Faith that doesn’t traumatize
Some thoughts inspired by Meredith Miller’s Woven
This summer in our Zoom discussions, we’ve been exploring what a faith might look like that doesn’t harm, traumatize, dehumanize, demonize, villainize, pulverize, or really any verb that ends in -ize. In a sense this type of exploring is what we do every week at Harbor. But this summer we have been following the blueprint of Woven, a book by Meredith Miller.
The book is really about faith formation in kids: its subtitle reads Nurturing a Faith Your Kid Doesn’t Have to Heal From. But the other day I was hanging out with a friend of mine who, like me, is neither a parent nor a grandparent. I described to him the premise of the book, and he commented, “I’d like to read that.”
The reason Woven appeals to him is the same reason it has generated some lovely conversations at Harbor: it tries to help people avoid cataclysmic faith deconstruction events. Too late for most of us at Harbor! But thinking about alternative approaches to faith is really helpful for those who are reconstructing, reimagining, re-envisioning (and other verbs starting with re-) their faith.
Here’s the elevator pitch I gave my friend about the book’s title and central metaphor:
Often when we help young people develop faith—or develop it in ourselves—it is a building project. You start with some foundational beliefs, then you build upon those, then you build upon the new ones, etc. etc., until you have a house (other options: house of cards; fortress of solitude). But one day you realize some of those early beliefs are untrue, or naive, or toxic, and because the whole structure is a Jenga tower, soon the whole things comes tumbling down.
But perhaps faith formation can be different from dogma-stacking. Consider the metaphor of a spiderweb. Pieces of spiderwebs get broken off or torn away all the time. As long as some of the central, core strands of webbing hold, the spider will build a new structure around them (without massive loss, trauma, etc.). At the end of the day, webbing is just more flexible and pliable than stones and wood.
It may just sound like a little rhetorical game, swapping in one building metaphor for another. But I sense there is some real substance there. A house of cards is much more susceptible to catastrophic failure than a spiderweb. And certain approaches to faith development really are house-of-cards-like: meticulously configuring a series of beliefs which all rely on each other to seem feasible.
So this summer we’ve been trying to experience an approach to faith formation that is more web-like. This includes identifying what the core strands of the web will be and learning to make them flexible and pliable instead of rigid, or brittle, or dogmatic. Here are the chapters of Woven that represent Miller’s suggested “core strands”:
God is good
God is powerful
God is just
God is joyful
God is with us
Jesus is Lord
Here’s the beauty of web-building: your web doesn’t have to be the same as Meredith Miller’s! Or as your parents’, or as mine. For instance, when Harbor discussed “God is powerful,” Dottie (one of our pastors) helped us think about non-coercive forms of power like persuasion. In other words, there are different ways to use God’s power as a strand of webbing in your faith—or, if it doesn’t work for you, you don’t have to use it that way.
We’ll be wrapping up our summer discussions this week as we talk about “God is with us.” (Maybe in a future series we will consider Jesus as Lord-with-a-capital-L.) Here’s a little preview of some of the themes we might explore:
God’s presence in the wilderness
God’s presence as a source of wisdom
God’s liberating presence
God’s patience
Examen practices
