Days of Awe and Wonder

by Marcus J. Borg

  The modern distortion of faith is the one I learned growing up around the middle of this century: faith as believing. Faith as believing the doctrines of the Christian tradition, faith as believing that there is a God, faith as believing that Jesus is divine, faith as believing that Jesus died for your sins—in short, faith as believing certain statements to be true.

  There are a number of reasons why I say that’s a modern distortion. First of all, try to imagine what faith was like before the Enlightenment, that great period of Western history that began in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Prior to the Enlightenment, in the Christian culture of the Reformation, the Middle Ages, and earlier, nobody had any trouble believing that the Bible came from God, that the Genesis stories of creation were true, that Jesus walked on water, and so forth. It didn’t take faith to believe any of that; that was simply part of the taken-for-granted understanding of people living in Western Christendom. It’s only when those things started to be questioned that suddenly faith came to mean believing what otherwise doesn’t make a lot of sense to you. And faith came to mean what Bishop Robinson called it some thirty-five years ago: believing forty-nine impossible things before breakfast.

  Now, I don’t want simply to knock that, because for many people that’s been a way of holding on to the meaningfulness of the Christian tradition when it seems to have been radically questioned. But I also want to say that faith as believing the right things is not only a modern distortion, but in many ways it is absolutely impotent in our lives. You can believe all the right things and still be a jerk. You can believe all the right things and still be miserable. Faith as believing, that is, believing with our head, is really pretty impotent. So let me turn to the three more ancient and authentic meanings of faith.

  In each case, I’m going to speak about the meaning of the word “faith,” but also about its opposite, because I think that sometimes we get clarity about the meaning of a word by considering what its opposite is. With the first meaning of faith I spoke about, the opposite of faith as belief is, of course, doubt or disbelief. I can recall as an adolescent finding my embryonic doubts moving toward disbelief. I thought they were sinful, because I thought it was the opposite of what God wanted from me.

  To turn now to the other three, the first of these three has a Latin name. I’m going to use the Latin name both to suggest the antiquity of the notion, but also because I think it’s a way of understanding what faith means in this case. The first of these last three is faith as fiducia. We get the word “fiduciary” from it. This is basically faith as trust, faith as radical trust in God, which can go along with great uncertainty about beliefs. The opposite of faith as trust is not doubt. The opposite of faith as trust is anxiety. You can measure the amount of faith as trust in your life by the amount of anxiety you have in your life. I mention that not to give you one more thing to beat yourself up about, but to suggest that perfect faith as trust casts out anxiety. Think of how wonderful it would be to live your life without anxiety. The journey of faith that leads to greater trust can cast anxiety out and free us from that self-preoccupying force.

  The second of the ancient and authentic meanings of faith is fidelitas in Latin. The English, of course, is “fidelity.” This is faith as fidelity to a relationship, fidelity to the relationship with God, in other words faithfulness. Again, it has very little to do with what we believe with our heads; it’s faithfulness to that relationship. The opposite of faith as fidelity is not, once again, doubt. It is, to say the obvious, infidelity, unfaithfulness. In the biblical tradition, this was frequently referred to as adultery. When the prophets rail against adultery, they’re not talking about sexual behavior. They’re using a sexual metaphor as a way of talking about unfaithfulness to God. And yet another word for infidelity in the biblical tradition is idolatry, namely, to be faithful to something other than God.

  The third and final of these more ancient and authentic ways of understanding faith—I don’t have a Latin word here—is faith as a way of seeing and, in particular, faith as a way of seeing the whole, the whole of that in which we live and move and have our being. I’m going to exposit this briefly in language that we owe to the great American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr, who points out that there are three different attitudes we can take toward the whole—three different ways we can see the whole.

  One way we can see the whole of what is is as hostile toward us, threatening toward us in severe form. Of course, this is paranoia. But there are much milder forms of this; indeed, popular-level Christianity might even see things this way. God is seen as the one who is going to get us unless we offer the right sacrifice, have the right beliefs, and so on. But even apart from a religious context, if you see reality as threatening or hostile, and it’s easy to see it that way—“The bottom line is it is going to get us all; we’re all going to die”—then your response is likely to be one of self-protection in various ways. You will try to find security against the devouring power that will consume us all.

  A second way we can see the whole is as indifferent toward human existence, indifferent toward us. This is the understanding that emerges within the modern worldview, where all is seen as a meaningless collocation of atoms interacting with each other. If we see reality as indifferent to us, again the appropriate and most likely response is to try to build systems of security that will give us some meaning in the face of this radical insecurity. But again, the attention focuses upon the self and its well-being.

  The third and final way that Niebuhr says we can see reality is to see the whole as gracious, nourishing, and supportive of life, to see it as that which has brought us into existence and continues to nourish us. There is nothing Pollyanna-ish about this. This attitude is still very much aware that the flower fades, the grass withers, that we all die. But to see reality as supportive, gracious, and nourishing creates the possibility of responding to life in a posture of trust and gratitude. And we’re back to faith as trust.

