How does religious faith, seen in those Mennonite hostages, provide reslience? Does such faith demand there’s some divine superman who swoops in and saves the day?
No. Once again, we’ll look at human behavior for the lived meaning of religious beliefs. As we’ve said in earlier chapters, beliefs about God show their meaning by how they get used. And we’ve seen already that these beliefs “boomerang” back to us, shaping our behavior.
So, how does belief in God shape resilience? Belief in a loving, protecting God provides, what psychologists call, a “holding environment.” A pioneering scholar of human development, D. W. Winnicott, used “holding environment” to describe the psychological space one experiences when one feels safe – especially safe enough to explore and risk. “Holding” is provided through the care of an abiding, loving person who does not overprotect and smother.
In infancy, one’s first holding environment is provided, typically, by a mother.[1] Each stage of our developmental journey and life’s work, ideally, provides us with other such holding environments.
Faith in God, then, is a divine holding environment where the believer feels that he is safe, but also that he’s enabled to strike out into the unknown and take a risk, confident he’ll be “held.” That sense of being held by God extends even to danger and death.
Thus, people of faith can experience an unshakeable safety. William James’s masterpiece on religious psychology, The Varieties of Religious Experience, repeatedly describes the unusual sense of safety known by committed believers.[2] James describes it (with some bafflement): “If you ask how religion thus falls on the thorns and faces death, and in the very act annuls annihilation, I cannot explain the matter, for it is religion’s secret, and to understand it you must yourself have been a religious man. . .”[3]
As those Mennonites repeatedly sang in their hymn, “So, when death’s hour draws nigh, I need not fear; The angel of Thy love will still be near.”
Death and Resilience
Especially as we face our own mortality or lose a beloved through death, we need resilience. Here, religious people have tested maps of guidance. They have sacred scriptures, familiar rituals, beloved music, and ancient teachings that help them through this wilderness.
Admittedly, the world’s great religions have quite different ideas about what happens when we die. Is “that place” a realm of joyful reunion with loved ones (popular “heaven” books), a resurrection into a radically different sort of body (traditional Christianity), reincarnation into another life (Hinduism), dissolution of our impermanent self into not-self (Buddhism). (I’ll have more to say about an afterlife in the final, eighth trail, “Resurrection.”)
But, as we have been saying throughout this book, we’re going to turn our attention to this world – to human behavior we can observe, and not invisible divine beings. So, what do the religious do with their beliefs?
Let’s look at those Mennonites. Their traditional beliefs about Christ and God’s power shaped their response to their captivity – those beliefs boomeranged back to their own lives. So, just as Jesus commanded and did himself, they prayed for their “enemies,” their captors – probably within earshot of them! They daily reminded these violent gang members that they loved them and forgave them – just like Jesus Christ. And they unceasingly prayed for their own release. They waited expectantly, preparing themselves, confident God’s power could open doors.
When that open door finally appeared after two anxious months of captivity, they were ready. They quietly escaped into the night, walking for miles over difficult terrain, guided by the stars.
(To be continued April 21, Chapter Four: Episode 19)
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[1] https://ebrary.net/248436/sociology/educational_implications_kohutian_object_relations_theory#266468
[2] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901-02) web publication https://www.truthunity.net/books/william-james-the-varieties-of-religious-experience. In The Varieties, James concludes with a summary of the characteristics found in ordinary believers, especially emphasizing safety: “An assurance of safety and a temper of peace . . .” (61) This emphasis on safety arises from many interviews by James and others, such as this from a 49 year-old man: “God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person... He answers me again and again, often in words so clearly spoken . . usually a text of Scripture, unfolding some new view of him and his love for me, and care for my safety.” (318)
[3] Ibid, 48.