Nurturing a true and living faith; also, not fighting with people.

I’ve been seeing a lot of fighting going on about LDS gospel doctrine and practice. It’s frustrating to me to see people hold their perception as the one and only way to view or understand an issue, and then try to impose it on others. I think it comes from the idea that the LDS church is the only church with the full gospel. This is true. It has the saving ordinances (baptism, endowment, marriage, etc) you need for exaltation. But I think we trip up when we assume that everyone has to have the same interpretation and understanding of the gospel. And I mean, issues beyond the obvious ones, like the law of chastity. I think that we assume that, since we understand a doctrine in the gospel, and the gospel is true and infallible, that our interpretation must also be infallible, and the only way of understanding it. So we panic when others interpret it differently. If they’re right, we must be wrong. If we’re wrong, we could somehow lose out on salvation. So we’re very invested in our interpretation, and there is still a 50% chance that we are wrong. But if we can convince the other person to switch over to our way of thinking, we’re 100% guaranteed to be right, and in rightness there is safety. And the other guy is in the exact same position: he wants to convince you he’s right so he feels safe. So we fight. We name-call, we judge, we condemn, we persecute, we alienate, we punish. Because if we can prove the other guy wrong, or at least get him to admit he is, we’re right, and we’re safe on the road to salvation. Right? Or are we setting up static, stagnant concepts and notions that actually block us from understanding the doctrine, or the teaching, or God Himself? And then, not only are we following, in a sense, false gods, but we’re picking fights with each other over them? That’s not good for anyone!

I’m reading a really excellent book right now that has a section that addresses this. The book is by a Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh. His students affectionately call him “Thay,” which I will do, because I already feel really close to him. Reading this book brings the Spirit like crazy. He’s an amazing philosopher and teacher. The book is called Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers. I’ve always felt a strong pull to Buddhism. After I read Paul F. Knitter’s Without Buddha, I Could Not be a Christian, where this serious long-term divinity school scholar and professor draws theological parallels between Christianity and Buddhism, I could see why I’ve always been so prompted to look into Buddhism. It has helped me look deeply and ask substantial questions that have helped me understand the nature of God and my religion beyond the tragically literal concepts I’d carried my whole life. When I say "tragically literal," we’re talking me basically just lazily thinking of God as this more-than-mortal guy hanging out up in a heaven situated somewhere in space watching our every move, waiting to rain down blessings for obedience or punishments for disobedience. I never really stopped to think, to consider, to study, to feel. I have now what I think is a clearer insight into His true nature now, but my experience with Him and faith in Him continue to grow and develop and evolve. And don’t worry, I substantiate everything I learn by going back to God in the scriptures and in prayer. :)
            And that is where this entry comes in. How do you nurture and grow a dynamic, living faith in a church it’s so easy to get lazy and say, “This is how it is, this is the whole, absolute truth, and it will never change”? And how do you coexist with people who see things differently? Who's wrong here, because we can't both be right, can we?
            Before you scoff, dear LDS friends, remember the “line upon line, precept on precept, here a little, there a little” pattern of God revealing truth to His children that shows up all over scripture (Isaiah 28:10, D&C 98:12, D&C 128:21, 2 Nephi 28:30). There will always be more truth and light and knowledge given, until it is perfect, that is to say, complete and full. If you have a perfect knowledge, like the brother of Jared did, you are subsumed by God. You become one with Him, because He is perfect and you, through obedience to God and His Spirit, have become perfect. So it’s a safe bet that if you’re still here on earth, you still have more knowledge to receive.

Also, remember that all truth can be gathered into one complete big picture. You might think it’s weird that I’m drawing truth from a religion other than the LDS faith, but truth is truth, no matter where it is. And you can know it’s truth by the confirmation of the Spirit (Moroni 10:4-6) and by its fruits. A good tree brings forth good fruit, according to Matthew 7:17. The good fruit would be peace and love and power and a sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7). You know it’s truth when you feel God.

