Trust
is the Way
December
16, 2020
I’m going to
write here about a powerful existential dilemma of which I am painfully aware
these days. I’ll start by explaining something that I spend a good deal of time
on in my book Liberating Christianity.[1]
It starts with an understanding of the way we are as created beings. We exist
as centered selves. We all exist as a center of consciousness. From that center
we experience what seems to us to be a world that has its own objective
reality. We assume that what we see or hear or touch is “really there.” We mean
by “really there” that it is still there when we aren’t perceiving it as there.
I assume that the wine bottle I see standing on my kitchen counter is still
there when I’m not looking at it. Yet all I can really know about that wine
bottle is that I perceive it standing there. All I really have, and all I can
have, is my perception that there is a wine bottle standing on my kitchen
counter. I can assume that what I see as a wine bottle exists as an object
apart from my experience of it, and I live in that assumption always and about
all things. Because all I have and all I can have about the wine bottle is my
perception of it, I know that I see it. I cannot know that it is real in
the sense of having independent, objective existence. My perception of the wine
bottle makes it real for me, but that the wine bottle seems real to me only
means that it seems real to me, not that it is objectively real.
Back in
September, 2011, I had to have my much loved Irish Terrier Jake put down
because his kidneys had failed. He had been with me since 1998, back when I was
in seminary. When I got him I was married to my first wife Francie. He was our
dog before he was my dog. He became only my dog on July 31, 2002, when Francie
died of metastatic breast cancer. Jake had been my faithful friend through a
career change, Francie’s death, my marriage to my wife Jane, a couple of moves
from one residence to another, the deaths of my parents, and many other
significant events in my life. Now his life would and, and I was an emotional
wreck. As I drove to the vet’s office to end Jake’s life I was already grieving
the loss of my best friend, my faithful companion, the best dog (for me) that
there ever was or ever would be again.
As I began my
drive from my home to the vet’s office a most remarkable thing happened.
Francie, who had been dead for over nine years at that time, appeared to me. It
wasn’t that I could see her exactly, although there was something I could
faintly see or at least perceive just in front of me, a little bit off to my
left, and slightly above the level of my eyes. I knew that it was Francie. I
can’t for the life of me tell you how I knew that my late wife was with me, but
I did. She spoke to me. She said, “It’s OK. I’m here waiting for him.” Then she
was gone. The whole experience lasted only a few seconds, but it was as real to
me as anything else I have ever experienced.
Recently, years
after I had that experience, I’ve been wrestling with the question of whether
what I experienced that day was “real.” The philosophy I developed in Liberating
Christianity and have briefly restated here says that all I can know bout
my experience is that I experienced it. Recently however I’ve tried to think
beyond that conclusion of my philosophy and have considered what the possible
sources of my experience that day might be. I’ve come up with four possible
sources for it. One I can easily dismiss. In theory my conscious mind could
have generated the experience. In other words, I could just have thought the
experience into being. I reject this possible source because I know that my
conscious mind didn’t make the experience up. I wasn’t consciously thinking
about Francie or her relationship to Jake. I wasn’t thinking about life after
death. I wasn’t thinking much at all, just enough I guess to keep my car on the
road and avoid running into the car in front of me. I was feeling a lot but
thinking very little. I have no doubt that my experience did not come from my
conscious mind.
Which leaves me with
three other possible sources for the experience. One is that my unconscious
generated it. This solution to the question of the source of my experience
appeals to my commitment to Jungian psychology. In Jungian psychology the
unconscious is far larger and more active than it is in Freudian psychology—and
it isn’t just about sex. It is the storehouse of our hopes and fears, our
neuroses and our dreams. It speaks to us in ways our conscious mind and the
seemingly objective world do not. It speaks through dreams and visions. It most
often speaks in symbols rather than in simple facts (or what we take to be
facts). It seems quite possible to me that my unconscious generated my
apparition of Francie in an attempt to deal with all of the powerful, painful
emotions I was feeling at that time.
