The “sinking raft path” and an Ecology of Practices
Loss of faith as impetus to increased faith-worthiness.
Faith. A word that can divide or unite. It goes back to the Latin root fidere “to trust.” Fidere in turn goes further back to a Proto-Indo-European root that also means “to trust, confide, or persuade.”
To have faith is to trust in something. to trust in something like a bridge, or an institution, or in something that isn’t a thing, like a person, or God.
When we lose faith in a thing or a person or God we can feel different things depending on the context. Frustration if a bridge is out, disappointment if an institution lets us down, even betrayal if a person proves to be untrustworthy after we have put our trust in them.
When I was a young man hiking into the mountains in the Kootenay range with my dad, I had an experience that is my touchstone for understanding faith. Dad and I used to hike up to Fletcher Lake each summer. In those days people built crude rafts to allow them to float out to deeper water and catch bigger fish. On one of these trips I discovered a raft that became my favorite. It had a roughly constructed wooden box nailed to it you could sit on. The raft itself rode fairly low in the water, but it had lots of logs holding it up, and lots of boards holding it together. The next summer I found the same raft again, drifting out among some logs. I was able to eventually get to it but the winter or other humans had not been kind to it. The box was weathered and and creaky, and the raft now barely floated above the water. If I went too near an edge the water would rush over the boards and I would slide around, flailing my arms. It was no longer reliable for fishing, so I abandoned it. The next summer I saw it again, still floating but the box was gone and some of the boards were rotting and broken. I didn’t even give it a second look. I didn’t have any faith that it would hold me up and I didn’t feel overly sad or upset, I had come to accept that it was no longer useful or reliable.
Recently, when I expressed doubts about a Christian doctrine, a friend asked, “have you lost your faith?”
Faith with a capital F
Curiously, the answer was a little yes and a little no. Because “Your Faith” is different from the more generic use of the word. Both involve trusting, but the “Faith with a capital F” is not just about relying on something or someone, it is about identity and belonging.
When Jesus said, “Your faith has made you well,” he was referring to faith (lower case) but when we belong to “A Faith” (upper case) we are referring to a whole set of practices and beliefs that form a guiding light in our life. Someone might say their Faith is very important to them, or that they are a person of Faith, or that their Faith is Christianity, or Islam or Buddhism. Usually this kind of faith is religious, but “keeping the faith” can also refer to the act of staying true to and continuing to remain hopeful and committed to a goal, such as civil rights, when faced with challenges, doubts, and so on.
For me, to say that I am having doubts about my Faith, is to say I am having trouble keeping the faith. Because when we truly start to doubt key parts of a belief system, we recognize that it could all fall apart, dropping us like the raft dropped me when it got too old and rotten. So we start to look for a more trust-worthy place to stand.
As I have lost one belief after another, I have started to do that. I’ve started looking for a firmer place to stand. I won’t stand for something I don’t believe in. And this has it’s own problems.
If you can overlook aspects of “A Faith” because “The Faith” provides a sense of belonging, comfort, and meaning, then you have not experiences the grief that comes from realizing you can’t.
To continue the analogy, I at first thought that one or two of the waterlogged logs in my raft of Faith was dragging the whole raft down, so I pried out the nails and kicked the dead weight away. Sure enough, the log sank to the bottom of the lake and the raft floated higher and felt more trustworthy than ever. Next season, a few more logs had to go. Eventually, only a few logs remained, and it wasn’t enough to instill faith in the raft anymore.
Brian McLaren coined the phrase Conflicted Religious Identity Syndrome to describe an experience that, for many, marks the first stages of loss of faith. He himself has moved out of Evangelical Christianity into a more contemplative form of Christianity as Dean of Core Faculty, at the Centre for Action and Contemplation. Rob Bell is another prominent Christian Leader who has traveled the “sinking raft path.” Raised and educated within Evangelical Christianity, Rob has been steadily kicking off the logs of his own raft.
Both McLaren and Bell have found or founded new rafts, unabashedly floating their belief system with ideas outside the confines of orthodox circles, and both focus more on love and acceptance than ingroup loyalty.
The raft of traditional or orthodox Christianity continues to have some buoyant logs holding it up, but I no longer find it enough to instill my trust. I’ve gone further than McLaren or Bell, jettisoning central doctrines like heaven and hell, immortality of the soul, lordship, inerrancy of the Bible, and the omnipotence of God; while at the same time accepting evidence from science that undermines Christianity such as the evidence for evolution, the billion year old age of the earth and universe, and lack of evidence for angels, demons, and a spirit realm. I now default to a mainly materialistic view of reality, with room for emergence and a large expanse of possibilities we can’t imagine due to the fact that we evolved in an area of space with specific conditions that helped form our nervous system.
For example, I have found tremendous insight and help from Stoicism, Buddhism, and the mystical traditions within Judaism and Islam. Not to mention the academics, poets, novelists, and artists who have blessed religious and secular communities across the globe and across time.
Mine is a cafeteria spirituality now, with therapeutic traditions, neuroscience, and nature-based spiritual practices all jostling side by side on my meal tray. I see Jesus as my touchstone, but as John Vervaeke puts it, Jesus is the pre-emanate sage among many for me now. Other luminaries I respect and model include Lao Tsu, Confucius, Socrates, the Buddha, Epictetus, and Jung. All of them reveal something of the sacred or divine.
As I kicked away rotting logs from the raft of my religion I added new ones from elsewhere, and for the most part my new raft holds me up pretty well. Of course the logs themselves are less like beliefs and more like ideas now. I embrace the idea of an “ecology of practices” and this is the focus of my efforts now.
An ecology of practices, refers to a living system of complementary activities and ideas that when adequately interconnected, cultivate wisdom and give the practitioner a sense of meaning and resiliency in the face of cultural and historic changes that have caused so many to question their “Faith” and their faith in things like science and ethics.
An Integrated Raft
Rather than relying on one teacher or technique (like meditation alone), “an ecology of practices” emphasizes a diverse set of strategies and practices that work synergistically together. The individual ideas, theories, activities, and rituals are not random logs picked up from wherever, but are curated from existing wisdom traditions, science, historic religions, and cultural sources that have fallen out of fashion or simply been forgotten.
Part of the wisdom comes in the curation, putting together insights or developing specific cognitive, emotional, and existential capacities to address various areas of life impacted by a crisis of meaning or relevance. The goal is not to make oneself feel content or at peace, but instead to create a self-correcting, evolving system that includes attention to our shortcomings such as self-deception and greed, while also fostering ethical maturity, a deep sense of attachment and connectedness, and skills for managing stress, loss, and disillusionment.
So looked at more closely, an ecology of practices is like a living ecosystem in which ideas shape perspective and goals, which lead to actions and behaviors, while other practices impact cognitive resiliency, enabling the individual to persevere at research, investigation, and testing of new ideas and practices.
The goal for me is to develop, through a process of individuation and growth, a self that is able to hold space with people, be aware of my judgements and triggers, and see others with love, despite the surface behaviour they use for protection. Central to it all is my work to strengthen “calm aliveness” and related states, so that it becomes a steady resting state within which I can nurture, develop, and integrate my ecology of practice.