I felt God when I was reading this. So I want to share. First, Thay talks about what constitutes true faith:

“When you have faith, you have the impression that you have the truth, you have insight, you know the path to follow, to take. And that is why you are a happy person. But is it a real path, or just the clinging to a set of beliefs? These are two different things. True faith comes from how the path you are taking can bring you life and love and happiness every day. You continue to learn so that your happiness and your peace, and the happiness and peace of the people around you, can grow. You don’t have to follow a religious path in order to have faith. But if you are committed to only a set of ideas and dogmas that may be called faith, that is not true faith. We have to distinguish. That is not true faith, but it gives you energy. That energy is still blind and can lead to suffering; it can cause suffering for other people around you. Having the kind of energy that can keep you lucid, loving, and tolerant is very different from having energy that is blind.  You can make a lot of mistakes out of that kind of energy. We have to distinguish between true faith and blind faith. That is a problem in every tradition.
            In the teaching of the Buddha, faith is made of a substance called insight or direct experience. [I just want to interject…this is what we call our testimonies in the church, this insight and direct experience.] When a teacher knows something, he or she wants to transmit that to disciples. But she cannot transmit the experience, she can only transmit the idea. The disciple has to work through it by himself. The problem is not to communicate the experience in terms of ideas or notions. The issue is how to help the disciple go through the same kind of experience. For instance, you know how a mango tastes, and you may like to try to describe the taste of the mango, but it is better to offer the disciple a piece of mango so that he can have a direct experience.

If you call yourself a Buddhist [and I would replace “Buddhist” with whatever your religion is] but your faith is not made of insight and direct experience, then your faith is something to be re-examined. Faith here is not faith in just a notion, an idea, or an image. When you look at a table, you have a notion about the table, but the table might be very different from your notion. It’s very important that you get a direct experience of the table. Even if you don’t have a notion of the table, you have the table. The technique is to remove all notions in order for the table to be possible as a direct experience.”
(Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home, bits from pages 71-82)

            I want to take a second to expand on this analogy of the table, particularly in light of my experience in the church. We are in a wonderful and tricky position to be in a church that we believe is the only one to have the fullness of the gospel. That makes gospel doctrine very black and white, which it is: truth is absolute and is not subject to culture, time, or country. The tricky part is when we get into thinking that people’s unique perceptions, definitions, and notions must also be black and white.

I’m going to push the table analogy further. Say that you’re in a room full of people, and there’s a table in the middle of the room. Everyone is in a different place in the room, in relation to each other, in relation to the table. How they got to their specific location isn’t really important: life choices, conscious decisions, freak accidents, random luck of the draw, whatever. The important part is that everyone is in a unique position within the room. Now ask all these people to look at the table from where they’re standing. Then have them describe the table they see. You will get a different description from every single person, because of their position and vantage point. They might agree on certain aspects, like, it’s brown, but no two descriptions will be the same. And think about it: If you were to take a picture of the same table from each person’s point of view, it would be a different table, based solely on the picture. Some people might see the tabletop as square, other as a diamond shape. Some people might see all four legs, others might see only three because one leg is covering another. And if you use these unique viewpoints, these snapshots, and call them the table, you’re going to have a bunch of people fighting about which snapshot of the table is the most accurate.
            The thing is, they’re all equally accurate and equally fail miserably to actually be the table. You have to throw away your snapshot, move around the room, go up to the table and actually experience it. You can’t cling to your own snapshot from your unique viewpoint and call that the table. That’s like going to a restaurant, and instead of ordering and eating food, you try to cut up a menu and eat the words that describe the food.
            I think you probably know where I’m going with this. Say the table is God. Everyone’s looking at the same God, but from different vantage points that are a result of their life experiences, so God looks different to everyone. If you sit there and fight with someone over your fixed snapshots of God, you’re never going to be able to get past your own preconceptions and notions to walk up to God and experience Him as He is. You’re just going to waste a lot of time and energy engendering bad feelings and participating in contention, which will only take you away from God, because “contention is of the devil”.

            Back to Thay, now on the topic of how notions and concepts (your “snapshots” of the divine) are dangerous:

            “We have so many wrong notions and ideas; it is dangerous to believe in them, because someday we may find out that that idea is a wrong idea, that notion is a wrong notion, that perception is a wrong perception. People living with a lot of wrong perceptions, ideas, and notions, and when they invest their life in them it is dangerous.