A third possible
source of my apparition is that it could have come from outside of me
altogether. It could be the work of the Holy Spirit active both in me and
beyond me. The Holy Spirit could have given me my experience for the same
reason my unconscious may have done it, to comfort and reassure me in a time of
great emotional distress. That solution appeals to my Christian faith, for it
has God actively caring for me at a time when I needed a good deal of caring
for. When I consider this possible source of my experience I consider that the
Holy Spirit gave me a vision I needed but not necessarily one that shows me an
objective reality.
The fourth
possibility for a source of my experience is the one I desperately want to be the
real one. The fourth possibility is that as a matter of objective reality
Francie really is present in some sort of life after death and that she came to
me that day to offer me what she could for comfort and support. Lord how I want
this one to be the one! I even need this one to be the one. I need the
comfort and assurance I’d get from knowing that what I experienced that day
represents some objective, concrete reality. But how can it be the one, or
rather, how can I know that it is the one? This solution to the question of a
source for my experience requires there to be an objective reality beyond my
experience of something as real. Yet I’ve long insisted, in print even, that we
can never know that there is such an objective reality behind our perceptions.
So I’m stuck on the horns of an existential dilemma. I need something to be
correct that I can never know to be correct. My ability to know is
incommensurate with my need to know. My ability can never meet my need. Such,
it seems, is the dilemma of human existence. We need what we can never have.
So what are we to
do? What am I to do? I could just accept and live with the dilemma. I could
resign myself to the impossibility of ever having what I need. Resigning myself
to the inevitability of that dilemma can lead either to a stoic calm or to a
stark cynicism about the nature of human existence. It can however never get me off the horns of
that dilemma. So is there no way off of those horns?
In one sense
there isn’t, but in another way there is—at least sort of. The dilemma will
never go away. It will always be with us. It flows inevitably from the
fundamentals of what it is to be human. We cannot step outside ourselves, so we
can never get beyond the fact that we are created as centered selves from which
perspective we perceive what appears to us to be an external, objective
reality.
We can however
ask about the ways in which it is possible for us to relate to that seemingly
objective world. We can accept that our perceptions do not deceive us and that
what we perceive to be objective really is objective. Or we can go too far in
the opposite direction and believe that since we can’t prove an objective
reality, there is no such thing. However, neither of these extremes works. An
acceptance of what we take to be the fact that our perceptions do not deceive
us fails because we know that sometimes our senses do deceive us. I recently
had an ophthalmologist ask me if I saw bright light flashes. Seeing such
flashes can be a symptom of various vision disorders. The bright flashes aren’t
really there. The visual sense of one with a particular vision disorder deceives
her into seeing something that isn’t there outside of her malfunctioning visual
sense. Going to the other extreme doesn’t work either. To cite a rather broad
example, assuming that what you see isn’t objectively there can get you hit by
a bus as you cross the street.
Fortunately there
is a third way of relating to what we perceive but cannot know to be objective
reality. It is the way of trust. We can trust that what we perceive as existing
really exists. What could it mean for us
to trust that what we perceive as real is real beyond our perception of it? To
answer that question we start with definitions. Google.com defines trust in our
sense as “firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of
someone or something.” Merriam-webster.com defines it as “assured reliance on
the character, ability, strength or truth of someone or something.” To trust
that what we observe as having separate objective reality actually has
objective reality is to live as though we knew that it did while knowing that
we don’t know that it does at all. Perhaps looking at a concept of Marcus Borg
from a different context will help explain this idea.
In his
discussions of how we can relate to the question of the literalism of the Bible,
Borg gives us what he calls “post-critical naivete” as a solution to the
question of whether to take the Bible literally or not. When you live your
relationship to the Bible in a state of post-critical naivete you know about the
higher biblical criticisms. You know at least something about the reasons why
we truly cannot take the Bible literally, that is, as always factually correct.
