In my last essay, Belief, I showed that beliefs are real, and that a belief is true and meaningful when lived within its proper context.  Here’s the next step: a belief is a communal relationship with reality.  I don’t hold individual beliefs, instead I live beliefs and I share them in my community.

 

Analysis and belief are different perspectives on reality; they see different things.  Belief is an inside, first-person perspective; analysis is outside, third-person.  I can learn much about a belief by analyzing it from the outside, but to fully understand the belief, I must go inside and become a believer.  It’s like love.  I can’t understand love except when inside the experience of being in love; my memories after-the-fact are an abstraction.  Just so belief: I fully understand a belief only when in the active experience of believing and sharing that belief with a community of believers… but when I step back to analyze the belief from the outside, it’s gone.  This is what happened at communion when I analyzed it: I saw the bread and juice as meaningless material objects instead of the body and blood of Christ.

​

Belief is a different mode of being than critical analysis.  I recall a podcast, I forget which, where the host spoke of scientists looking at the brain activity of some Southern Baptists during a sermon.  Lo and behold, the parts of the brain that the scientists associated with critical skepticism were quiet during the sermon.  The host and guest giggled and sniggered, then spent a few minutes speculating.  They finally decided that it was a function of power: the preacher had power and therefore the churchgoers listened with empty, believing minds. 

​

Laughing at belief is like laughing at love.  The podcaster didn’t understand that the applicable reality for the congregation -- what they’re actually doing -- is joining in together and experiencing the Word.  They’re not analyzing the sermon from an isolated, third-person perspective.  Belief and critical analysis are different stances, so it makes sense that brains engaged in one stance look different than brains in the other stance.

​

The podcaster’s mistake was to take an outside perspective on something that must be understood from the inside.  It’s simple: either I join the dance or watch the dancers.  Both perspectives have truth, but I can’t do both at the same time.  To the dancer, the dance opens outward into deeper and deeper meaning, inexpressible in words.  To the watcher, the dance expresses an abstraction, perhaps the utilitarian value of enhancing group cohesion.

​

I remember something from 10th grade English, Mr. Green’s class.  We were talking about Thoreau living alone in his shack by the lake, writing his book.  Nelson A. said one of the most intelligent things I’ve ever heard: “Thoreau is missing out on all the good stuff, he can’t play ball with his friends.”  That’s the risk when I stand apart to analyze: I lose connection with my essential, communal nature.  I look down on those petty people and their petty beliefs.  It’s the smart kid’s dilemma.  I can analyze and dismiss the dumb kids on the dance floor, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and I want to dance too.

 

Belief is a communal dance with reality.  Somehow, someway, I must join the dance and give myself up to it; lose myself to find myself.  Anthony Trollope, in Barchester Towers, describes a young preacher, fresh out of divinity college, facing an audience of old peasants.  He had learned to talk abstract religion in college, but what can he say to this crowd?  “How am I, just turned twenty-three, who have never yet passed ten thoughtful days since the power of thought first came to me, how am I to instruct these gray beards, who with the weary thinking of so many years have approached so near the grave?  Can I teach them their duty?  Can I explain to them that which I so imperfectly understand, that which years of study may have made so plain to them?”