FINDING FAITH IN STRANGE PLACES
Cheryl Walker
July 6, 2003
Well, it is finally summertime in New York City. After a long and dreary spring, summer has arrived in full force. No need to wonder what the weather forecast will be for the next month or two…it will be the same everyday. Hazy, hot and humid with a chance of afternoon showers. Don’t bother watching the weather channel every day—they will tell you the same things: bring an umbrella, wear light colored clothing, drink plenty of water and stay in air conditioning if you can. I know that officially Memorial day begins the summer recess and summer officially starts on the summer solstice but the real summer season doesn’t usually start until the 4th of July weekend.
Now, how many of you are visiting New York on vacation today. Raise your hands. Welcome and enjoy New York. Be sure to spend lots of money—we need it. Well what about the rest of you? Don’t you have summer homes, or friends with summer homes you could go visit? Perhaps you are like me and enjoy New York City on holiday weekends. The city takes on a different feeling. So many people leave for the weekend that it seems almost, but not quite, empty. People don’t seem to rush around in quite the same way. Maybe because its too hot, or maybe because we just don’t feel the same need. There’s a seat to be found on the subway or bus, taxi cabs are plentiful, and we not up to rushing anywhere. In fact, the only rush, during rush hour, is the rush to get out of town.
And except for the lines to sit in an air conditioned movie theatre viewing the latest summer block buster, lines everywhere seem much shorter. The supermarket checkout express lane, really does mean express. One can get in and out of a department store in less than an hour and there is no wait for a table at restaurants. But the one place where I am most thankful that there are no lines, is at the very first church I ever attended as an adult. I use church here very loosely. It is the church of the holy billiard cue, the chapel of the blue chalk, the sanctuary of the slick stick, it is also know as Amsterdam Billiards Club.
Now it may seem to you a stretch to call a billiard club a church, but if a church is where fellow believers come to practice their faith then indeed my billiard club, fancy words for pool hall, is a church. It was the first place where I began to understand and practice faith. Don’t get me wrong, I grew up practicing religion, but religion and faith are not always the same thing. I knew the rules of my childhood religion and I followed them as best as I could, but I did not possess faith.
Faith seemed antithetical to reason and like so many of us I was not comfortable using it in my personal vocabulary, that is to say the vocabulary of my life. Faith was that thing that people turned to when reason could not be found. Have faith, God will provide. But I knew God didn’t provide food for the table, the toil of the hands of women and men provided food for the table. Have faith that tomorrow will bring a better day, well sometimes, tomorrow isn’t better and the next day isn’t and the day after that. Faith seemed to me just a shorter way of saying I don’t know.
So imagine my surprise when I had my a-ha moment of faith at a pool hall. I wish I could tell you the exact date, but I can’t remember it. I do remember the experience though. I was practicing alone for a tough match I had coming up. A friend and worthy opponent had beaten me the last time we played, massacred would be a better description. And I was determined that our upcoming match would have a different result. I can be a bit competitive, okay really competitive when it comes to pool. I hate to lose and I make it a point of trying never to lose to the same person twice. Vengeance was going to be mine, not the Lord’s!
So I was putting in the extra hours of practice time I needed to make sure my skills were honed to their best level. I was working on remembering all the things that I had been taught from my coach and all the little lessons I had picked up from other players, in particular old men with gravely voices. The first lesson I learned and the most important lesson I learned is that you do NOT just get up there and shoot at a ball. In fact that’s the last thing you do. A game of pool is not about the one ball you sink, its about one ball at a time. Like life a game is a journey. Each ball is just a different step on journey. Each step is important but if you only took one step you would never complete a game, much less win one. And the first step in any journey is choosing which path to take.
Rarely on a pool table is there only one shot to take, usually there are many choices. Some choices are a little more difficult than others but they may result in greater rewards. Some are easier for one person than for another person. There are many paths that can be followed and rarely is the path to choose crystal clear. But choose one must and so with cue stick in hand you walk around the table sizing up the various shots. This is a good time to put some chalk on your cue. Not only because its good for the cue, but it makes you appear to know exactly what you are doing, even when you’re thinking "well I don’t have a clue as to what to do next". Another good life lesson, at least look like you know what you’re doing.
After you choose your path, the next question you’re faced with is how will you strike the cue ball. Will you hit it in the center so that it will stop when it contacts the ball you’re trying to put in the pocket. Or will you hit it a little above or below center to make it roll forward or backwards. Maybe you want to hit it a little to the left or the right so that it deflects in a certain way. Its not only which path you will follow but how will you journey along that path. The way you choose to follow your path will make the journey either easier or harder, and the easy way is not always the best way.
After you’ve used your reason to chose the path and how to follow it you take a couple of practice strokes, without touching the ball of course. Then you lean over the table get ready for the shot, take a moment to breathe and center yourself staying perfectly still, I like to call this the Zen moment…. and then you shoot.
That particular practice session was not going very well. I was pretty sure that I was doing everything right, but still I was missing more shots than I should have. Something was lacking in my game and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. And then it occurred to me. I realized that at the very moment of impact there was something I was missing, I was missing faith and yet it was the one thing that I needed to be perfectly sure. A-ha!
I needed faith that the path I had chosen was right and good and the way I had chosen to journey the path was true. I needed faith in my ability to complete the task at hand and faith that through my action good things could happen. I began to understand, perhaps for the first time in my adult life, that faith did not need to be antithetical to reason, it could be an extension of it. A door had opened that day, a door to reasoned faith. I had only to step through. I had discovered faith in a pool hall, a strange place indeed.
