Living the Real

The fraughts and failures of faith and how to live it rightly (even for the non-religious!)

• Matt Boettger • Episode 23

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In this episode, Matt takes a hard look at faith and how it can be our greatest asset but also our greatest enemy to a life well-lived.

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In my nearly 15 years of teaching. There's one particular story that I give as an illustration to teach an important point about faith, the importance of faith. Now you may be thinking, wait, I'm not a spiritual person, faith doesn't pertain to me. Yes, it does. Because whether you're a person of spirituality or not faith imbues every part of our life. And this is why it's an important episode today, because I've seen. The vexes of faith and how has destroyed relationships and destroyed individuals. And I want to stop that from happening. And my 15 years, I've noticed a particular pattern with certain types of faith that I see as inspiring and wonderful. And there's other kinds of faith that really draw me away. And I want to talk about this idea of faith and how we can truly live a more faithful life that brings purpose mean and fulfillment to our life. So let's start with this illustration, the story they share with my students to convey a point about faith, the basic elements of faith, say it is a nice cold blizzardy night. In Colorado. And I am desiring a nice hot cup of hot chocolate. I turned to my wife and I asked her, Hey, do we have any hot chocolate in the kitchen? She says, yes, absolutely. It's in the cupboard left of the fridge. So I go in open the cupboard, nothing there cupboard after cupboard, after cupboard, I look for this hot chocolate, desperate for a warm velvety cup of hot chocolate. And there's nothing there. I scour even the drawers. I go back to my wife and say, look, there's no hot chocolate. I don't know where it's at. She tells me no, no, no. There is. I'll go get it. She goes in the kitchen. Handful of minutes later, she comes back and there it is a hot cup of hot chocolate. Now what's my response response. A Oh my gosh. I couldn't find, I have no idea where it was. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm so excited that response of faith. B wait a minute. How do I not know? That you went in the kitchen saw for yourself. There was no hot chocolate texted your best friend immediately who lived nearby, who went to Starbucks, got hot chocolate knocked on the window in the kitchen. Secretly gave you the hot chocolate. You put it into a mug, brought it to me as if we had hot chocolate to prove a point that you were right. And I was wrong. Now the first option, we'll probably at least keep my relationship as status quo. The second one, for sure. That is not by faith, but basically prove it to me is going to be absolutely toxic destructive and is true. My live relationship, either lean towards divorce or at least I'm no longer living there. Same room with my wife. That's the important faith. And how it plays the part of our life now, because faith is such a part of our life. I also think is a very dangerous reality. I don't want to talk about the two problems I have seen today in today's episode about faith and how we can do six things to help us live more faithful life in the relationships around us, to ourselves. And if you do practice a form of spirituality, even in the context of God, so let's get going. My name is Matt Boettger. Welcome to living the real, I hope this week. Is the most real life possible for you yet? Okay, let's get going. Are you living the most real life possible? I ask myself this question all the time. Most of the time, the answer is I just don't know, but sometimes the answer is definitely not. This is why I have this podcast. I'm Matt Boettger and welcome to the show. Two small things. If you get a chance, please leave a review like on Apple podcasts and also check out my website, live in the real.com where I offer lots of resources on how to live the most real life possible now on with the