Struggling Faith: Becoming A Fundamentalist

Last week, we met the God of Green Hope, which I hope has greatly boosted not only your self-esteem, but also your self-confidence.  You may remember from the first blog post in this series that confidence is one of the five keys to hope; today, we are going to talk about another important aspect of one of those keys: becoming fundamental.

This is our first step towards exploring the ultimate–the sacred–which may come as a surprise, because in our modern society we don’t tend to think of fundamental and ultimate as related concepts.  In fact, we tend to think of them as direct opposites.  

To our modern minds, ultimate has generally come to mean something bigger and better than us, while fundamental has come to mean basic, and not in a good way.  When we think of something as fundamental here in our modern world, we tend to think of it as somehow “dumbed down”, which is never a good thing, right? At the same time that we sit around wishing for the “simple life”, we equate the simple with being basic, and the basic with being “dumbed down”. It’s no wonder, really, that we spend half our lives confused and in a rut!

The true definition of fundamental is anything but dumbed down:

Fundamental:  serving as a basis supporting existence or determining essential structure or function; serving as an original or generating source; of central importance; essential; indispensable; a foundation without which an entire system or a complex whole would collapse.

From that definition, I hope that it is relatively apparent how the fundamental and the ultimate are actually inextricably woven together.  The ultimate–the sacred, remember–also serves as a basis for existence, determining the essential structure and function of the Universe around us and serving as its generating source.  In some ways, in fact, one might say that God(s) is (are) the fundamental personified.

We may know who or what God(s) is/are.  We may also not like Them very much at the moment because of the rough spot we’ve just come through. We are trying to crawl out of a faith rut, after all.  It might be easier, therefore, to rebuild this portion of our “faith ladder” via a backdoor: the fundamental.  But what is or are the fundamental(s)?

I’m going to do that thing many of you hate again, and throw another Bible verse at you.* 

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. –Galatians 5:22

For those not coming here from a Christian background, the fruit of the Spirit might best be understood as the nine necessary attributes for a person to live in accord with the Universe, God(s), and other people: in other words, the fundamental(s).  While nine are given in the verse, they can actually be simplified down to three:

• Love
• Joy/Happiness/Fulfillment
• Peace (which patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control all bring into being)

You will find these three fundamentals echoed across almost all world religions, including Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Islam, and, yes, even Paganism.  They effectively provide a “back door” through which God(s) enters the room, and we may come face to face with the ultimate.

For many people coming here from a Heathen background, the concept of love, joy, and peace as the three fundamentals necessary for making contact with the ultimate may seem sickeningly sweet; trite, even.  They tend to brush up against the “rough warrior exterior” that so many like to paint in broad strokes across the face of our faith in an uncomfortable fashion.  To those people, I would say three things: first, if that were truly all there was to our faith, many of us would have left it long ago.  Second, have you met Freyr and Freyja? And third, try substituting each of those in the blanks in the following sentences and tell me if they still do not ring true:

_______________ supports my existence; without ________________, life would have no meaning.  ________________ is the source of everything in the Universe.  ___________________ is of central importance.  Without ________________________, the entire Universe would collapse.

The sort of love we’re talking about here isn’t the icky, complicated human concept of love.  Let’s face it, whether you want to get all fancy and call it agape or eros or what have you or not, somewhere somehow along the way, our limited concepts of love get us into complex and complicated situations that end with someone broken-hearted, disattached, and hurting.  No, what I’m talking about with that one terribly-grafted-upon four letter word is concern for, enthusiasm, and devotion.  Love is fundamental not because the Beatles sang songs about it, but because without concern for things, situations, and people in life, enthusiasm as we go about living it, and devotion to something bigger than us, life has no meaning and everything falls flat.  Ultimately, love and respect are the same thing, and what we respect, we come to cherish: to hold in our minds and hearts constantly (as in, we’re thinking about them and considering them all the time) with esteem.  

