Faith Seeking Understanding

“Faith seeking understanding.”[1] What a puzzle. But first a little throat-clearing. This seems to me a long post. It seemed to me a short to medium “essay,” but as I put it in the blog, it seems long. At the moment, there are 2171 words. I tried to break it up into several posts, but they are connected and I don’t want to start serializing like Charles Dikkens (the well-known Dutch author, thank you Monty Python).

So here is the idea. There are three parts. In the first, I tell the story of how I learned to hear the low trumpet/flugelhorn part in the march, The British Eighth. In the second, I identify the two relevant parts of that experience as “faith” and “understanding.” In the third part, I illustrate just how sticky that relationship between the two can be and end with a passing note on what the church is for. I thought if I said where this journey goes and pointed out that there are, in fact, rest stops along the way, that fewer of you would simply sign out and wait for a shorter one. The episodes can serve you as rest stops. That's how they served me.

Second throat-clearing. It’s hard to get really accurate about The British Eighth without distracting myself and all of you from the point I am trying to make. That’s why I didn’t embed a hyperlinked recording or paste in the first six measures of the score. So some of the “facts” about this march are just invented as a convenience. Is D the first relevant tone? Does the run end at D#? I don’t really know. Just call the music part “fiction” and I’ll get on with the story.

So. Where was I. Oh yes.

“Faith seeking understanding.” What a puzzle! And no prominent role at all for knowledge.

Today, I would like to tell you a story that has provided the context for most of my thinking about this in the last year. It isn’t, except by analogy, about religious faith, but it does set trust and experience dramatically at odds with each other and I want to tell you, it is not a comfortable experience.

Episode 1: The British Eighth March

Marilyn and I both played musical instruments. She was a virtuoso and I was good enough not to get myself thrown out any of the several bands I played in. But we had both played a lot of marches. A lot of marches. We took it upon ourselves, sometime back in the late 1990s to figure out what was going on in the first six bars of the march, “The British Eighth.” We had the Ohio State band’s recording of it to work with.

We listened to it over and over and couldn’t make it work. The trumpets doodle a little, (two measures)drop an octave, and they work back to half a tone higher than when they started (four measures) and they do it in eight notes. Let’s say that the ru begins on the D above middle C, drops an octave to the next lower D, then crawls back up: D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D. Oops. That’s my eight notes. That’s all I get and I’m not at E yet.

It’s a very common band phrase: flutes and clarinets do it all the time, which might by why Marilyn and I were so sure we were hearing what we knew what we were hearing.. This time it’s trumpets, or possibly, since it’s the Ohio State Band, flugelhorns. Two very experienced musicians who couldn’t account for what we were both hearing. Eventually we gave up.

Episode 2: Cold Case

Sometime within the last year, I decided enough was enough. This was a mystery that really shouldn’t be allowed to linger, so I took it on in a “Cold Case” spirit. I went to one of the most talented musicians I know, our church’s organist and choirmaster, Jon Stuber. We put the Ohio State disk in his player and he followed the trumpet line on his keyboard. It didn’t work. He could tell what the pitches were, but he couldn’t get back to D# in eight notes.

So he called in our mutual friend, Ann van Bever, who is, among other things, the best oboist I know. Jon explained our dilemma to her. It starts here and drops an octave and gets backto D# in eight notes. She listened to it once. She said to Jon, “What do the trumpets do?” He repeated it. We listened again. “No,” she said, “They don’t do that.”

She said that as an oboist, she had played a lot of marches and had learned how to hear them. I remembered at that point that I had gone first to a church organist. What they actually do, she said, is drop to the low D, then drop further to C, then make the run up to thefinal D#. Jon said, “OK, let’s listen to it again.” I said, “No, it can’t be.”

So we listened to it twice more. Not the dozens of time Marilyn and I had listened to it. Yup. We all heard it the same way. D, then C, then the run, ending where it was supposed to end. In just eight tones. I went home a bemused and happy man.

It almost goes without saying that I put that disk in the CD player on the way home, mostly in celebration of a problem resolved at last. I wasn’t much of a celebration. I heard it just the way I had always heard it. I “heard it,” that is to say, in a way that is not really what they were actually playing. And by that time, I , I knew they were not playing it that way.

The solution, in any case, was straightforward. I played that track every time I got into the car for several days. I instructed my mind to hear it in the way I knew it was, despite my continuing to hear it the way it wasn’t. Hearing it truly flickered for a little while; now on, now off. Then it stopped flickering. Itcame on and stayed on. I actually heard it the way it actually was. And, if I am careful, I still hear it that way. And eventually, I won’t even have to be careful.

Episode 3: And your point is…..?

