Faith Without God: Finding Courage in Hard Times Given by: Lawrence Bush, BSEC Fellow
. . . I’ve lived a charmed life for my 57 years. I haven’t lost a child, I haven’t been divorced, I haven’t been on the street, I haven’t been sexually abused, I haven’t been roiled by racism or homophobia or sexism or any other hatred, I haven’t been brainwashed or repressed, I haven’t yet nursed someone who was mortally ill, I’ve never been hungry, I’ve never been in a war zone, I’ve never been evicted, I’ve never been addicted. I’ve made my living more or less as I’ve wanted to. . . . I don’t really have to find my courage to step into the world, I just have to find my glasses and my wallet. Nevertheless, I make it a practice to say to myself, each day, that it might have been otherwise. I make a practice of the DISCIPLINE OF BLESSING, of recognizing and savoring my blessedness — because I find that this awareness makes me a more generous and giving human being.
Note that I talk about blessedness, not luck. Blessedness may be a difficult or challenging word for people for whom God is just a three-letter word, because blessedness implies a source. But that is precisely why I use the word: because thare profound sources for the feeling of blessedness. The sun does not rise every day, and the Spring does not return every year, because of luck, but because our natural world is full of amazing structure and pattern that enables us to live; our natural world blesses us with life. And I am not able to make a living with words because of luck, but because humanity has built cultures upon the foundation of language, and my parents raised me with literacy, and numerous other human interdependencies bless me with my livelihood.
These profundities that humanists recognize — the profundity of nature, the profundity of human interconnection and the interconnectedness of all life — are as rich as any God concept. And our means of approaching and apprehending these realities, the tools of science and the tools of poetry and the arts, seem to me far more effective than prayer, as they actually enable us to build a relationship to the profundities that nurture us. All the more reason for us to . . . shape “religious” disciplines, shaping a “religious” practice, from the values in which we believe.
I could really end my platform here, because my central purpose is to remind us that putting God on the side, excommunicating the supernatural, does not release us from the need for spiritual practice and spiritual discipline. There is a certain arrogance among atheists that prompts us in that direction, away from imposed or even self-imposed disciplines. We figure that if the fundamental God concept is no good, then the entire religious superstructure can be dismissed. But my title today, “Faith without God,” was not said in the spirit of elitism or self-satisfaction or with any sense of superiority to those whose faith is “with” God. There have been too many studies showing that religious people benefit from their faith, with longer lives, more contentedness, better healing, and all the rest, for me to stake out my atheism as an advantage, a mark of enlightenment, or a dispensation from having to practice spiritual disciplines— especially in hard, challenging times. My goal, rather, is to help us — us, including me, because I’m very underdeveloped in this realm — to help us find the kind of discipline that believers, at least theoretically, derive from their beliefs, from their religious systems. That is one thing that I admire greatly about Ethical Culture — that whether or not we like to call it a religion, it is populated by people who seem to want to their lives under a kind of yoke, to have their lives shaped by an ethical consciousness. This is unlike many non-believers who, despite their ideals and good intentions, never submit to any kind of yoke of values.
Still, when I invoke that phrase, “spiritual discipline,” the skeptic in me becomes self-conscious. I feel compelled to tell you that I’ve never in my life read a self-help book and I have no intention of being a motivational speaker. My practice as a writer is self-examination, to confess to my inner life in expectation that we all share a common human condition. And I also feel compelled to tell you exactly what I mean by “spiritual discipline.” It is not in the least other-worldly. I simply mean practices that help us connect to the reality of human interconnection. That’s how I define spirituality: as the emotional surge that we experience when we become aware of the reality of interconnection and our sense of self and separation becomes softer.
