Exploration of beliefs
July 27 2004

What follows is the second affirmation of faith I shared with my Unitarian Universalist church:

My topic has undergone a metamorphosis since I first proposed it for a service. When I suggested the topic of writing a creed, I was planning to tell you about the intellectual and technical aspects of writing, how I thought the attempt was an empowering exercise, my suggestions for structure, and so forth. And while trying to write that, I ran up against my old nemesis of writer's block. I realized, after pushing at the block for a while, that the problem was that the topic I was trying to write about had somehow turned too heady and intellectual to really be appropriate as an affirmation of faith. The problem is that although I think that figuring out what you believe by writing it out is important, I don't think my talking about it in the way I had planned does justice to this podium.

A couple of weeks ago, I shared with you a neat and tidy view of my religious beliefs, by sharing my creed and explaining what it means to me. Today, I'm going to show you the less orderly side of my beliefs.

I started thinking about my creed and its relation to my daily life. When I think about what keeps me on the treadmill even though I'm exhausted and don't feel like running another step, and when I think about what sends me to work each day, I can't point to any part of my written creed and say, "That's the principle at work here."

I think that means that there's something rather important missing. My creed contains an important statement of my beliefs, but if it's not capturing what's driving me each and every day, it's definitely missing something. I wish I could share advice on how I fixed that, but honestly, I haven't, and I'm hoping that I'll figure out how to by listening to more of Davidson's sermons, reading more books that speak to me, and just by going out and living some more to try to further my understanding.

A large part of my current creed's purpose is to point to the transcendent and wondrous in the world. One of the things I've noticed is that I always try to put religious sentiments in poetic language; not to obscure the meanings, I think, but because it seems to me that poetic language is the most appropriate language for handling religious ideas. It imbues them with a sense of beauty and importance.

Sometimes, it feels as if modern life has lost much of this beauty and sense of wonder. As Karen Armstrong says in her book A History of God, "One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen. Our scientific culture educates us to focus our attention on the physical and material world in front of us. [...] One of its consequences [...] is that we have [...] edited out the sense of the "spiritual" or the "holy" which [...] was once an essential component of our human experience of the world." My current creed reflects this desire to imbue life with a sense of spiritual or holiness.

Keeping the transcendent and wondrous in mind is important while thinking about religion, but it's equally important to stay grounded in what it is that drives me, day in and day out, to live, to work, and to play. That's the part I think I've left out of my creed, and that's the part that's the hardest for me to compose. I don't yet know the answer to that piece; and even though I believe it's somewhere inside me, I haven't yet figured out how to write it down.

I'm left suspecting, and hoping, that, like my creed, I'm still a work in progress.

If you'd like to see the sermon that followed, it is available here.