Tillich: “The concern of faith is identical with the desire of love: reunion with that to which one belongs and from which one is estranged. The separation of faith and love is always the consequence of the deterioration of religion.”
As I near the end of my conversation with Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard and Tillich on the subject of faith, I’m impressed once again by how vibrant, experiential and deeply mystical they all regarded it. This is quite different from popular Christianity, where faith is either identified with the boxes of belief we hold onto, or our willingness to stop thinking for ourselves and simply adopt the beliefs of someone else – even if that someone else is an author of a book in the Bible.
At the deepest level, faith does not have an object. Rather it is the total release of yourself to the ground of being, or to what I have named the present mystery of reality (or real presence of mystery). This ground is only found by an interior descending path of contemplative awareness, not by looking outside yourself into the environment of your life.
And yet, a more mystically grounded spirituality will not dismiss your outer reality as just dead matter or a seductive distraction.
Your physical senses connect you to a marvelously diverse expression of that same ground, as every other form is similarly rooted in the one mystery of being. In the creative swell, this ground generates the multiplicity of things; and in its own time, each thing recedes, dissolves and returns its small loan of energy to the source.
As one of these forms, you are a manifestation to me of real presence – a creative expression of the ground as an embodied person. It’s astonishing how the ineffable (nameless) mystery of reality reaches out to me through your physical form, your quirky personality, the various roles you play, through the conceited, insecure and occasionally pompous ego acting out your life. (No worries: I have one, too!)
The force that draws us together and holds us in communion, is love. This is the ground as spirit, surrounding and moving between us. Of course, if you’re too quirky and conceited, I may not feel especially interested or attracted to you. Our insecurities might make it challenging for us to be too close, and our separate convictions might rub the wrong way, causing us to feel uncomfortable, threatened and defensive when we’re together.
But whether we like it or not, despite our differences and however fond or freaked out we are by them, the spiritual truth is that we are fellow expressions and co-participants of this universe (“turning as one”), which is simply another word for communion (“together as one”) and the creative, unifying power of love.
Perhaps this is our best working definition of religion – from the Latin religare, to link back. Healthy religion is a relevant system of spiritual practices, artistic symbols, sacred stories and social rituals that link us each internally to the ground within, relationally in shared community, and universally to the planetary and cosmic environment.
Faith is about the contemplative clarity with which we individually connect and release ourselves to the ground, while love is the communal bond that contains our seemingly separate lives and moves us into intersections where we must meet and discover each other. According to this definition, love doesn’t have to feel good and make us tingle.
If we resist its rhythm and aim, in fact, we should expect to feel pain. As pain is the signal that something is wrong and needs careful attention, its intrusion on our relationships might inspire us to inquire where we are interfering with love’s greater design. What do we need to let go of and leave behind, or perhaps stretch out for and go beyond, in order to flow more gracefully and creatively in The Way?
Faith, then, is resting in the ground – in that profound and ineffable mystery supporting you in this present moment. Love is the longing that moves through you and connects you to everything else. Resting and longing: these are the dynamics of healthy spirituality and relevant religion. Remove one of them from the balance and you have either self-absorbed insecurity (today’s counterfeit spirituality) or glorified intolerance (today’s dogmatic religion).
As things continue to deteriorate, we succumb to anxiety and depression, get caught in more destructive conflicts with each other, and undermine our planet’s ability to sustain life.
The fact that we are here at this evolutionary moment in time means that we belong together. Like it or not, we live in the same house and come from the same place. And even now we are passing away, eventually to make room for our successors – if the wake of our own trash and toxins and holy convictions still leaves a sufficient clearing for the possibility of enlightenment.
It’s not yet too late. But we have got to wake up.
