Faith, Meaning, and Experience
Part 2, The Meanings Only Faith Can Reveal
The point I made in the prior post is that our experience of the world isn't a passive reception but is formed and shaped by our beliefs, expectations and assumptions. And at the end of the post, I ask how this might affect our experience of God.
Specifically, as I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, borrowing an insight from Andrew Root, our disenchantment in an increasingly post-Christian culture is largely due to attention blindness, habits of attention that direct our gaze away from God. Much of this attention blindness is due to our beliefs, assumptions, and expectations about what can or cannot be seen in the world. Our assumptions can help us see, and they can blind us.
Beyond seeing, our beliefs and expectations about the world affect the richness and variety of our experiences. This is an argument made by George Lindbeck in his widely read book The Nature of Doctrine. Linbeck's argument is that learning a faith, like learning a language, gives us symbols, rituals, and practices that make some experiences possible and enrich the kinds of experiences we have. Here is Lindbeck describing this:
[T]o become religious--no less than to become culturally or linguistically competent--is to interiorize a set of skills by practice and training. One learns how to feel, act and think in conformity with a religious tradition that is, in its inner structure, far richer and more subtle than can be explicitly articulated. The primary knowledge is not about the religion, nor that the religion teaches such and such, but rather how to be religious in such and such ways...[I]t is necessary to have the means for expressing an experience in order to have it, and the richer our expressive or linguistic system, the more subtle, varied, and differentiated can be our experience. To be religious, then, is learning to become competent. Learning to interiorize a set of skills that allow us--in ways we can't all on our own--to have certain experiences, and more subtle, varied and richer experiences at that. There are some meanings that only the practice of the faith can reveal.
In short, faith isn't a list of propositions that we "believe." Faith is an experiential pathway leading us into a deeper and richer experience of ourselves and the world. Lindbeck once more:
There are numberless thoughts we cannot think, sentiments we cannot have, and realities we cannot perceive unless we learn to use the appropriate symbol systems. It seems, as the cases of Helen Keller and of supposed wolf children vividly illustrate, that unless we acquire language of some kind, we cannot actualize our specifically human capacities for thought, action and feeling. Similarly, so the argument goes, to become religious involves becoming skilled in the language of the symbol system of a given religion. To become a Christian involves learning the story of Israel and of Jesus well enough to interpret and experience oneself and one's world in its terms. A religion is above all an external word...that molds and shapes the self and its world...
It is necessary to have the means of expressing an experience in order to have it, and the richer this means of expression the deeper and more varied will be our experience of the world. For there are numberless thoughts we cannot think, emotions we cannot feel, and realities we cannot perceive unless we become skilled and competent in these expressive systems. There are some meanings that only the practice of faith can reveal.
I’m not sure on this one. If I understand, what Lindbeck is saying is that proper expression of an experience is essential to the meaningfulness of that experience. However, I think everyone has had experiences that can’t properly be described, no matter how astute or poetic is one’s linguistic capabilities. It’s like seeing a sunset and then taking a picture of it. The picture just can’t ever quite capture the beauty in the same way it was originally experienced. That doesn’t mean there are not beautiful pictures of sunsets, but no matter how beautiful, the picture can’t match the experience.
In a similar way, there are aspects of faith experience that a non-believer cannot perceive or understand; it has to be experienced. I have reasons for my faith that I can explain, facts and events and logical arguments. But in truth, why do I persevere? It’s because of my experiences that I can’t really explain.
"It is necessary to have the means of expressing an experience in order to have it." This assertion troubles me. Experience precedes expression.
Yes, the human brain does abstract from perceived experience and assign a symbol system to the bits it recognizes through repeated exposure. Yes, the brain needs these symbols in order to "think about" what it perceives of experience. But these symbols are merely nicknames, placeholders, for the few bits of experience that the brain captures by perception. And the brain is thinking about the symbols, not about the whole, real experience--which precedes cognition.
Our greatest struggles with ourselves and with each other over "religion" arise from our struggles over our symbol systems. Worse, over our insistance the this symbol system is "right" and that one is "wrong." Worse still, there is so much of reality that we cannot see, precisely because we only look at what our symbol systems tell us to look at.
It seems to me that our symbol systems are themselves what is behind attention blindness. It is our symbol systems that express and also enforce our beliefs, assumptions, and expectations.
A prime contemporary example: American "christianist" culture is wandering deeper and deeper into the weeds because we cling to a socially contrived symbol system--based on belief, not on biology--that insists there are only male and female genders and that there is only heterosexuality, with homosexuality as an aberrant CHOSEN behavior.
At a deeper, far more essential level, what we let ourselves look at, perceive, and know about sacred reality is severely constrained by what our symbol systems tell us is "real."
The sacred, the divine, refuses to be represented by any symbol. It simply says, "I AM."