That kind of spirituality is essential to finding courage in hard times. Courage, after all, is about overcoming fear and anxiety to take action — even if it’s the action of self-restraint, as in non-violent protest. You’ve heard this in a dozen buddy movies and war movies, that courage is not the lack of fear but the ability to overcome it. Courage is not only a personality trait; it is also, I believe, a product of training. Not everyone has the reflex of courage, just like not everyone has strong athletic reflexes; but with training, we can hone our reflexes to their maximum. And the spirituality of interconnection can be a key part of that training. Fear, the paralyzing kind of fear, is deeply rooted in our sense of separateness and aloneness and possible obliteration. Think of it: When we sense danger for our children or other loved ones, we are jolted into action; it doesn’t take courage to get moving; love makes us courageous. But when we sense danger for ourselves, we become fearful and often paralyzed. We draw into ourselves and cut ourselves off; we hide. Spiritual disciplines that enable us to move beyond ourselves therefore help us move into action. .
. . . Let me try to describe how I am going about assembling my own courage these days — how I am trying to develop spiritual disciplines based upon my humanistic values and my lived experience. I’ve already mentioned the DISCIPLINE OF BLESSING — and its twin sister, THE DISCIPLINE OF TRANSIENCE: the discipline of knowing that our experience may, no, will, someday be otherwise. . . .
I’m not so good with this discipline of transience. Since I like what I have, I don’t want to lose it; since I like how I live, I don’t want it to change. Even small challenges to my routine can irritate me, and technological disruptions like a short electrical blackout or a car break-down or any other kind of pulling of my plug can have me crying to the heavens like Job. I did learn the beginnings of the discipline, however, by playing the game “Which hand?” with my children when they were young. I loved that game because of its central gesture: the opening of the fist to disclose the hidden treasure. That image, that dance — the closed fist rolling over and opening — has stuck with me as a kind of mantra against my resistance to transience and change. . . .
The open hand, the unclenched fist, may, in fact, be a key to good luck. There is a psychologist, Richard Wiseman, who some years ago undertook a scientific examination of “why some people are consistently lucky whilst others encounter little but ill fortune. In short, why some people seem to live charmed lives full of lucky breaks and chance encounters, while others experience one disaster after another.” Wiseman wrote about this in TheSkeptical Inquirer. . . .
Lucky people, Wiseman found, “generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good . . .”
. . . There is a humanistic affirmation implicit in this study — because we usually think magically about luck, and Wiseman is saying that luck is, to an extent, in our hands. . . . There is also a lot of controversy implicit in this piece, about blaming the victim . . . The point today is simply that by embracing transience, by seeing change as full of potential, we not only prepare ourselves to be courageous in the face of loss and change, but we open doors to new experience and new gains.
. . . Two more disciplines that I try to practice go back to my own childhood. When I was 13 years old, I had a revelation one night. I was studying very hard for a test. I was well prepared but still worried. And I sagely said to myself: You’ve studied. You’ve done your work. You’re prepared. The best thing you can do now is to get a good night’s sleep. There’s nothing else for you to do in the hours between now and the test. It’s no longer in your hands. . . . Ever since, I’ve rarely lost sleep due to anxiety about tomorrow.
My story is about the DISCIPLINE OF HARD WORK/PREPARATION — and its associated discipline, the DISCIPLINE OF SURRENDER, of knowing when to stop, of controlling anxiety about circumstances beyond control. . . .
[W]orry is the most useless activity of all, yet it has the trait of being all-consuming. JD Salinger captured it perfectly in A Catcher in the Rye when he has Holden Caufield saying, “When I really worry about something, I don't just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don't go. I'm too worried to go. I don't want to interrupt my worrying to go.”
Worry gives the illusion of activity and achievement. It is the most adolescent feeling of all in its ability to consume us, to destroy our sense of perspective. We would have much greater genius if we spent much less time worrying about our lack of genius. We would have much greater joy if we spent much less time worrying about our lack of joy. . . . I love how former Sen. Pat Schroeder puts it: “You can’t wring your hands and roll up your sleeves at the same time.”
. . . It’s not a surrender to helplessness that I’m advocating, but a surrender to faith. When I sit in an airplane and surrender myself to the pilot’s skill, I’m surrendering not to helplessness but to faith in an entire world of mutual responsibility and mutual concern and organizational integrity and technological know-how. I’m surrendering to the competence of others; I’m surrendering to the reality of mathematical odds.
