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What Do You Mean By Faith?

by David R. Hudson

October 11, 2009 
A few years ago, now, I happened to hear Scott Simon interviewing the actor Tommy Lee Jones on his Saturday morning radio show, Weekend Edition. Tommy Lee Jones is a hard interview; he doesn’t engage in easy conversation. He questions the questions and the assumptions or ignorance behind them. I know this because I happened upon several other NPR interviews with Jones in my search for Simon’s; he had even the savvy veteran Terri Gross squirming and stuttering.

 

Simon was interviewing Jones about a movie he had directed and starred in, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. It’s the story of a Mexican living in the Southwest, an illegal alien, Melquiades Estrada, of how he was shot, mistakenly, and surreptitiously buried by a border patrol agent, and of how his friend and employer, Pete Perkins, the Tommy Lee Jones character, discovered this indignity, forced the agent to dig him up, and then, with the agent in tow, carried Estrada on the back of a horse, across the Rio Grande and through the desert to his home village to be properly buried. You see, Pete had once promised his friend that, if Estrada died on the U.S. side of the border, he would take him home to be buried.

 

Jones started the interview cooperatively enough, telling Simon that his was a “journey film.” “(The protagonist) moves from a bad place to a good place, having learned something,” he said. And then he made the statement that lured Simon into trouble. He said, “The movie has something to do with the consideration of the mechanics of faith.”

 

“In what sense do you mean faith?” Simon asked, innocently. “F.A.I.T.H.,” responded Jones. There was a long pause - awkward, of course - after which Jones tried to pull his interviewer out of the quicksand by adding, “ Flannery O’Connor once said, “Faith is what you know to be true, even if you don’t believe it.” …..Faith is what you know to be true even if you don’t believe it…… He went on: “Our movie looks at life from that perspective; what do you have faith in, and, once you do have faith in something, what happens.”

 

For some time I have been interested in the subject of engaged faith. I have come across the term a good deal in my reading – in the ideas of the evangelical Christian Jim Wallis – and his Sojourner group, in the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, and I have seen many examples in the lives and work of other religious people, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin , who spoke eloquently and acted passionately from his positions as Yale chaplain and senior minister of New York’s Riverside Church - and others. They appear often, if you are looking for them.

 

And, about the same time as the Tommy Lee Jones interview, I came across an article in the Atlanta paper about the former Catholic priest, Richard Keil, who founded the Tubman African American Museum in Macon. In 1981, while the pastor of a church there, he spent $36,000 to buy a derelict furniture warehouse in downtown Macon; the museum is now the largest of its kind in the Southeast. As a young seminarian Keil had spent the summer of 1956 in Alabama working in the fields with black farmhands. “In 1956,” he said, “I didn’t really understand, shall we say, the nature of African American and white relationships. I didn’t really understand the idea of oppression.” An encounter with an old black worker suddenly impressed upon him the nature of that oppression, and it changed his life. He had addressed the old man as “Mr. Hartman”, and the man had responded, “My name’s not Mr. Hartman. I’m just an old nigger.” Keil knew then that he wanted to spend his life affecting change in black and white relations. He came to Macon, and he did just that. He had awakened to a reality.

 

Some might say he was called. Jim Wallis and his Sojourners group felt called in the early 70’s, when as young seminarians at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, they formed an intentional community of Christians “committed”, as they say in their Statement of Faith, “to working together to live a gospel life that integrates spiritual renewal and social justice.”

 

They speak of the Spirit continually calling God’s people back to what they refer to as the primary Christian commitment – to love. They feel called to a ministry of justice – called to make religious communities and the government more accountable to the values of the prophetic religious tradition, which they define as “pro-justice, pro-peace, pro-environment, pro-equality, and pro–consistent ethic of life” - called by what they believe are the values Jesus taught.

 

They refer to themselves as radicals, “trying to recapture the spiritual, political, and cultural cutting edge of the gospel,” they say.  They speak of an “explosive mix of biblical faith and radical social change, of a new order for living, in which all people are equal and each life sacred.” They see themselves as part of a long lineage of Christian renewal movements, who have called the church back to its core values, “holding out a vision of what the church can and should be,” they say.

 

And they are committed, walking the talk, “committed”, they say, “to God, to one another, to their sisters and brothers on this planet, and to the Earth itself”. Through continual commitment they “order their lives together” - in their words – so that they “may walk together with those with whom Jesus walked – the poor, the weary, the outcast, the stranger.”