  Faith is thus about setting out on a journey like Abraham’s in a posture of trust, seeking to be faithful to the relationship we are called into. We are invited to make that journey, that journey of faith, in which we learn to trust our relationship to God, learn to be faithful to that relationship, and learn to see in a new way. We will be led in that journey into an ever more wondrous and compassionate understanding of our lives with God. Indeed, if this is not what life is about, namely, growth and wonder and compassion, then I don’t know what it is about.

  The story of Abraham leads us to that marvelous question asked by the contemporary poet Mary Oliver. The question is, “What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?” Are we going to remain in the world of the dull, the repetitive, the same ole, same ole, or are we, like Abraham, going to respond to that voice that invites us to leave our old way of being and enter a life beyond convention and our domestications of reality? The voice speaks of promise to us. “I will show you a better way, a better country.”

  * * *

  Sermon delivered at Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis, Tennessee, as part of the Lenten Noonday Preaching Series, March 8, 2005.

  Chapter 3

  My Conversion to Mysticism

  MY THIRD CONVERSION was a series of experiences that began in my early thirties. They weren’t the product of thinking, even though over time they have greatly affected my thinking, perhaps more than anything else has. And they made God real to me.

  In retrospect, I understand that they were mystical experiences (more about that soon). But I did not know that at the time. I knew nothing about mysticism. It had not been part of four years of undergraduate and five years of graduate study in religion. Whenever I had tried to read books about mysticism on my own, they were utterly opaque. My eyes glazed over. I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about.

  The experiences were brief: none lasted longer than a minute or so, and some only a few seconds. They may not sound like much as I describe them, but I have since learned tha
t this is one of the classic features of experiences like these: they are difficult to express in words. Even when words can convey what was experienced, they can only inadequately convey how it was experienced and the transformative power of the experience.

  Aware of that difficulty, I share one of these experiences that illustrates features common to all of them. It happened as I was driving through a sunlit rural Minnesota winter landscape alone in a nine-year-old MG two-seater roadster. The only sounds were the drone of the car and the wind through the thin canvas top. I had been on the road for about three hours when I entered a series of S-curves. The light suddenly changed. It became yellowy and golden, and it suffused everything I saw: the snow-covered fields to left and right, the trees bordering the fields, the yellow and black road signs, the highway itself. Everything glowed. Everything looked wondrous. I was amazed. I had never experienced anything like that before—unless perhaps in very early childhood, and so I no longer remembered it.

  At the same time, I felt a falling away of the subject-object distinction of ordinary everyday consciousness—that “dome” of consciousness in which we experience ourselves as “in here” and the world as “out there.” I became aware not just intellectually but experientially of the connectedness of everything. I “saw” the connectedness, experienced it. My sense of being “in here” while the world was “out there” momentarily disappeared.

  That experience lasted for maybe a minute and then faded. But it had been the richest minute of my life. It was not only full of wonder but also filled with a strong sense of knowing—of seeing more clearly and truly than I ever had. For about two years, I experienced more moments like this one. Some were just as vivid, and others were mere glimmerings. Most were visual. A few were triggered by music—a chamber orchestra in a college chapel, a symphony orchestra in a concert hall. The latter were not about a change in seeing, but about a change in hearing that again involved a falling away of the subject-object distinction of ordinary consciousness. During the experience, it was not I listening to the music but something outside myself. Only the music was left.

  For about twenty years, I didn’t have any more experiences like those, even as I yearned for them. I occasionally wondered why they had stopped and concluded that perhaps they had been for a season and had served their purpose. But what I had known in those experiences had changed me.

  Then, in my mid-fifties, I had the longest and most intense such experience I’ve ever had. It happened an hour or two into a flight from Tel Aviv to New York—in economy class—a detail I add not to establish virtue, but to make it clear that I hadn’t had any before-dinner drinks. I think the experience lasted about forty minutes—not that I timed it, but it began before dinner was served and ended as the flight attendants were removing the dinner service.

  As during the experiences of my thirties, the light changed. It became golden. I looked around, and everything was filled with exquisite beauty—the texture of the fabric on the back of the seat in front of me, the tray full of food when it arrived (which I did not eat). Everybody looked beautiful—even a passenger who, as we left Tel Aviv, had struck me as perhaps the ugliest person I had ever seen. He had been pacing the aisle and was so hard to look at that I averted my eyes each time he passed by. Even he looked wondrous. My face was wet with tears. I was filled with joy. I felt that I could live in that state of consciousness forever and it would never grow old. Everything was glorious, filled with glory.

  Back to my thirties: soon after these experiences began, a new teaching appointment required that I become familiar with mysticism in Christianity and other religions. That’s when I realized that these were mystical experiences. Especially important was William James’s classic book The Varieties of Religious Experience, published more than a century ago, still in print, and named by a panel of experts in 1999 as the second most important nonfiction book published in English in the twentieth century. The book combines the elements that made up James himself: a psychologist fascinated by the varieties of human consciousness and a philosopher pondering what all of this might mean.