show. So let's get right to it and talk about what I see are the two fundamental problems about faith. The first one I seen, and this is a recent. Discovery. And that is that I see where faith is. Everything to someone that's a danger. Faith should never be everything to someone. Rather, I think the better approach of faith is this idea by which we bring our faith to everything big difference. Let it not be that our faith is everything, but rather we bring our faith. To everything. We're an unpacked a little bit. It was a big distinction. When we make our faith, everything, our faith becomes impermeable, this like impermeable bubble and it's can become the disconnected from life. If you know anything from living the realness podcast, it's all about how do we live the most real life. And it's through a lens of discovery. And when our faith becomes everything, we create a separation from our faith and the world. Within again, a world becomes our adversary. And we'll talk about more about this in just a few minutes. And the second probably want to unpack today is this idea that we think we're living a life of faith when we're really living a life of belief. Okay. So what's the difference. It's actually pretty big now, of course, this is coming from the English language where we can have these different nouns and we can use them differently. Belief is about this idea by which the subject is me and individual and the object is another object. I can believe that Tahiti exists either. Been there. I've seen pictures and it's way too. Good to be true. It's like a unicorn. It's gorgeous. I've never been there, but I believe it exists because there's been enough pictures and I've had friends who've witnessed going there on their honeymoon and have come back with pictures that are similar to the ones I see on Google. So I believe that to Hedy exists faith on the other hand is different faith is this idea by which the faith that subject is me again, but the object is a another person, not a thing. I have faith in my wife. I believe she can do so many great things. And I have faith in my wife and the danger is that we think we live a life of faith when really it is one of belief. So what's a consequence of living a life of belief over that of faith. When you live a life of belief within faith, when you believe, and you think it's faith, then your belief is function or performance base. It's off the things that they do, not in the actual person, the consequence we engage our ideas about the person, rather than the person itself, our expectations become the gold standard and measure the quality of the relationship versus the actual person itself. It becomes a quantifiable relationship. We think we have faith in Samba reacting, according to belief and unpack this in a little bit more, just in a few minutes for faith. When the OD is a person it's now based on trust, connection based it's connection focused, and the consequence we engage the person itself, and our experience becomes the gold standard, not our expectations. At all. It reminds me of a really powerful quote that I want to share with you from this incredible philosopher, theologian, Carol I read this book, love and responsibility. One of the most influential books of my life, love and responsibility. Page one 35. He says this in the context of love, and it's a little meaty. So hang on to this, but this explains what it looks like when you have faith in someone over that of belief. Here's the quote. We'd love the person complete with all his or her virtues and faults and up to a point independently of those virtues. And in spite of those faults, the strength of such a love emerges most clearly when the beloved person stumbles when his or her weaknesses or even sins come into the open. One who truly loves to not then withdraw his love, but loves all the more loves and full consciousness of the other shortcomings and faults. And without an Elise approving of them. Now here's the key line for the quote, listen to this for the person as such, never loses its essential value. The emotion,