. . . The best way of working at these disciplines, I have found, is through my seventh and final discipline for today, the DISCIPLINE OF SERVICE. This one I also learned from my children. When Susan and I adopted our twins twenty-two years ago, I very quickly realized that I had to maintain an attitude of service towards them and towards the needs of the moment; that if I tried to resist that call, if I pretended to still have the power to exercise control over my life and my days, I would be a very unhappy father with two crying babies. Instead, I would answer the summons: Here I am! I made my goals short-term: Change the diaper! Prepare the bottle! Blow on the belly! Play peekaboo for ten minutes!
I made it a goal to feel good rather than to cultivate my greatness. And the rewards for that, for presenting myself as willing and able, were immense: full of hilarity and joy.
I have tried to carry that way of being into relationship beyond my family. “How can I be of service?” is the question that I try ask of myself in new situations — especially in hard times, when I’m beset by insecurity. It’s like getting into uniform, into harness, to see each interaction as an opportunity to do service; it’s a spiritual practice that enables me to get over myself, to allay my anxieties, to find some courage. But it’s not selfless, you see — it’s a discipline that is based on the fact that people respond to being recognized, respond to being listened to, respond to be cared for; that my HERE I AM! moment of service will win for me not only relief from my internal anxieties, but affection, and admiration, and solidarity, and support, and community, and possibly even hilarity and joy.
SERVICE is about turning our humanism into humanitarianism, our abstract values into behaviors that shape material reality. When I was young, my parents, who were very politically active, refused to give charity: The government should be taking care of these needs, they believed; they gave money and time only to causes that aimed to change the system. But I have found that denying charity, denying service, is like turning off your own sense of humanity and compassion; that social change is not about EITHER relief OR revolution, but about keeping our capacity for social response-aibility — the ability to respond — alive.
My partner Susan and I are in a little family group that has spent Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday together for more than ten years. This year we stood in the lobby of a super-market and collected food for the local food pantry. I almost bugged out; I thought it was work more suitable for my kids; I’m a bigshot magazine editor, a fellow at Ethical Culture — I have world-shaking things to do with my time! But I exercised the discipline of service — I showed up — and I found the experience utterly transformative. In three short hours, we prompted the generosity of scores of human beings, we filled 40 boxes with food, we fed multiple families for two or three days, and we strengthened the bonds of our Martin Luther King Jr. Brigade with love and accomplishment.
. . . The other morning, Susan startled me with a philosophical comment, even before we had our coffee. The older she gets, she said, the less she is confident of the innate goodness of human beings. She was overawed at that moment about the amount of corruption in government and the business world that we were learning about. She was appalled by the stories pouring out from the radio about suffering in hard times.
I truly thought she was next going to say to me, “Larry, we have to take care of ourselves and our children. We have to look out for ourselves. It’s a cruel and selfish world.”
Instead, Susan said to me: “We really have to work harder at drawing out the best in people. We really have to work harder at being catalysts for the good. We have to practice kindness; we have to interact with the world with compassion.”
That is our calling within Ethical Culture: to practice the disciplines that turn our humanism into humanitarianism; to practice the disciplines that draw out love and goodness from the people in our lives and our communities. There is a Jewish story about a devout man who is on a difficult business trip and realizes that he’ll never get home before the sun sets and the Sabbath begins. He presents himself at the home of the local rabbi and says, “Rabbi, the Sabbath is about to begin, please let me stay with you and keep me from sinning.” The rabbi says, “My good man, I have a household full, I cannot fit one more. Go in good health; I’m sure that God will provide.” The poor traveler goes to another house, with religious ornamentation on its door, and he gets the same friendly rebuff, “I’m sure God will provide.” This keeps happening, as the sun sinks and darkness spreads.
Finally he comes to the home of the local Bundist, the radical, the atheist. And he is amazed to be brought in. And he is amazed that the Bundist has Sabbath candles on the table, waiting to be lit, and bread and wine, waiting to be blessed and eaten. They do all that together, and the traveler says, “My friend, how can it be? All of the religious Jews in your town send me away from their door, telling me that God will provide; and you, a rascal, an atheist, you bring me in and treat me to kindness . . .”
“Because, my brother,” says the Bundist, “I know that God will not provide.”