The discovery of faith did not make me a super spectacular player afterwards. It wasn’t as if now that I had faith I was never going to miss another shot. Far from it. If I made every shot I took, well I’m not sure I’d be here this Sunday morning. You’d have to turn on ESPN to see me as I would be on the professional tour. No I still miss shots, everyone does. But it is interesting why I miss them. Sometimes I miss them because my faith wavers at that second of impact. I lose faith in my abilities and faith in my reasoning. And sometimes I miss them because my faith is blind. I believe beyond reason that I could make a certain shot. A shot even the great Minnesota Fats could not make, because it is impossible for anyone. And that is a danger of an unreasoned faith, we are apt to make unreasonable decisions with undesirable and sometimes even horrific consequences. Blind faith may be just as bad as no faith, and in some cases it may be worse.
It would be a leap of faith, so to speak, to say that it was a short trip from the pool hall to the sanctuary of a Unitarian Universalist church. That leap of faith I was not yet ready to make. My faith was just beginning to blossom and it was taking me places but not to church, at least not yet. I was getting on the faith train and the next destination, of all places was the kitchen.
I was not a stranger to the kitchen. The kitchen was more than just a place to find plates on which to put take out food. I had become a pretty decent cook, much to the surprise of my mother. As a child, the kitchen was the last place I could be found except when I was foraging through the refrigerator. But more than liking to cook, I like to eat. And the only way to eat what you want when you want it is to learn how to make it yourself. So I learned to cook. But I never learned how to bake.
My mother was an excellent baker. She could whip out a pineapple upside down cake without the use of a recipe, just going on instinct. And every birthday I was sure to get a homemade cherry pie, my favorite. But baking was skill that I had never mastered. It wasn’t even one that I attempted very much, unless you count cakes from pre-made mixes where all you have to do is add an egg and some water. But baking this way is like painting by number and then thinking you’re Picasso. Real baking is with flour and baking powder, and yeast and vanilla and all sorts of things.
I always thought that the reason I didn’t bake was because it was my mother’s forte and I was afraid I could never measure up. But the real reason was that I lacking faith, because baking is about faith. When you cook you can always make mid course corrections. Not enough salt? Just add a little more. Forgot an ingredient? Well, unless you forgot the main ingredient like say the chicken in chicken stew you can either do without it or add it later. But baking is another story altogether. You mix your ingredients in the right proportions, and in the right order and then you put it in the oven. And once its in the oven that’s it. You can’t go back and add the sugar midway through the process. All you can do is have faith that you have added all the necessary ingredients, that the oven can hold the right temperature with as little variation as possible, and that you will leave the cake in the oven for the correct amount of time. Baking is all about faith.
Not sure of my faith yet I started with cookies. The good thing about cookies is that you can make a test cookie. You bake one and then if it turns out okay you make the whole batch and if not, well you figure out what went wrong, fix it and make another test cookie until you get it right. Cookies are a good way to bridge that gap between faithlessness and faithfulness.
As my faith has grown so has my adventures in baking. From cookies I worked my way up to biscuits and then all the way to cherry pie. And when I bake a cherry pie on my birthday I have faith that I can do it and faith that my mother’s spirit is with me as I roll out the dough and measure the ingredients and I can almost hear her whispering be patient, have faith.
There have been other places where I found faith before finally coming to a Unitarian Universalist congregation. I suspect they were pointers on my journey to finding a faith community I could call my own. There were lessons to be learned before I could know which community of faith could fit my faith rather than ask me to fit its faith. It is the beauty of Unitarian Universalism that we are here not to show you the way, but let you find your own way. Just as pool opened the door to my finding my faith, Unitarian Universalism, may be best at doing that too. Opening a door for you to find your faith.
Pool taught me to hold onto a reasoned faith, and Unitarian Universalism at its very center is a reasoned faith. Our fourth principle is to promote and affirm an individual’s right to a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. We do not ask that you suspend your reason to find your faith. Instead we challenge you to use them both. Because pool also taught me that faith without action, was of no use at all. Without actually following through and striking the cue ball it did not matter how weak or strong was my faith. And so as Unitarian Universalists we are called to put our faith in action. Called to develop a faith that by recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of every person we feel compelled to help realize a world where all people are treated with respect and compassion.
And baking taught me that faith demands patience. It takes time to develop faith and it takes time to recognize when our faith and our reason are in synch with each other. Patience to know that our actions compelled by our faith may not bear fruit today, or in the next day, but that if we keep our faith and keep our eyes on the prize, justice and peace will arrive some day.
How did my match turn out, well that night when we played, my reasoning was sound, my body was fit and my faith was strong. And on that night, I won my match. But he beat me again the next time we played, I guess he reclaimed his faith somewhere along the way. And that was another lesson I needed to learn about faith. Sometimes, no matter how strong our faith is, no matter how sound our reasoning is, we will not win that game of pool. But it is not a reason to give up on faith, it is just to know that faith alone cannot overcome all things. We are not the final arbiters of our destination, we are just the major actor.
It is strange sometimes the places where we find our faith. Places where we least expect. Think about your lives and ask yourselves where is my faith to be found today? You might be surprised at the answers you get. It might be in a pool hall, or a kitchen, or a beach, or stroll through these city streets on a holiday weekend in summer. Its there waiting for you to find. It is calling your name and opening a door. You only need to walk through.
Amen and have faith that you are loved.