 

The call and the commitment are elements of the mechanics of faith. But they are not primary; they fit in the category of “once you have faith what do you do with it”. They stand on something else - an awareness – an awareness of truths – “profound, deep and abiding truths,” Davidson Loehr calls them. Loehr, until his recent retirement, was the outspoken, iconoclastic minister of the First UU Church of Austin, Texas. In an essay in the Journal of Liberal Religion, entitled “Why Unitarian Universalism is Dying”, he says that people are hungry for truth, a truth that can set one free, but he goes on to say that they need a profound place to start, truths that make demands on people of character, demands that ask us to choose the harder right, to lead noble lives – deep and abiding truths that can sustain honest spiritual quests. The Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism are not such truths, he holds, for they don’t require critical thinking, sacrifice, or hard work. In real religions, he says, the way is narrow and hard and few are those with the faith, love, and courage to take it. We know this, he says, for we honor, above all others, the 19th century sages who took the hard way – Channing, Emerson, and Parker.  
For Wallis and the sojourners, the most basic truths are the power of love, as exemplified by the life and work of Jesus, and the sacredness of all creation, with which we must live in harmony – responsibly. For them Jesus’s way of non-violent transformation and peacemaking becomes then, a necessary path, a path requiring sacrifice and even suffering – like the path across the Rio Grande and through the desert.

 

For UU minister Tom Owen-Towle the basic truth is also love, and for him the logical extension of the unconditional love he finds in our Universalist heritage is the same as it is for Jim Wallis.

 

In his book Wrestling with God he says, “One’s espoused theology pales beside one’s practiced faith. Our mission is to be concerned about earthly service, not heavenly speculation, to be riveted on economic justice not metaphysics”. We inherit the truth of our Universalist ancestors, who believed in God’s unconditional love for all of us – for all of life.  Loved, we love in return, “through active, direct service,” Owen-Towle says, “by being carriers of compassion to the Earth and its inhabitants. Our mission is compassion.”

 

which leads us directly to Thich Nhat Hanh and his engaged Buddhism. Compassion is at the core of his thought. For this famous Vietnamese Zen master, religion is all about preparing one’s self for productive engagement in the world – for healing a broken world. We meditate - monks go to the monastery - to find understanding – about ourselves, our perceptions and feelings, and about the world – to find strength. We then re-enter the world - engage in it – more ready to make a real contribution “as the healthy leaf nourishes the tree,” he says.

 

The mechanics of faith for Thich Nhat Hanh should sound familiar: we sense the power of a great truth – the Oneness of the Universe, and that, by leaving behind our separate selves, emptying ourselves of our separateness, by understanding the interdependence and interrelatedness of everything, we become full of everything, of the entire Cosmos. So, sensing this great Truth, we commit to living in awareness and mindfulness, the most important precept of Buddhism, he says. “We look deeply at things in order to understand their true nature, as Buddha did,” he says. As we look, as we are mindful, we begin to understand. Again, he says, “To develop understanding you have to practice looking at all living beings with the eyes of compassion. When you understand, you love; when you love, you naturally act in a way that can relieve the suffering of people.” You naturally act in a way that can relieve the suffering of people.

 

There is a sense of inevitability here, of an unstoppable momentum, like that of a roller coaster, of our being compelled, propelled once we take on a Truth, once we put our faith in something, and do the work it asks of us, commit to it.

 

As Davidson Loehr suggests, this is not easy. Thich Nhat Hahn tells us that we must be what we want to understand, a tall order, as it is for the Sojourners, who are compelled to walk with those with whom Jesus walked – the poor, the weary, the outcast, the stranger.

 

But as they develop an understanding of the interrelatedness of the Cosmos, of the Oneness of Creation, engaged Buddhists come to understand that every thought and action has an effect. The ripples of our thoughts and actions extend outward infinitely, touching all. They understand deeply that their religion is about their daily lives and that everything they do ultimately has an effect on the Cosmos. Thich Nhat Hanh says, “The way we drink, what we eat, has to do with the world’s political situation. The nature of bombs, the nature of injustice, the nature of our beings are the same.” That is a profound truth!

 

I think our oldest son Ty understands this. Ty, who, as a child, spent Sunday mornings in the classrooms of Chalice House next door, is now a union organizer in Los Angeles. In college he had become involved in an organization and movement called Students Against Sweatshops, which is dedicated, as the name implies, to convincing colleges and universities to buy clothing – hats, T-shirts, sweatshirts – from companies that do not employ sweatshop labor; through that engagement he became interested in other labor issues on his campus; and, eventually, like a number of his friends, he became interested in the labor movement beyond his campus. When he graduated, he took a job as an administrative assistant in an office of the university, so that he could become a member of the clerical workers local and, from there, work to further union causes on the campus. When his cover was blown (he was seen at a rally on the New Haven Green), his alma mater, Yale University, promptly fired him. (In fact, they had suspected that he had been encouraging his coworkers to attend.) He then went to work for the service employees union – S.E.I.U. – in Stamford, Connecticut, organizing nursing home employees, and a year later he moved to L.A. to work for the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union – H.E.R.E.