Let us discuss, for instance, our idea of happiness. Each of us, young or less young, has a notion of how to be happy. We believe that if we get this or that, we will be happy, and that until we realize these things, happiness is not possible. Most of us tend to have that kind of attitude.
Suppose someone asks you, ‘What do you believe or think to be the most basic conditions for your happiness?’ They may suggest that you reflect a little bit on it and write down on a sheet of paper the basic conditions for your happiness. This is a very wonderful invitation for us to re-examine our notion of happiness. According to the teaching of the Buddha, our notion of happiness may be the obstacle to our happiness. Because of that notion, we may remain unhappy for our entire lives. This is why it is so crucial to remove that notion of happiness. Then you have the opportunity to open the door to true happiness, which already exists inside and around us.

If you are committed to one idea of happiness, then you are caught. You may not be happy all your life. You think that if your idea cannot be realized, then happiness will never be possible. That is why a notion is an obstacle. There are many ways to be happy, but you are committed in only one way. That is a loss. A young person may say, ‘If I can’t marry that person, it’s better to die because happiness cannot be possible without that person.’ But you don’t have to die. There are other ways to be happy, but because you are only committed to one idea—that happiness is only possible with this person.”

So, if we cling to notions, to snapshots of the actual thing, rather than going back to the thing itself and experiencing it over and over, we stagnate. We cling to something that is not real, that does not promote real, living faith. If you have one concept of God and say, “This is it. This is all there is. This is exactly how and what and why God is,” you’ve replaced God with a snapshot. Actually, more like a sketch that you drew yourself. And that sketch is elevated to the status of a false god, if it takes the place of your seeking to continue to experience God Himself. Your certainty keeps you from experiencing God. And really, who can definitively say exactly what God is? God’s ways are not man’s ways. We have a very limited understanding through a very mortal lens. We see through a glass darkly, as it were. So, to a mortal mind, the divine will always defy description. God is not to be bound be mere words. I think that’s important to remember. It would save a lot of bad feeling of people arguing about how they see God.
            And in that vein, back to Thay, on suffering that comes when people are closed and persecute others when they think they have the only and full truth:

“Faith here is a living thing, and as a living thing it has to change. We allow our faith to change. That does not mean that today I believe this, but tomorrow I will no longer believe in it and will instead believe in something complete different. A one-year-old lemon tree is a lemon tree, but a three-year-old lemon tree is also a lemon tree. True faith is always true faith, but since faith is a living thing, it must grow. If we adopt that kind of behavior and know how to handle our faith and therefore our love, it will not make people suffer.

When we believe something to be the absolute truth, we are closed. We are no longer open to the understanding and insight of other people, and this is because the object of our faith is just an idea, not a living thing. But if the object of your faith is your direct experience and your insight, then you can always be open. You can grow every day in your practice, in sharing the fruit of your practice, and in making your faith, love, and happiness grow.

There are many people who in the name of faith or love persecute countless people around them. If I believe that my notion about God, about happiness, about nirvana is perfect, I want very much to impose that notion on you. I will say that if you don’t believe as I do, you will not be happy. I will do everything I can to impose my notions on you, and therefore I will destroy you. I will make you unhappy for the whole of your life. We will destroy each other in the name of faith, in the name of love, just because of the fact that the objects of our faith and our love are not true insight, are not direct experience of suffering and of happiness; they are just notions and ideas.

There is something more important than notions and perceptions, and that is our direct experience of suffering and of happiness. If our faith is made of this direct experience and insight, then it is true faith and it will never make us suffer. … Suppose you have learned the art of making fruitcake. You have made fruitcake several times, and because of your experience you now have faith in your capacity to make fruitcake; you are confident as far as fruitcake-making is concerned. There is only one thing that you have to bear in mind: Your art of making fruitcake can be improved. You know how to make fruitcake, but you have to be aware that there are people who are better than you at making fruitcake, and you can always improve your art of fruitcake-making.

…

Life is so precious, too precious to lose just because of these notions and concepts. Very often we feed ourselves only with words and notion and concepts…we do it all our live. Concepts like ‘nirvana,’ ‘Buddha,’ ‘Pure Land,’ ‘Kingdom of God,’ and ‘Jesus’ are just concepts; we have to be very careful. We should not start a war and destroy people because of concepts.”
(Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home, bits from pages 71-82)

I can’t wind it up any better than that last paragraph, so I’ll leave it like that. J