Liberty and Dignity for All

"The way to see by faith

is to shut the eye of reason,"

Benjamin Franklin,
Poor Richard's Almanac, 1758

Faith is born from peace, out of a sense of liberty and dignity, mutually supporting each other. It is fear, the opposite of faith, that purges faith in ourselves, individually and as a nation.

In our fear, we have sought control reaching for our own ways and means through our own intellect or reason and consequently overlooked an innate part of ourselves which is stronger. Faith would reach for our "illiative" sense rather than our intellect where we spin our theologies and reasonable economic and political arguments.

Soon after I graduated from college, I realized that one could not encounter God through the reason branch of our brains. It seemed to me that faith is not reasonable. Faith in God is not reasonable. It is not reasonable to give your life for another, to sacrifice your time, money and talent during a natural disaster. Love, in fact, is certainly not reasonable, nor is falling in love, getting married and having children. All these great moments of passion that occupy our human lives are not reasonable.

Perhaps, when we are faced with some of life's greatest challenges, such as the economic decline that is thrusting our nation, and most likely the world, into an uncertain future, and we need as much as ever to turn to a "heavenly father," many of our most intelligent, best educated people don't know how.

Through our years of scientific data-gathering, the ever-increasing technological hard-wiring of our brains, CNN-style surface information processing, we seem to have lost the ability to look below the layers of our lives, our current events - personal and global - and listen with an entirely different and yet even more real part of our being, a part which St. John Neumann called our "illiative sense," that innate part of our being that "just knows" something. It is with that aspect of our minds - not the brain, but rather the part the ancient Hebrews called "the heart," which isn't the organ either, where our faith can be found. When we use that part of our minds, we are most likely using the frontal lobes of our brains as receptors, like antennae sort of, to "hear" that illiative sense, to hear the Spirit. Spiritual people have long said that the human spirit, the "mind" of man, is far larger than the physical body. The spirit lives in the body, but is not completely contained within it.

I have known so many people who have struggled with understanding faith. They've sought it, studied, spent years reading the writings of others, even felt a bit hopeful through the poetic verses of others - Rumi, Merton, Milton, Shakespeare. One thing these all - and there are an infinite number of others - held in common was their faith which seemed to emerge in radiant verses flowing abundantly out of their creative minds, some would call their "right" side of their brains, that non-technical, can't-balance-a-checkbook, can't-program-a-DVD-player, can-barely-answer-a-cell-phone, part of us. Painfully, they know who they are. They are so well connected with that other part of themselves, the faith center, the creative genius which inhabits their bodies and fills their lives, even through the darkest of times, with light, love and joy.

Last night's State of the Union Address by President Obama speaks to that part of our minds, our hearts, our souls. He spoke to the soul of our nation, to our faith as a people, gathered together under a common goal - freedom and liberty and to uphold the dignity of every human being - who at one time washed upon our shores, broken, beaten and poor, but today may struggle to survive almost anywhere on the Earth.

Obama's was a visionary speech, not new really, but as needed today as others like it more than 200 years ago, at the founding of our nation. Then, as now, we needed a leader who would call us together as a coach calls his team together before the big game. When, as a fledgling nation, our leaders gathered in Philadelphia to sign a bold and dangerous claim for independence, Benjamin Franklin spoke on behalf of our brave new cause, "If we don't hang together, we will surely hang separately." Spoken at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 7/4/1776, he saw the absolute need to come together, putting differences aside for our very survival. It was a case of either we do this together, or we don't do it all, because if we aren't strong enough to defend our cause, we will lose our necks on the scaffold.

Today, as then, we, as Americans, and as human beings, must hang together, put aside our political, religious and even cultural differences, reach deep into our hearts for our common faith, once again look to and accept the love of our creator and remember our unique kindred bond. We are all one, all connected on our deepest level where our dignity and freedom abides, running together like an underground stream, from our Creator to and through all of us.

Today we can be proud, but tomorrow and the next day, we must love ourselves and our neighbors, our enemies, all brothers, friends and foes, from the place of faith welling up from within us, emerging far below reason's careful eye.