by

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

—Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”

Here are three things that I learned when I was very young and that have had an enormous influence on my spiritual life.

Satan can hear every word I say but can never read my mind. If I repent and am forgiven, and then commit the same sin again, my previous repentance will be revoked. If a prophet or Church leader tells me to do something that is wrong, and I do it anyway, then I will be blessed for my obedience and the Church leader will be punished.

It would be difficult to overestimate the degree to which these early beliefs messed up my spiritual life. The first one turned my prayer life into an elaborate game of keep away, where I tried to conceal my true intentions in public and only acknowledge them in silent prayer where Satan couldn’t hear them.

The second caused me to spend much of my 20s and 30s in a state of perpetual religious terror, certain that I had sinned beyond God’s capacity to forgive and that any of the hard-won forgiveness I had experienced was nullified by my inability to stop being such a sinner.

And the third created a toxic relationship with the Church that compelled me, for a time, to surrender my own judgment to institutional pronouncements. It tempted me to substitute obedience for moral reasoning and to justify my own spiritual errors with the comforting thought that, if I just obeyed hard enough, somebody else would have to pay for it.

These are all examples of what cognitive scientists now call the “anchoring heuristic.” A heuristic is a mental shortcut that we use to use to make decisions quickly, without putting a lot of thought into them because a rule of thumb usually produces answers that are good enough for our immediate needs. The anchoring heuristic causes us to take an initial piece of information and use it as a reference point for future deliberations. We may move away from the anchor a little bit, but the initial information defines our range of possible responses.

I find the metaphor of the anchor especially interesting in matters of faith. The purpose of an anchor is to keep a ship from moving around. This is a good thing when a ship is in the harbor. It keeps it close to the shore and firmly rooted in place. Ultimately, however, being safely anchored in a harbor is not what ships are for.

But leaving the harbor is a dangerous proposition for a person on a ship. You might get lost. You might hit a storm and sink. And you might find someplace that you like better than your own harbor and stay there. It happens all the time. People don’t come back, or they change so much while they are at sea that nobody even recognizes them when they return.

I am, of course, talking about journeys of faith here. I don’t actually know anything about how real ships work. I read in Moby Dick, but that was a long time ago. I do, though, know a few things about trying to navigate the vast sea of my own faith without the anchors of my childhood belief. It is incredibly difficult.

Matthew Arnold, who wrote the wonderful poem excerpted in the epigraph quite famously argued that we should maintain our faith in God, even though He does not exist, because what else are we supposed to write poetry about? When I first encountered his arguments as an English major at BYU, I thought he was a nut. But now I think he was probably right: the faith that creates culture is not quite the same as the faith that is created by belief.

Some of the most profoundly religious people I know no longer consider themselves to be religious believers at all. And there is a specificity to these non-beliefs. My friends who used to be Catholic see the world very differently than my friends who used to be Evangelical or who used to be Mormon. The anchors of faith persist, even in unbelief.

This, I think, is one of the reasons that I still define myself as a believer, and generally a contented one. I am not the same kind of believer that I used to be. I no longer talk to God in code in order to fool Satan. I see repentance as something very different than double-entry accounting. And I no longer look to the institutional Church to relieve me of my responsibility to exercise moral reason. I am pretty sure that I have lifted up dozens of the anchors that once defined my faith. Maybe even hundreds.

But there are thousands more holding me firmly in place in ways that I do not fully understand. These anchors don’t define me as a person, or even as a person of faith. But they do create the space in which my spiritual journeys must occur, and they constrain, but not completely, the routs that they must take.

And that’s OK. Because a completely open sea is really scary, and I just don’t have time to land in every port.