Faith: Integrity Within Relational Uncertainty
As a follow-up to A Well-Grounded Integrity, the notion of faith has recently come front and center in my life, both in the nature of what it is and how it may be put to use in ways different than my fundamentalist days. Faith for the religious dogmatist is a means of acquiring knowledge, a relational process between believer and deity that allows for the imparting of information called revelation such that is not available to those without their particular faith structure. There are numerous difficulties with this that I’ve written about before and will offer a redone version here soon, but what I want to focus on here is the relational quality of faith.
Faith in more liberal-minded evangelical writings will often be equated with trust and of course that trust is predicated upon the relationship between believer and deity so essentially we’re back where we started. However, now there’s been an introduction of a new word, needlessly confusing the issue. At least it’s confusing within that context, but it need not be if we step outside the traditional view of deity and place it in a context of a more progressive spirituality. Here, god becomes more of a conceptual holding term rather than a person or specific separate force. For further clarification on this idea I’ve written about it in The God That Is There and Nowhere.
In this context, faith can retain its relational dynamic but rather than directing one’s attention to a god “out there,” separate and mysterious, the relationship is found to be an internal one. As I mentioned concerning betrayal and the breaking of trust in Your Partner Is Not A Sleeper Cell, if we begin looking at trust as a quality we identify within ourselves then the breaking of one’s word becomes an indication of the other person’s character, not a reflection upon the brokenness, foolishness or stupidity of the deceived. Here then is where I want to continue with trust and faith.
Stephen Batchelor notes in Buddhism Without Beliefs: “Self-confidence is not a form of arrogance. It is trust in our capacity to awaken. It is both the courage to face whatever life throws at us without losing equanimity, and the humility to treat every situation we encounter as one from which we can learn.” Integrity is about finding strength in the acknowledgment of one’s own presence and power with the constant appreciation for the inherent inability to know everything or even to know every aspect of a single situation. If we were to take just a moment to consider the basic social interaction of a conversation, no matter the topic, and then mentally construct the variables involved we’d be astounded at the amount we don’t know. A conversation is not simply about the two (to keep this “simple”) involved but each and every interactive piece of data in each of their lives, from their familial upbringing and the ideas and emotional paradigms being utilized often unconsciously to their education and relationships with fellow students and professors informing them of what was important to focus on and how to engage in dialogue to what they ate that morning or how they slept or the status of their current relationships. None of us exist in a box of our own making, we are and are within a relationally interactive existence.
Trust here for Batchelor is faith in our ability to awaken our conscious selves to a broader appreciation of life’s web-like reality, to be grounded in the confidence that appreciation brings and humbly interact with every new situation from a position of knowing something can be learned. The trust is a relationship we have with ourselves and by self then is meant the trinity of relationships existing between brain/mind/relationships as articulated by Daniel Siegel. Even at the basic level of self there is still a relational existence. Faith and trust here can be interchangeable and lead to a deeper understanding of integrity where “Ethical integrity is not moral certainty. A priori certainty about right and wrong is at odds with a changing and unreliable world, where the future lies open, waiting to be born from choices and acts.”
Faith is not certainty in the face of the unseen or a means of dogmatizing one’s opinion but a locus of being comfortable with life’s changing dynamic. None of us are the exact same person that woke up this morning, every experience we have, every relationship however ordinary or basic we interacted with today, has changed our neural maps and made some behavior more likely to happen than others in the future. “You are what you eat” was a slogan from a by-gone era of dietary care but of greater strength is “you are what you relate to.” Faith is then upon this foundation a mental act, an intentional force based on recognizing one’s relational existence and the inherent uncertainty bound within it.
In every word we use, in every act we do, there is a temptation to retreat into the dogmatic version of faith that inculcates us from criticism and places us in a realm wholly unconnected to the natural world. While this mentality is most easily associated with supernatural beliefs and traditional religious dogma, it can also exist as much in the mind of a person dedicated to logic and reason or an adherent to a particular spiritual fad. “Ethical integrity is threatened as much by attachment to the security of what is known as by fear of the insecurity of what is unknown.” (Batchelor) It is not the beliefs themselves that are at issue on this point but the association made between their articulation and whether or not they are considered above critical consideration. There is an attachment here of identifying oneself to an absolute idea rather than resting upon faith in the reality of a relational changing universe.
Like most considerations of ethical behavior, it is based on a growing appreciation and knowledge of the human condition. If we treat people from a position of faith in our relational existence and look upon each face as a connected source of further understanding then dogmatism and the fear that inevitably rides with it fades. When we dwell in the faith provided by our relationship with everything then each person and connection becomes a space for awakening.