Concern and care are not synonyms, even though we treat them like they are.  We can care too little, but we can also care too much.  That is why when you look up the definition for the word care in the dictionary you get positive, good things within that definition like painstaking or watchful attention and regarding with esteem, but you also get  profoundly negative, bad things like grief, anxiety, uncertainty, and apprehension.  To be concerned is to be engaged: to relate to, to be involved with.  There is no necessary emotion implied, as with caring.  When we cease to be concerned, we disengage, and when we disengage, everything and everyone ceases to matter, and when nothing matters, everything sucks.  When we lose concern, we also lose enthusiasm: we become unable to become excited, joyful, or happy about anything in life.  And when we aren’t enthusiastic, it is impossible to be devoted to anyone or anything (to set anything or anyone apart as special or sacred; if nothing is ever special, life loses its luster fairly fast).

When we fall into a faith rut, we become disengaged in exactly the same way as if we had fallen down a well.  At the bottom of a well, you’re all alone (hopefully, unless there are rats or spiders, of course, in which case you’ll soon be wishing you were all alone!).  You are in a cold, dark place, disengaged from the rest of humanity.  Chances are, you’ll soon be hoping that you could re-engage, likely at the end of a rope tossed down by some would-be rescuer.  But how do you trust that would-be rescuer enough to grab onto that rope and climb up those slippery walls back out into the light, without having to fear that they will let go of the rope?  You have to engage with yourself before you can do so with anyone else: you can never grab onto that rope if you’re so busy freaking out over your present condition that you never even notice that it’s there in the first place, and you will never have the courage to grab onto the rope once you do notice it if you constantly fear that your would-be rescuer is going to let go.  This is why, in the last blog post, we re-engaged with ourselves, via meeting the God of Green Hope within.  To experience love, much less to spread love, you must first love yourself.

Meeting the God of Green Hope also helped us to restore joy and peace in our lives (hopefully), so now we have the building blocks in place to take our journey deeper and reach out towards the ultimate.

We are going to begin that reaching out through prayer.  Prayer does not need to be conflated, or composed of poetic phrasing; on the contrary, I have found in my own personal experience that my most profound experiences with prayer consisted of conversations very much like those one might have when initially making contact with another living-breathing human: 

“Hi, Freyja? Yeah, this is Connla. Are you hearing me okay?  I just wanted to call you up and tell you how much I appreciate having you in my life….”

Or:

“Hello, Hella? This is Connla.  I’ve noticed you being around in my life a lot lately, and I just thought I’d let you know that I know that you’re there….”

Because the entire purpose of this blog series is to attempt to climb out of a faith rut, your God-conversations (aka prayers) should probably focus right now on asking for help in doing that.  To make your life a bit easier, I’ve taken the liberty of including a suggested prayer below (a Heidhrinn and a Christian version).  Feel free to use them, with or without personal embellishment.

Climbing Prayer (Heidhrinn) Hail, Freyr, Lord of Light! Help me to love me As You love me. Show me my strength, When I feel I have none. Teach me the joy Of sun upon the wheat; Of mead in the cup, And of birds on the wind. Grant peace and good seasons in my life; Peace and good seasons in the lives Of those whom I hold dear. And when my cup is empty, Let me trust in You to refill it: For You are my Brother, And my Friend. Blessed be.

Climbing Prayer (Christian) O, My Christ, Lord of Light! Help me to love me As You love me. Show me my strength, When I feel I have none. Teach me the joy Of sun upon the wheat; Of mead in the cup, And of birds on the wind. Grant peace and good seasons in my life; Peace and good seasons in the lives Of those whom I hold dear. And when my cup is empty, Let me trust in You to refill it: For You are my Brother, And my Friend. Amen.

Reaching out to the ultimate is your first brave step towards coming to rely on something greater than yourself: the first true building block of a returning faith.  I hope you’re feeling hopeful right now; I know I am!  In my next blog post, we’ll talk about how to use that reliance and trust to begin living without fear.  I look forward to our time together next week!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*(As an aside, I’d like to note that the Bible is a book, just like the likely plethora of books sitting over there, across the room from you on your bookshelf.  To discount it as a valid source of wisdom, based on experiences with others who have beaten you over the head with it, is as arbitrary–and discriminatory–as dismissing the Qu’ran purely because you have some sort of personal issue with Muslims. The book itself hasn’t done anything to you: it can’t; it’s an inanimate object. It’s just a book.  It’s also a magnificent work of literature, so if you’re down with quoting Byron, Eliot, Tolkien, or Poe–who were all Christians–taking issue with the Bible is hypocritical, at best.)