 

His mother and I supported and encouraged his anti-sweatshop and union interests, although we did ask him to try not to give the school an excuse to expel him, for he was at the center of that activity, helping to organize protests of the school administration’s labor policies and serving as a lead student negotiator with the university president. But we were also concerned that this direction was leading him away from what we perceived his strengths to be; he was a brilliant English student – Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa. He had spent summers as an intern at the Atlantic Monthly and Yale University Press. We saw for him a future as editor, publisher, writer.

 

And we worried that union organizing required strengths that he did not have, those of easy sociability, of the extrovert, which he was not. In organizing we saw him working from a position of disadvantage, of deficit.

 

When he graduated, he interviewed with a few interesting magazines, but that really was not where he wanted to be. His heart wasn’t in it. His heart – his passion – was in the struggle for economic justice, for improving the lot of those upon whom our economic system is built, “walking with those with whom Jesus walked,” the Sojourners would say. He followed his heart.

 

In fact, organizing did not come easy for him; the Connecticut local let him go after a few months; they didn’t have the time or patience to train someone who was not a “natural”. And after several months on the job in L.A., he decided to resign from his organizing position. He felt that, in order to really learn the job, he needed to experience the struggle firsthand. He wanted to be part of an organizing campaign from its very inception, at the very grass roots level, not as a professional organizer, but as a worker, building a union at his own workplace, struggling alongside his own coworkers and uniting with them in solidarity.

 

So, with the union’s blessing, he went to work for a large non-union hotel near the Los Angeles International airport that was on the union’s list to organize. He worked first as a switchboard operator on the night shift, and then at the front desk. For nearly four years he did that, patiently - far more patiently than I could - working at the hotel, laying the groundwork for the organizing effort that went public only after three and a half years. During this time, dozens of his coworkers met secretly with union organizers - for months (some for years) - never allowed to talk about the union at work or even to know who else was involved, due to the danger of losing their jobs should their union sympathies be revealed.

 

Once, as the union was preparing finally to go public, he called. He had just come from the very first organizing committee meeting, in which workers who had committed to leading the campaign– housekeepers, drivers, dishwashers, cooks – finally acknowledged to each other, openly, that they were in this together, and told their stories – who they were, what their jobs were like, how they were exploited, why they wanted a union, what their dreams were. It was very moving, as you might imagine. “I am not a religious person,” he said, “so I have never known what to think of the concept of faith, but in that room, I felt what I think I can only describe with that word – faith. There was a religious feeling in that room – in the way that those people felt about this struggle, in their hope for it, their belief in it, their commitment to it and to each other, in their feelings for each other. I have never felt that before. It was amazing. It was profound. It was moving.”

 

There had been no doubt in our minds – my wife Kate’s and mine - that this young man had faith. How else could you describe his life and work of the previous four years? There certainly had been no guarantee that this organizing effort would get even as far as those early meetings. On more than one occasion during those years we had wrung our hands, together, wondering whether he was beating his head against a wall, but he had persisted, kept the faith, as they. He says that he is not a religious person, whatever that is. Tom Owen-Towle says, “Religion is ultimately about what you do with who you are.”

 

And Thich Naht Hanh says – remember - “To develop understanding you have to practice looking at all living beings with the eyes of compassion. When you understand, you love; when you love, you naturally act in a way that can relieve the suffering of people.”  Or, as William Sloane Coffin expresses the very same idea, “The highest purpose of Christianity  - a way of life, not a set of beliefs – is to love one another….and love demands that all our actions reflect a movement toward and not away from or against each other.”

 

And “Faith,” says Coffin, “is being grasped by the power of love….Recklessly, you leap and then you grow wings…. It is not so much a leap of thought as of action….In matters of faith, it is first we must do, then we will know. (Do you hear Thich Nhat Hanh in these words?) First we will be and then we will see. One must, in short, act wholeheartedly with absolute certainty....trusting without reservation.”

 

These are the mechanics of faith. This is Flannery O’Connors acting on what we know to be true, in our guts, whether or not you believe it, which is to say, without concern for the proof – aware of profound truth, called by it, committed to it, responding to the truths that make demands on people of character – as Davidson Loehr says - quitting your job and taking a lower-paying one in the hope of some day being involved in an organizing effort there.

 

The lives of the faithful – Jim Wallis and the Sojourners, Richard Keil, Thich Nhat Hanh – and, yes, Pete Perkins and Taylor Hudson – suggest that it is the power of their faith that fuels their actions – their good work, and, further, I would submit, that it is not possible to be so engaged in the relief of suffering – of bringing decency and dignity to people’s lives (in Tom Owen-Towle’s words) without some kind of faith. This is what our son’s life tells me.

 

Faith is not belief in inerrant doctrine. “It is being grasped by the power of love, taking the leap of action, wholeheartedly, without absolute certainty. It must be lived before it is understood,” Coffin says…”we act buoyed by hope, despite the evidence, knowing that only by so doing can the evidence be changed.”

 

It is digging up the body of one’s friend and carrying it across the river on the back of a horse – across a hot, unfriendly desert – because it is what we know to be true.
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