Remember that this is a reflection on faith seeking understanding. The people I have been reading and listening to recently have been pushing for a notion of faith that has more the flavor of trust. I am attracted by it; I am trying it out. I have someone who says the music goes like this when my own experience tells me it goes like that. On the other hand, my experience is ineffective. It doesn’t solve the problem I know I have. That’s the dilemma.

What I could do is to trust Ann. I could, in language I am more familiar with, “have faith in Ann.” That means that I refuse to do, in this case, what I do in virtually every other situation in my life, which is to bring the views of another person to the bar of my own experience and see how it fits. In this case, I would be rejecting my own experience and trusting someone else. But what the heck, right? It’s just a piece of music, right?

Let’s imagine the same dilemma in another form. I visit my parents-in-laws. I’ve had three complete sets of parents-in-law, so I can use this example without pointing the finger at anyone. My father-in-law hates me. He is belligerent and aggressive and sarcastic. Not so, says my wife (three of those too, of course) in this unspecified example, “He is a shy man and he is intimidated by you. He isn’t really being mean; he is just trying to get comfortable with you. Just respond in a friendly way and all well be well. Eventually.”

. “Faith seeking understanding” might have stuck you as a little abstract. The father-in-law who is so obnoxious is not abstract. I know what he is doing and I know why. I tell myself that I have experienced both the “what” and the “why” even though some academic part of my brain knows that you can’t really experience “why.” That means I also know what the effect will be of my playing nice with him. It is three more days of being his piñata. I don’t think so. That is Lemma ! of the di-lemma.

Or, I could trust—I could have faith in— my wife. That is Lemma 2 of the di-lemma. I could privilege her experience and her understanding. I could try to hear in her father’s manner what she is hearing rather than what I am hearing.. I could discipline my own experience so that it reproduces in my own mind, what her experience is. I could, to refer back to the British Eighth, “try to hear what Ann is hearing.”

Episode 4: Finally. Faith Seeking Understanding

Which brings to the last two points, the first of which offers a more conventional example (religious) of faith seeking understanding and the second of which speculates about what the church is for.

Many times, when I was young, I stood in church beside my father and listened to him repeat the parts of the Apostles’ Creed he agreed with. He would have said, “those parts he understood,” but he was a gentle man. I heard the Creed go on then off then on as if Dad had a loose wire. What does it mean to say that we believe Jesus “descended into hell.” Or in the confession based on Philippians 2: that every knee shall bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth. Under the earth? The sound came on; then it went off.

Dad had his own reasons and chose well from the options available to him. But the options we are considering today were not available to him. Dad’s cosmology made “under the earth” a silly thing to say. Dad’s Christology made “descended into hell” incomprehensible. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t know what “the church” had meant by saying those things across the centuries: all those scholars and mothers and mechanics. He had his way of looking at the world to guide him. He would have called it his integrity. He felt that if he gave that up, he would be giving up everything.

Now you see why I started with the trivial example of The British Eighth. It gets harder. Giving up the way Marilyn and I heard the flugelhorns was something I could do. More specifically:
*I could withdraw my consent from the way I heard it.
*I could decide that I was hearing it in error, even as I continued to hear it that way.
*(Having faith in Ann made a new choice possible for me. )
*I could believe that reality was the way she heard it; not the way I heard it.
*I could not only withdraw my consent from the way I was hearing it, but I could give my consent to the way she heard it. And,
*I could do that, could give my consent, even when I couldn’t hear it that way myself..

So how does faith seek understanding. Well, I could, in the same way:
*withdraw my consent from the objections I have learned to make to the creeds.
* I could give my consent to another way of hearing the creeds, even if I am not at the moment able to hear them that way.
*I can tell myself what I believe (what I am trusting) the truth to be and instruct myself to see it that way. Even for the British Eighth, it didn’t happen right away. But I kept trying to hear the truth and eventually, I did.

The last light touch is on the question of what the church is for. In the example I have been playing with, Jon and Ann and I are “the church.” We are listening to the same music. Jon and Ann are “the church” for me. As I stand there with them, knowing what they are hearing, I can hear it. But I am new at hearing that and very experienced in hearing something else. So when I go home and put the CD on, I can’t hear it. I have lost my sense of what they are hearing. I’m not denying it. I’m still remembering what we all heard. But by myself, I can’t really hear it..

That worked for Jon and me because we had faith in Ann. Can I have faith in “the church?” Are there things that all Christians though all the ages have said to be so? Have they come, after years of work, to experience on their own the reality they have trusted? Is that what the church is really for? I have no idea. It does seems worth asking, though, doesn’t it?



[1] Augustine. Also Anselm. I am reminded of it every time my copy of The Christian Century comes in the mail.