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“what we believe”
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense. ” — Rumi
As soon as we mention God, or Jesus (or, for that matter, Buddha) people want to know what we’re about. They want to know “what we believe.”
“Remember: the buddha-dharma is about seeing, not about believing.” — Steve Hagen, Buddhism Plain and Simple
“Remember: the jesus-dharma is about loving, not about believing.” — The Radical Love Project
If you’re looking for something like the Nicene Creed, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. We don’t subscribe to a list of “beliefs” that we think grant us some special status. We do have some ideas we think stand up to criticism. We like reaching for an understanding of how reality works, but we don’t reach for certainty, and we don’t think anyone else has to agree with us or else.
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The Source.
We are in awe of divine power, the creator, the source of peace.
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God within.
We reach for an awareness of God’s presence within us, and we find it in Jesus, the living Christ, who shows us the way.
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Grace.
We are excited by the light of unconditional love and infinite grace, and we are serious about forgiveness. We’re called to love with a radical, scandalous dedication. In every single moment, we are called to honesty, compassion, and awareness.
God’s world is full of beauty and knowledge and love, and we appreciate those things wherever we find them.
- From Zen, we’ve learned the importance of a quiet mind, and the role of attachment, opposition, and delusion. We’ve learned how it might be possible to follow the advice of Jesus, “Judge not.”
- From Non-Violent Communication, we’ve learned how to love by listening with empathy.
- From Conal Elliott, we’ve learned that heart-connection doesn’t come from managing how we communicate; it’s about finding an empathetic, loving place from which to speak what’s true.
- From James Dennert, we’ve been inspired by the idea that religious and spiritual knowledge need not be tied to belief.
- From Heart of Now, we’ve learned to fully accept where we are in every moment.
We hope this gives you a good idea of where we’re coming from. If you have more curiosity about what we’re doing or thinking, we invite you to talk with us. If you’d like us to understand what’s most important to you, we’re happy to listen.
We’ll happily talk about those things, but we don’t spend much time in debate. We’re more interested in practice.
Posted by Angela under about us
Saturday, September 19, 2009
7 Comments
I have a question: What is the source of these beliefs? Is it personal experience, the Bible, good books, borrowed creeds? In other words, what are the things you lean on when the “criticism” comes your way?
Also, you frame/start the bulk of your statement by saying what it is not (Nicene Creed, etc.). I think people can tell that when they read it; sometimes saying something like that can make it seem like you’re more interested in refuting another belief system than you are in sharing something that is good and true. My guess is you’re more interested in communicating the latter. I think it might be best to just let the things that you aren’t be known through their absence in your statement, rather than their refuted presence. Love the thoughts in here though!!
Hi, Mikey, thanks for commenting. :)
[Note: the above was a collaboration, but this comment is just me.]
You’re curious about what we see as the source of our ideas? We’re excited about a school of thought called Critical Rationalism (forgive us; we’re both students of philosophy). We explore the world for ideas, and subject them to challenges and tests. Ideas can come from all of our experiences, including books we read (like the Bible) and more direct and personal experiences—maybe even revelation.
Would you like to share what you see as the source of your ideas? I’m curious.
As for the second part… We talked about your idea, and I can see where you’re coming from. In the end, we decided it was important to us to state clearly that we hadn’t just forgotten to include a particular doctrine, but had deliberately left it out. It wasn’t in an effort to be off-putting, but to be clear and transparent.
Well, that, and to be welcoming to folks who are experiencing what I used to experience—a sense of exclusion from the Christian world because they can’t sign off on things like the Nicene Creed. I want to help those folks (assuming I’m not the only one!) not feel so alone.
Someone commented privately that Jesus teaches all the things we say we’ve learned elsewhere. I want to respond here and say that’s true. But Christianity didn’t bring those things to us. Prayer didn’t either. God brought those things to us through the people and groups we mentioned.
All truth is God’s truth, isn’t it?
I, like the rest of humanity, develop my beliefs based on some crazy conglomeration of my authorities (at one point parents, then friends, then hopefully Scripture, the Spirit, and those who have the Spirit) and my experiences of what seem to be right and true.
Some of my beliefs are true and some are not. I could see myself making two different kinds of “What I Believe” pages. One, if I were to be totally honest with myself and give myself grace, would have to include everything I base my actions on, and it would probably include things like, “It is important to prove my value to others through my accmplishments”, but also “God gives me good things when I ask him with a pure heart.” In other words, it’d have both truth and lies, because I’m prone to be an equal-opportunity believer of both truth and lies.
The other list I would potentially write is just the true things I believe, or perhaps even the things I think are true and wished I believed, and wish that others would believe. For that list, I might want to say “I’m deriving all of these from the Bible, specifically from these verses”, so then I am relying on an authority that I (and some others) consider wholly good and true.
If I’m not deriving the stated belief from such a source, then there’s a greater chance its source is not always good and true (like parents or friends or Satan), and perhaps it’s a false belief I hold that belongs on the first list. It seems like you’re trying to make the second kind of list, and so it would make sense to state your authority as something you’re pretty sure is always right and good.
I hope all that craziness made some sense.
It makes a lot of sense! I am glad you put all that out there. I love learning what it’s like for you, sorting this stuff out.
Actually, I don’t think my beliefs are true. I think they’re an approximation of the truth, I guess, but that they can be improved (and often are, through the process of questioning and re-thinking, which we call criticism).
This is especially true of ideas of God. I think mine are just the best I can come up with, given that God is ineffable. We get glimpses of GodStuff, but it seems to me we can’t fully know what God is like.
As for sources… I’m thinking I get ideas from all sorts of places: dreams, books, preachers, friends, tv shows, etc. What makes them juicy is our ability to poke at them, to challenge & test them, and see how they hold up. I think this applies to all sorts of ideas, including ideas about God.
So that’s what I mean when I say “ideas that stand up to criticism.”
I like that you have learned from many different sources and not just one. You are sure to go wrong if you keep yourself closed to the many different teachings that are out there.
I like this. Statements of faith can be so limiting, but y’all have both cut it down to what’s important and left it open, because being open is the major function of what you’re doing. I sometimes think that I’m a recovering theologian, because I spent a long time trying to piece together a “statement of faith” (seriously, I found the paperwork when I was cleaning out my room in my parents’ house) but even though I find the recitation of those things beautiful sometimes, it’s so much less important to me now. The basics and the openness are what matter to me now.