You know something about the editorial history of many of the books of the
Bible and about some of the unavoidable vagueness, ambiguity, or just plain
obscurant nature of some of the original words in the Hebrew Bible. Most
importantly you know that the stories in the Bible are myths, that is, that
they are human stories the purpose of which is not to convey facts but to point
beyond themselves to a spiritual truth far deeper than any mere factual truth.[2]
In a state of post-critical naivete you know all that, but when you engage in
worship, prayer, or spiritual exercises you set all that knowledge aside. You
enter into the Bible’s stories without worrying about whatever critical
insights the scholars may have discerned about those stories.[3]
You let the myths work in you as myths and don’t reject them simply because you
know that they are myths rather than factual accounts. Your status is
post-critical because you know about the higher biblical criticisms and accept
rather than reject them. Your status is naïve because at least in come
circumstances you think and act as though you knew nothing at all of those
higher biblical criticisms.
To live in trust
in the objective reality of what looks objective to us is to know that you
can’t prove the validity of a belief in objective reality but to live
nonetheless as though you could. It is to live in relationship to what appears
to be objective without worrying about the fact that you know that you can’t
know whether it is objective or not. We could say that to live in trust in the
reality of the objective is to live in a state of post-critical naivete with
regard to that reality. You know you can’t prove it. You live as though there
were no question about it. You trust that what you perceive as objective
reality is actually objective reality.
Living in trust
that what we perceive as objective reality is real actually has strong biblical
roots. In any English translation of the New Testament you will find many
references to faith and belief or believing. Today most of us understand those
words to mean to take as fact something you can’t prove is fact. To most of us
they mean to accept as factual truth something you don’t have the evidence
necessary to prove is factual truth. That however is not what the Greek words
that are translated into English as faith, belief, or believe mean. Those words
all have as their root the Greek word pistis. Pistis does not mean take as true something you can’t
prove is true. It means instead something much more like trust in or give your
heart to something or someone. When the Gospel of John refers to people who
believe in Jesus (John 3:16 for example) it doesn’t mean people who take
certain unproven facts about Jesus to be true. It means people who put their
trust in him. We trust Jesus to be who our Christian tradition says he is. In
the New Testament to have faith or to believe is about trust, not about
unproven knowledge. It’s the same when we live our relationship with apparently
objective reality in a state of trust. We don’t know that what looks like
objective reality is actually objective reality. We trust that it is.
Now let me apply
this concept of trust to my experience of my late wife appearing to me in my
car on that sad, sad day several years ago. I said above that I both want and
need what I saw and heard in that experience to be objectively real but that I
can’t prove that those things are objectively real. I can’t prove it, but I can
trust that it is so. When I do, here’s what happens. I relax. I stop worrying
about the objective reality of my experience. When I trust that it is real I
can live as though I know that it is real even though when I stop to think
about it I know that I know no such thing. When I trust in the objective
reality of experience I gain the benefit of it being objectively real without
needing to know that it actually is.
No, trusting in
the reality of something is not the same as knowing that something is real. An
element of doubt remains. Living in a state of trust is to live in between the
extremes of certainty on one side and total denial on the other. It’s not a
perfect solution, but then there’s nothing perfect about human nature or human
existence. Trust is just the best we can do. Living only with the knowledge of
our inability to meet our need for certainty can lead to despair. Living in
trust that what we perceive as objective is truly objective reality is our way
out of that despair. God knows the truth about objective reality, but we are
not God. Trust is the best we can do, and it is enough.
[1]
Sorenson, Thomas C., Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith
in the New Millennium (Eugene, Oregon, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2008).
[2] Borg
does not use the word myth. He speaks of historical metaphors instead. The
technical term for what he means is however myth.
[3]
When I was a church pastor I used to explain to my people that I spoke
differently in adult education classes than I did from the pulpit. In adult
education classes I was all about the higher biblical criticisms. From the
pulpit I spoke much more in a spirit of post-critical naivete. In the pulpit,
when I was drawing meaning our of a biblical myth, I didn’t say that the story
was a myth though I knew that it was.
No comments:
Post a Comment