiously speaking, faith in God, which is our self-conscious affirmation? That is the question. It’s a faith question that human beings have been asking and answering for millennia. And so can we. Blessed be.