First Steps, Moving Faith Forward
I spent the season of Lent reading some of Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope, which I found challenging and compelling. He talked about despair as if it’s our kryptonite, not because despair is “bad” or “shameful.” If anything, when we pay attention to the world, we can find lots of reasons why despair seems logical. But hopelessness is like a 500-pound weight on our shoulders, weighing us down, making it impossible to look around, move forward, dance with joy, or even mourn.
“Believing hope will itself provide inexhaustible resources for the creative, inventive imagination of love. It constantly provokes and produces thinking of an anticipatory kind in love to man and the world, in order to give shape to the newly dawning possibilities in the light of the promised future, in order as far as possible to create here the best that is possible, because what is promised is within the bounds of possibility. Thus it will constantly arouse the ‘passion for the possible,’ inventiveness and elasticity in self-transformation, in breaking with the old and coming to terms with the new.”
In this light, beliefs that provide hope need to be flexible as our lives change. Our faith is dynamic and shifting, not because life’s “truths” change but rather because we, the beings who believe, change. We cannot underestimate how much our faith evolves as we change. In the same way, a sweater comforts you in winter but suffocates you in the summer heat, a belief may flourish during one season and weigh down on you in another.
Theological change begins when we first sober up and realize that we’re operating with beliefs that once functioned to inspire, empower, and ground us, but have become chains that restrain and paralyze us.
For example, you once were able to move through life motivated to address complex problems in your daily life, allowing your hope and faith to grow. Actively bringing God’s kingdom to earth today was a belief that functioned in you like fire in an internal rocket engine, igniting your passion and clarifying your purpose. However, today’s national climate overwhelms you with the complexity of these wicked problems. Wise thinkers in design talk about wicked problems as issues with many interdependent elements that make simple, approachable solutions seem impossible. There may be times when you can operate daily believing that you can help end childhood hunger in your community by gathering enough resources, partners, and momentum. Yet, there will inevitably be seasons when you feel overwhelmed by the difficulty of addressing poverty due to factors outside your control. Tackling such problems still motivates you, but the initial confidence in your impact can no longer serve as a benchmark for your faith life—something you didn’t even realize you were doing until things fell apart.
The fire that once fueled the movement has turned into a wildfire, terrifying you with uncontrollable anger and an unquenchable sense of powerlessness and helplessness. Rather than feeling motivated, you feel paralyzed, which fills the room with despair, even though you are still operating with the same belief whose function has changed in this life season.
Moltmann speaks of hope in God’s promise that all will be well one day. This belief functions like a crane that can lift us out of despair and paralysis, setting us back on our feet. Naming the beliefs that no longer serve you positively in this stage of life is a decisive step in moving faith forward. How we name it matters just as much as the words we use. Compassion, not criticism, is the only way we can get back on our feet and move forward.
In When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, the wise Buddhist writer, Pema Chödrön, teaches us that facing our inner reality is the only way forward. We have to name the beliefs operating within us, which can sometimes untie knots and at other times pull them even tighter. She suggests that one has to get out of one's routines by doing something different.
“Usually we feel that there’s a large problem and we have to fix it. The instruction is to stop. Do something unfamiliar. Do anything besides rushing off in the same old direction, up to the same old tricks… My first step was to decide I wasn’t going to act on my habitual momentum. It was a test, an exploration of the Buddhist teaching that says we create our own reality, that what we perceive is our own projection.”
Adam Morgan and Mark Barden call this breaking path dependence in A Beautiful Constraint: How to Tranform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It’s Everyone’s Business.
“Path Dependence describes the bundle of premises, processes, assumptions, relationships, and ways of thinking about solutions that define ‘the way we do things around here.’”
Morgan and Barden advise that companies caught in unhealthy or unproductive patterns need to make an effort to acknowledge what once served them but no longer does. Breaking path dependence requires us to challenge our fundamental assumptions that have remained unchallenged. First, however, we must identify those assumptions and then pinpoint the processes, routines, relationships, and success measures that arise from them. One cannot begin to tinker with the system without first recognizing the underlying (often unseen) foundation on which it was built.
I’m curious:
What beliefs have served you well in the past but no longer work in this moment in your life?
How do you articulate those?
What emotions arise when you ask such questions?
How can you invite compassion into the reflection process?
It’s Step One work, which may seem easy but is actually the most difficult and life-changing when honestly tried.
