April 2020 – Faith as Openness, Faith as Training

As the coronavirus keeps washing through the world, and many of us are paused in one way or another, the question of how to use this time keeps arising. There are many answers, of course, from topical to deep, and it’s to the latter that I address this month’s article. Depression often is phrased in terms of control or management of it, often as a medicalized condition, but it has a deep relationship to faith—the choice to remain open in the face of the unknown—that is not obvious on the surface.

So here, I’m suggesting a couple questions intended to help you parse out when depression is speaking in its “anti-faith,” and to expand your attention beyond the contracted and stifling confines that depression tries to impose.

Faith as Openness, Faith as Training

“Never let a good crisis go to waste.”  –Rahm Emanuel

Although this quote is often attributed to Winston Churchill—which like many Einstein quotes, we have to admit, makes a better attribution—apparently it was popularized by Rahm Emanuel in relation to the 2008 financial collapse. It has a complex flavor, rough and hopeful, that’s appropriate to this current time of harshness, uncertainty, and opportunity, although the latter needs some consideration to see what, collectively and individually, that may be. Here I’m going to highlight that among possibilities, the intentional development of “faith” is especially present and real, and even more particularly relevant to folks who struggle with depression.

As I wrote a few years ago (link), depression is a kind of “anti-faith,” in that it asserts categorically that life, and often you, are miserable and worthless, and the best response is to get small and withdraw. This is a “faith” because it is a stance or position in relation to questions that cannot be answered by raw data: Is life good or bad? Worthy or not? Am I good or bad? These are not questions that have absolute answers (unlike, say, the exchange rate of dollars to yen), but rather ones that force a position in relation to the unanswerable. I think faith, in its essence, is best defined as, “The choice to remain open in the face of the genuine unknown.” Depression answers the unknown with its position, “Life and self are worthless, and one should be closed down in response,” an anti-faith. Whereas the other answer, a “faith-full” response, is, “Life and self are essentially unknown, and in response I choose openness.”

Notice how this is not faith, openness, as supported by some belief or dogma. What I’m suggesting here is that faith at its most fundamental is a choice one is making, about how to be in relation to the genuinely-not-knowable, and that it boils down to whether one chooses openness to that unknown, or closure.

Although it’s true that in order not to default to a “faith because” response (which fuzzes up the essential choice one is making) one has to work out what faith is in one’s own life, faith does have contours and shapes to it. So, I’m going to offer three inquiry questions that one can use to help support this development of faith.

1) Can I answer this statement with data or not?

So, this is the question that sorts for whether you’re in the domain of faith or not. If the “statement of reality” is answerable with data, that’s a reality question, and should be approached as such. Apropos of this current time, the statement, “Masks reduce the rate of viral transmission,” is one that can be answered with data: you look at the objective research, and draw the conclusion based on what’s there. It’s not a realm for belief, because there is a truth, which you could check on your own with research if you chose. Anything else is misunderstanding of dogma.

If the statement is, “This pandemic shows us how pointless life is,” then you are in the realm of faith, because that is not a question that can be answered with data. Is life meaningful or not can be addressed somewhat objectively—there is something called life, and there is something called meaning—but ultimately has to be answered positionally, not factually. But if you find yourself answering categorically, that life is not meaningful, then you’ve entered the realm of anti-faith (and probably depression), because you actually cannot prove that answer. You’ve nailed a gate over what is actually a portal.

Although there is plenty of nuance to chew on with this question, it does help to point out whether something you’re believing is about data, and requires more research to answer clearly, or about faith, in which case the task is to clarify where you stand.

2) What is larger?

Depression has everything to do with a problem with grief, with a collapse in this faith that the huge unknown of life can be met with openness, rather than contracted from. So, this question is to point your attention, when contracted and shut down against reality, to what and how there is a larger reality. If we see, for instance, a person hoarding food at the market, we can reactively think (particularly if we’re wrestling in that moment with depression), “See, this is what people actually are.” But if we ask, without then defaulting to some Pollyanna view of humans, “Wait, what is larger than this?”, we can start thinking about the space in which dark things are happening. We might think, well, in terms of human behavior, on the drive to the store, everyone obeyed the traffic laws, allowing me and us to function as a group that has to share the same roads. And, although hoarding is not positive behavior, virtually no one else is acting like this in the store now.

Human beings are built to over-focus on the negative, which makes evolutionary sense: the paranoid monkeys survived better than the laissez-faire ones. So we have to remind ourselves often of the larger reality around the smaller ones that scare us.

3) What sustains?

This question, rather than addressing the contraction of “What is larger?”, addresses the fear that loss and limitation will be forever. This question points us to reflect on larger time scales than those that capture our attention. Fear, by design, limits our scope and range of attention to that which is scary (or painful), so this question pushes us to intentionally think about what still exists underneath the present loss.

So, if we find we’re thinking, “This pandemic will shatter the economy,” then yes, that’s definitely a scary thought, with some reality to it. But if we get too focused there, we forget to set the present in a larger world. Economies can shatter, but it’s in human nature to rebuild—that drive sustains. Human desire for growth, in all sorts of ways, sustains. Human connection sustains. The physical world sustains. Life as a function of reality sustains. You can keep going, bigger and bigger, to remind yourself of the larger reality in which dark realities rest.

And…?

Depression answers unknown questions with closure, contraction, and rigidity, whereas faith in the essential sense is a response to the unknown with a choice of openness. These three questions are training tools to push back on, or direct an inquiring stance towards, that depressive closure. They are intended to point out that the “obviously there’s nothing good here, and never will be” stance of depression is just that, a stance, not objective reality. With that opening, one can then choose to stand in it, to allow for that openness, to see the falsity of depression’s anti-faith, and to choose repeatedly and intentionally to let the unknown and mysterious be just what it is. That repeated challenge and undermining of depression’s false rigidity is what it means to treat faith as a practice and a training.