Guide for Chapter 5
Don and Joyce
Session 4:
Chapter 5, Faith, the Evolution
“In life, in religion, in science, this I believe: any conviction worth its salt has chosen to cohabit with a piece of mystery, and that mystery is at the essence of the vitality and growth of the thing.” —Krista Tippett
1. “Faith is evolutionary, in every culture, and in any life.” How has your faith (or some particular concept of faith) evolved through the experiences of your life? Has the concept of mystery been any part of that?
2. For many, the move from childhood into adulthood is synonymous with a shift from mystery to certainty. However, Robert Coles pinpoints the childhood quality of a “questioning spirit” as being an important trait in those who are thought of as the great figures of religion. Have you experienced Robert Coles’s sense that mystery can be a great companion? What makes it challenging? What makes it comforting?
3. Consider the “Nones,” those who respond “none” when asked about their religious affiliation by pollsters. Tippett says this nonreligious space is far from being absent of spirituality; that many Nones are theologically searching, spiritually curious, and service oriented. Explore the phrase “spiritual but not religious.”
What does it mean in the world you see around you? How is this development interesting/relevant/uncomfortable for you? What challenges/opportunities does it create for PCC. How might we incorporate such people or make space for them in our congregational life?
4. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks sums up the Jewish imperative saying, “To be true to your faith is a blessing to others regardless of their faith.” Have you had, or seen, an experience of this?
5. “Wondering is a useful way to begin to speak of a shared vocabulary of mystery we might embrace across our disciplines, our contrasting certainties, and our doubts.”
“Once upon a time I took in mystery as a sensation best left unexamined. Now I experience it as a welcome.” How do you view mystery and what role does it play in your spiritual experience?
6. “So much of what we orient towards in culture numbs a little going in and helps us avoid the reckoning we actually long for—the push to self-knowledge and deeper lived integrity.”
“Maybe this is another way to think about original sin—the ingrained lure of the possibility of going numb, a habit of acquiescence to it.” How do these views resonate (or not) with your experiences and faith?
7. “I apprehend—with a knowledge that is as much visceral as cognitive—that God is love. That somehow the possibility of care that can transform us—love muscular and resilient—is an echo of a reality behind reality, embedded in the creative force that gives us life.” Does this fit with your sense of who God is and how God works in our lives?
8. “Our greatest aspirations and virtues have always relied on a measure of inner equanimity. And this is something many of us are learning to tend better, more consciously, precisely as the noisy world feels like it is pulling us apart.” Do you find this something you have incorporated in your life, or would like to incorporate?