The second event that is contributing to my hopefulness comes, as I said, from the domain of religion, but it was to be found in a very unlikely place: the op-ed pages of the New York Times. On May 30, Stanford anthropology professor, T.M. Luhrmann wrote an editorial entitled "Belief is the Least Part of Faith" (which is related to his recently published book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God).
The good professor had spent years studying, visiting and talking to people in evangelical churches. He wanted to know why they went. He starts out making clear that (a) questions like "Does God exist?" or "What is the evidence that there is an invisible agent who has a real impact on our lives?" are abstract, intellectual questions, not questions of faith; and (b) not everyone showing up for church every Sunday is necessarily even sure God does exist, but, what is more, it doesn't really matter. These are unexpected statements in this context, to be sure, but they reflect a change in thinking that has taken and is continuing to take place in the minds of many people these days.
In consonance with the classic anthropologist Émile Durheim's insight that religion arose as a way for social groups to experience themselves as groups, Luhrmann found that people don't go to church because they believe in God; rather, they believe in God because they go to church. As he put it himself, "I saw that people went to church to experience joy and to learn how to have more of it. These days I find that it is more helpful to think about faith as the questions people choose to focus on, rather than the propositions observers think they must hold."
What struck me about this is the de-emphasizing of what one says one believes, but rather that it emphasizes one's experience, what one feels, and ultimately, what one does. That is where the focus has shifted to. It's not what you say, but what you do that matters in the end. Yes, ultimately, actions speak louder than words.
It would seem, then, that there may a shift away from the static nature of noun-based or noun-centered view of the world (i.e., God as entity) to a more process-based, action-centered understanding of reality (i.e., "God" - the Good); that is as a friend of mine put it, "the process of the flow of loving-kindness itself". We shouldn't underestimate the significance of this shift, and we certainly shouldn't be so arrogant to know where this shift is going to lead us. I may be hopeful at the moment, but I'm not an unbridled optimist. We humans are capable of great glories, but we are also capable of screwing up the simplest of things.
The reason for my hopefulness, however, comes from the fact that a shift from noun-thinking, if you will, to verb-thinking, to put it in simplest terms, is a change of mind, and it is precisely the kind of change of mind that I have been referring to so often. Verb-thinking is a fundamentally different kind of thinking than noun-thinking.
Still, the fact that actions, what we do, what others experience of what we do ... the entire complex of human interaction and relations ... speak louder than words is the take-away here. Given that this is the case, I can only admonish all of you to be more careful about what it is you do. In the end, all the world is watching.
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