Dreaming the Future Closer

So, I’ve been enjoying reading and thinking about things kind of historically lately.  You know one of the things I enjoy most about reading history?  Because it helps me remain intellectually humble.  When you read good historical accounts of religious movements, you discover how diverse they are, how much variation lies between and within them.

Better yet, you start to get a sense that those movements and what they serve aren’t all that stable.  They change, in relation to other movements (religious and otherwise) and in relation to the life experience of their members, especially of their clergy.  The variation isn’t alien to devotion, but proper to it, the natural result of each person, each group, living the truth of their encounters with the divine.

Read enough history, and you begin to doubt that there are firm lines to be drawn between groups and epochs, only relative ones defined by situations.  Most importantly to me, you get the sense that there is no one true, everlasting way to live any religion.

Now, what history isn’t so good at is giving me a sense of why those changes occur.  Sometimes, it does a downright lousy job of it.  If you take your faith seriously, if you want to sustain your faith and a sense of its history, you have to remember that those changes came into being by virtue of thoughtful, devoted people.

Religious changes aren’t ’caused’ by external forces, they are motivated by them.  If we lose sight of the motivations of the faithful, we lose sight of what gives faith life, namely the dialogue between individuals and spirit.

To be more specific: the historical record shows a lot of variation between different pagan practices, even practices that are superficially grouped under the same cultural rubric (say, ‘Norse’ or ‘West African’).  There is a tendency to look at that variation as a sign that something has gone wrong, that the traditions have crumbled from some more unitary practice into lesser, more ignorant, superstitions.  We want to select the ‘true’ practice from the field of competing practices.

Sometimes, of course, we need to do just that.  Sometimes, there are practices that emerged from ignorance and produce harmful effects.  A lot of times, though, we are looking at a field of equally good practices.  We don’t need to select one over the other in any absolute sense, but make sense of the relationship of that practice to the ‘life’ of an individual’s devotion.

This forms a sort of spiritual corollary to Habermas notion of communicative charity.  Begin with the presupposition that a practice serves a purpose, that there is a variation for a reason, even if you cannot easily discern it.  Then watch the fruit that they bear, letting that be the proper test.

For those rebuilding a discontinuous tradition, remember where the life of the faith emerges, not from history, but from present life.  The goal of faith is not coherence with an abstract conception of orderliness, but dedication to, and a relationship to, a living mystery beyond ourselves.