Martin Marty is one of the foremost figures in religion today. The guy was born in 1928 and has lived a long, very fruitful life. He taught for years at the University of Chicago. He was a prolific writer and speaker. I cannot claim Marty and I were friends, but we were acquaintances in the sense that he recognized me and vaguely knew who I was and perhaps where I taught. We had him to campus while I was at Earlham as well as my current colleges. He taught American Church History and certainly seemed to know every detail of that history since the 17th century. And he was a storyteller.
Marty could tell stories from all four centuries of American history---at least since Europeans became part of that American history. He made you feel like you were there in the middle of the story. A few years ago, he shared a story of one of my favorite writers, Brian Doyle, who sadly passed away a few years ago. Doyle was not an academic theologian, but he was a man of faith and he could inspire by his own stories.
Marty tells the story of Doyle sitting in a pub in Australia in conversation with two philosophers. They were talking about the “roots of faith.” The philosophers were intrigued whether religion was merely a factor of “biological constructs” or the “electrical explosions in the brain.” Doyle said that conversation stayed with him. He wondered whether faith was more than what they were discussing. He commented in an interesting way, “I still have faith in faith, despite the philosophers’ evidence that religions are merely nutty hobbies, like being a Cubs fan. I keep thinking that under the rituals and rigamarole, there is in religion a crucial, wriggling sense of what human beings might someday be.”
I like that last point. Religion might tell us what human beings might someday be. Put this way, religion is not so much knowledge or a truth, as it is a vision or a dream. Religion has to do with imagination. Jesus gave a word to his vision, namely, the kingdom. In his famous prayer, he prayed, “thy kingdom come.” How many times I also have prayed that line! I wonder, what do I actually think the kingdom might be which I pray to come? Surely for me it has to do with justice, peace and love. Religious traditions have used the metaphors of a banquet, a heavenly city and a garden to image the kingdom to come. Maybe it is a global party!
Doyle muses a bit further. He notes, “Sometimes, for a second---at a game, a meeting, in line at the bank, at a. park by the river---you get a flash of connective energy with your fellow beings, just a flick of it, a quick shiver of inexplicable peace and joy in the company of your fellow travelers.” It takes no effort for me to know that I have felt that connective energy. I like that description. Doyle uses fascinating ways to detail this energy: flick, quick shiver, etc. Have you been flicked? Have you felt energized in this fashion?
Doyle makes a claim. “That flash is what religions are for. Doyle then cites Peter Mathiessen, whom I know as an American novelist, naturalist, Zen teacher and more. Paraphrasing Mathiessen, Doyle writes that “we are mammals just down from the trees…and we are afraid of death, which is why we deliver it to others so easily…But what if…our moral evolution ever caught up to our breathtaking physical evolution? What if?” He elaborates, “But what if we dropped the dagger, plucked the beams from our eyes, and grew up?”
That is where the vision and dreams of religion are born. Doyle thinks we already carry the seeds of that vision. He observes, “We already have maps of that bright country in the brilliant bones of religion.” I never thought about religion having bones! Bones are our skeleton. They are the foundation of our being together and having mobility and so much more. They are the source of stability---our basis as it were. Religion, too, has bones. It would be fun to explore and develop this idea. To our point here, we already have the skeleton of the vision of what might be for ourselves and our world.
Doyle correctly notes there are many religions. Controversially perhaps, he suggests, “…but in their essences all are about the same thing: praise for the miracle of life; awe for the mysterious force that creates it; yearning for life beyond death; and most of all, inarticulate desperation for a future in which mercy trumps murder. More than any other force on this bruised earth, religions keep that desperate dream alive…” For some reason, I am attracted to the idea of a desperate dream.
Sometimes religion feels that way. People do think it is silly; it is a waste of time and reserved for folks who can’t otherwise find better things to do. But I always have felt like there is something there. I did not know it was in my bones---my religion bones. In those bones there is a map of a vision of a kingdom. No doubt, I have had that vision since I climbed down from the trees. I am ok with the fact that I have evolved. I only hope my moral evolution can catch up! And I hope yours is also evolving. It is time to work on that dream, rather than continuing to create mayhem in our world.
We have work to do. We have to keep believing. We have to keep coming together to tell this story and all our other stories. We have to fan the flames of this desperate vision. We have work to do.
Marty, Context, 7-07 A pp. 1-2
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