Called to Unbelief

Kristi Tippett has a regular program which is basically an interview with somebody who is quite interesting.  Normally, I listen to these as podcasts.  Often I do not know the person she is interviewing, but it almost always turns out to be someone who has something important to tell me.  Tippett is a fascinating woman in her own right.  Relatively young in her career, she experienced what I would call a meaning crisis in her own life.  She headed off to seminary at Yale.  Her quest for wisdom in the world and finding meaning is behind the interviews she conducts.  This resonates with my own intrigue about life.

A few years ago, she interviewed Christian Wiman.  At that point I had never heard of him.  He is a poet and deep thinker.  He now teaches at Yale Divinity School.  His background is not unusual.  He grew up in Texas in a religiously conservative context.  After school, he became an agnostic.  But through the process of marrying, getting cancer and other adventures in life, he returned to the faith.  However, it is not the faith of his childhood.  

I now have read some of Wiman’s poetry.  He is a penetrating thinker.  He has a way with words that often floors me.  Let’s follow the insightful questions of Tippett to hear Wiman’s voice.  Indeed, Tippett says of him, he “is a writer who has come to give his voice…to the hunger for faith and challenge of faith for people now.”  She continues, “he’s bearing a kind of poetic witness to something new happening in himself and in the world.”  That thrills me with possibilities.

Wiman offers a line that provoked me to ponder deeply my own perspectives.  Wiman confesses, “Sometimes, when I think of all of this energy that’s going on, all of these different people trying to find some way of naming and sharing their belief, I think it may be the case that God calls some people to unbelief in order that faith can take new forms.”  I can imagine many of my friends being turned off by the prospect of God calling some people to unbelief.  With their view of God, that would be inconceivable.  Admittedly, it is a challenge for me.

My way into thinking about it is to remember the differentiation I make between belief and faith.  For me faith is primary; belief is secondary.  Faith is more of a heart thing.  My favorite synonym for faith is “trust.”  To say I have faith---in God or in you---is to say I trust.  The important fact is trust can be used as a verb.  And I think faith is a verb.  Of course, I can use trust as a noun---saying I have trust in you.  But verbs come before noun.  I cannot have trust in you if I don’t trust you.  I have to do the verb for a while before it becomes a noun.  

Belief, on the other hand, is more of a head thing.  It is cognitive.  Unfortunately, for too many Christians, belief comes to mean the same thing as doctrine.  It can mean little more than having an idea of God.  I am not against doctrine, but it is not the same thing as faith.  I suspect some of this distinction between faith and belief was at stake for Wiman.  He tells us he never even met someone who did not believe in God until he went to college.  

I was touched to hear Wiman talk a bit about his struggle with cancer.  It was at this juncture that Tippett asked him if he found poetry to be helpful in the cancer process?  Did poetry help or heal in response to cancer?  I found Wiman’s anwer odd.  He says, “I didn’t want poetry that gave me more of the ineffable.  What I wanted was some way of apprehending the world that was right in front of me that was slipping away.  I wanted the world in front of my eyes.  And the poems I found useful were absolutely concrete; sometimes not at all about religious things and not at all about spiritual things, but simply reality, and reality rendered in such a way that you could see it again.”

I sensed that if I could understand this, then I can better understand his earlier comment about God calling some folks to unbelief.  In the passage just quoted, Wiman says he did not want more of the ineffable.  Ineffable means too great or mysterious to be put into words.  To many of us, God’s nature is ineffable.  Wiman is saying in the face of cancer, he did not need to be taken deeper into this reality.  Instead, he needed concreteness.  He wanted reality you could touch and talk about.  

Interestingly, he tells us that religious and spiritual things were not even necessarily helpful.  It makes me remember the people in my life who wanted nothing to do with that “religious stuff,” as if they had some kind of allergy to pious-sounding words.  In many ways I resonate with that perspective.  Words do not always heal or help.  These kinds of words can be very superficial at times of deep need.  

I think about hospital visits I made.  Often folks appreciated prayer.  But there were many times, they would prefer a hug or something more tangible.   After all, prayer can be merely a bunch of words that sound good, but are totally ineffective.  We say words, but there is no effect---no reality.  To get a hug is to get some reality.  Reflecting this way, perhaps that is my backdoor entry to understand being called to unbelief.  

There are times we may be called to hug instead of utter theological or spiritual words.  The central thing is reality.  What is most real?  Often reality is more than a head thing---more than a belief.




https://onbeing.org/programs/christian-wiman-how-does-one-remember-god-jan2018/