  Part of his book is about mystical experiences. Based on James’s study of accounts of such experiences, he concluded that their two primary features are “illumination” and “union.” Illumination has a twofold meaning. The experiences often involve light, luminosity, radiance. Moreover, they involve “enlightenment,” a new way of seeing. “Union” (or “communion”) refers to the experience of connectedness and the disappearance or softening of the distinction between self and world.

  In addition, James names four other common features:

  •Ineffability: The experiences are difficult, even impossible, to express in words. Yet those who have such experiences often try, usually preceded by, “It’s really hard to describe, but it was like . . .”

  •Transiency: They are usually brief; they come and then go.

  •Passivity: One cannot make them happen through active effort. They come upon one—one receives them.

  •Noetic quality: They include a vivid sense of knowing (and not just intense feelings of joy, wonder, amazement)—a nonverbal, nonlinguistic way of knowing marked by a strong sense of seeing more clearly and certainly than one ever has. What is known is “the way things are” when all of our language falls away and we see “what is” without the domestication created by our words and categories. This way of knowing might be called direct cognition, a way of knowing not mediated through language.

  Reading James and other writers on mysticism was amazing. In colloquial language, I was blown away. I found my experiences described with great precision. Suddenly, I had a way of naming and understanding them. Moreover, they were linked to the experiences of many people. They are a mode of human consciousness. They happen. And they are noetic: something is known that one did not know before.

  I also learned other ways they have been named. Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) called them experiences of “the numinous,” that which is behind and sometimes shines through our experience of phenomena. Abraham Heschel (1907–72) called them moments of “radical amazement,” when our domestication of reality with language falls away and we experience “what is.” Martin Buber (1878–1965) spoke of them as “I-Thou” or “I-You” moments in which we encounter “what is” as a “you” rather than as an “it,” or an object. Abraham Maslow (1908–70) called them “peak experiences” that involve “cognition of being”—knowing the way things are. Mircea Eliade (1907–86), one of the most influential twentieth-century scholars of comparative religions, called them experiences of “the golden world,” referring to their luminosity. Others have referred to them as moments of “unitive consciousness” and “cosmic consciousness.”

  Mystical Experiences and God

  I learned one more thing as I read about mystical experiences; namely, people who had them most often spoke of them as experiences of God, the sacred, the Mystery with a capital M that is beyond all words. It had never occurred to me that what we call “God” could be experienced. For me, the word had referred to a being who might or might not exist, in whom one could believe or disbelieve, or about whom one could remain uncertain. But I realized there is a cloud of witnesses, Christian and non-Christian, for whom God, the sacred, is real, an element of experience, not a hypothetical being who may or may not exist and whom we can only believe in.

  For the first time in my life, I understood the affirmation that the earth is full of “the glory of God.” Perhaps the most familiar biblical example is in the prophet Isaiah. As he has a mystical experience of God, he hears the words, “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; / the whole earth is full of his glory” (6:3). It is also familiar to Christians in liturgical churches in the Sanctus: “Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might; heaven and earth are full of your glory.” “Glory” in the Bible most often means radiance, luminosity. To affirm that heaven and earth (all that is) are full of God’s glory means that everything is filled with the radiant lum
inosity of God. God, the sacred, pervades all that is, even though we do not often see it.

  But there are moments in which our eyes are opened and we see the glory. Such a moment occurs in the climax of the book of Job. Throughout the book, Job questions the reality of God that he had learned, a God who rewarded the righteous and punished the wicked. Then, in the closing chapters of the book (38–41), Job experiences a magnificent display of the wonders of the universe. In the final chapter, he exclaims, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear—but now my eye sees you” (42:5). Job experienced the glory of God in the created world—and it changed his convictions about God. Believing or not believing in a concept of God was no longer an issue. Job learned that God, the sacred, is, and that God, the sacred, is both more than and other than Job had imagined.

  Naming what is experienced in mystical experiences is difficult. People who have them not only consistently speak of them as ineffable, but as “unnamable,” beyond all names. So it is in the story of the call of Moses in the book of Exodus. He sees a bush filled with fire and light yet not consumed, radiant with glory. A voice speaks to him, and Moses asks, “What is your name?” The response is a tautology: “I am who I am” (3:13–14). A tautology says nothing: it offers no information, but simply repeats itself. In Judaism, the most sacred name of God—so sacred that it may not even be pronounced—comes from this story. God, the sacred, is beyond all names—is “am-ness.”

  The most abstract and generic terms for what is experienced include “reality itself,” “ultimate reality,” or “Reality” with a capital R, “what is” when all our words fall away, or “is-ness without limits”—without the limits created by our language and categories. Buddhists sometimes speak of it as “suchness”—the way things are before our categorizations. William James called it “a more,” a stupendous wondrous “more” that is more than what we had imagined even as it also is present everywhere and capable of being experienced anywhere.