This moring I was listening to NPR. I like their “This I believe” segments, even when I don’t agree with the beliefs of the speakers and writers. This morning Richard Rohr was the presenter. His piece was titled “Utterly Humbled by Mystery.” He developed a portion of a theme I’ve been working on for a little while, since hearing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on his Oct. 7 “Ring of Fire.” Kennedy’s words in a moment.
Richard Rohr talks about how we seek certainty in our faith but says that certainty “is the opposite of faith.” He discusses the irony of how present day scientists are often comfortable with contradictions and mystery while some religious folks are not.
In October I downloaded a podcast where Robert Kennedy and Mike Papantonio were talking about the film “Jesus Camp.” I’d always been a fan of Robert Kennedy for what I knew he stood for, but I became a fan that day because of what he said.
“[The pharasees] — they were the fundamentalists. …it is really the end of religious faith, because religion at its best is supposed to be a search for existential truth and fundamentalism is an end to that search, so fundamentalism is really an exercise in power. The fundamentalist preacher says, ‘here is a book. The entire word of God is in this book and I’m going to tell you what it means, and I’m going to be your interpreter.’”
I’m sure this was even better in context. Both he and Mike Papantonio are brilliant guys. They got me thinking about faith in a hopeful way, a hope I’d pretty nearly abandoned, at least for the short term. Suddenly I want to be an evangelist, but of a particular kind. I believed I sought a world envisioned in John Lennon’s “Imagine” — a world without religion. That certainly would do away with religious conflict.
I’m not just talking about wars and skirmishes justified by religion, but all of the great and small ways we, as a people, oppress others with our religious beliefs.
Now I want to spread the message that true faith allows for mystery and doubt. What if a consensus could be reached that within the mystery of faith, there is room for a broad range of expressions and experiences of the holy. I’m sure we’d find some way to turn openness into dogma, the way everything good is allways carried to it’s extreme these days. But it seems the opposite extreme has been reached already.
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