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Matt:

attaches itself to the value of the person remains loyal to the human being. Now that is me. We could spend this whole hour unpacking this, but we're not the gist of this is the idea that faith is this idea that surpasses the function of the person and attaches it to the person itself unconditionally and that's faith. And the danger I've seen is that people think they live a life of faith. But as our belief, it's functional. It's duck trying not about the things within the person. And I want to talk about how we can untwist this reality in live a deep faithful life. Whether it's spirituality or your mother or father, or your spouse, or your friends that you live a life of faith in them, rather than believe in the things they do that they do. And again, so many people I've seen turned their faith into belief and make it insular. And so it begins to atrophy, deep personalizes and becomes hard into the mystery of life love. And even God. Now I want to make this note of clarification. So you're probably thinking then what's the difference between faith trust? It sounds similar. And the, our trust is about credibility. It's about this idea of looking at someone maybe from a neutral lens or not a neutral lens and seeing what they do when they become trustworthy. And now you trust them. But of course at any point in time, that trust can be revoked very quickly by looking at what they do to measure whether they're trustworthy, faith, no longer seeks credibility and begins to interpret life through the lens of the quote above this idea that it sees the value of the person, whether they stumble or fall or hurt you, they still attach greatly to the value of the person. They don't just withdraw their love. Then they lean in all the more that's faith. Each violation. Each hurt is interpreted through the, to the Goodwill and remains loyal to him or her. Instead of responding through suspicion through a hurt, we like, man, I was expecting this from them. They did this to me. There's a difference between what I expected and what happened. And I feel that as you've heard in other episodes of that gap with Goodwill, that's a life of faith in someone. Because it remains loyal to the person, your mom, her dad. So trust is a raw material of faith, as it should never be blind. Now I'm not advocating faith to be blind. That leads to harmful relationships and religious cults, right? The opposite of faith is not doubt, but rather suspicion. And so we begin to cultivate trust in someone and eventually maybe they become so trustworthy. We begin to take to the next level, which is now faith. And in the same way, trust can be revoked. So can faith, but faith is as surrender to a person that you trust. We no longer examine what they do in scrutinize it. We actually fill it with Goodwill. That's faith. It's powerful. But how many times do we exchange faith with belief? And we're constantly examining them and judging them by their acts. See whether they're credible for our life. I think a great example of this. If you want, illustration is dating. I work on a college campus and I seen this all over the place that when a guy and a gal get together and start dating, they're the perfect example of which faith becomes everything to them. I see this over and over where the two couple come together. I've done it to my own life and it's really a terrible habit to be in. And your world becomes so immeshed with the person that you're just infatuated with the, you drop all of your hobbies. All of your friends, maybe even your school, which is dangerous. And you just immerse yourself in that relationship that you just discovered. That is the best example I can give of this idea when faith becomes everything. And so now you've revoked your entire lifestyle, your habits of life, and changed them dramatically. Just spin with this person you're infatuated with it is such a dangerous road to go on for tons of reasons. Because now you're no longer allowing that person that you really, really interested in to see you in the context of your life. That's an important measurement to see, Oh, would I be compatible with this person by incorporating their life into my life? But you don't. You simply just immerse yourself in revoke everything. And then finally, when things get quote old, you now want to go back to your normal habits, which actually can cause a rift in the relationship because now you look like a different person. What you used to be is always at the person's apartment, always be with them. Now you went out with your buddies while you went with your buddies. You're no longer like me. You see all these problems began to surface. They don't get to see your life and see weather. Oh my gosh. I would love to be a part of their life. I love their life or, you know what, gosh, I, I'm not really a big fan of their friends or what they do. These are important things. And that's like when you immerse yourself, when faith is everything you revoke the world and the world no longer becomes an advocate to help you inform your faith and grow your faith. So in the same way that relationships need to be tested, how they're tested is by incorporating not only your life with them, but your hobbies and your friends and your career and your education and your family, all of that is part of you that needs to be used for discernment and understanding and the same thing for faith. So the antidote to the above story is to practice bringing our faith to everything. And like in the same way that we want to bring our girlfriend or a friend, everything in our life, same thing we want to do in a practice idea of bringing our faith to everything. So what does that look like? How does that differ? We need to make a couple of notes that are important that both faith and love overlap tremendously because both have the person as an object. A second really important note about faith is that there is no such thing as absolute evil. Or badness that doesn't exist. Just like the same sense that there is no such thing as darkness, not a substance. It's an absence of light that which is bad and evil and all these things in the world is not something that's actually a thing that exists. It's a deprivation, a lack thereof, like a balloon not filled up all the way. And like the darkness is not a substance. It's just an absence of light. So faith acts like this spotlight on the world, revealing meaning and purpose light, and the dark parts of life and makes the bright spots of life even brighter. The purpose of faith is to look and see life and bring into life, to see the powerful meaning and purpose of life. Allowing faith to interpret the world around you through the lens of faith. It's the matrix, right? All since seen the zeros and the ones, and you see things differently and it's a powerful reality. And it allows the world on the other side, the flip side to inform, to correct, to untwist, to deepen and to mature our own faith. And we bring faith to the world around us. We move from passive to active faith. Through that principle of discovery. We discover commonality between us and even the midst of fundamentally different lenses of faith. We discover our own shortcomings in our faith life and presented with an opportunity to deepen, grow mature, our faith, and it fuels community-based faith. It does. What do I mean by this? Because the opposite of this, when our faith becomes everything, we live out of what I call sympathetic faith. Which basically means mutual experience. We have our own bubble. We gather the people around us who think and feel differently and we keep everyone out and it becomes this passive built reality of nothing more than shared experiences, which is really just self absorption. You just get other people around you who share the same experience of you. It's a very passive reality. It's not active. Is this you both mutually experienced the same kind of feelings about certain things. And we get upset with those who experiences do not align with our faith life. We simply just throw them out. We get, we, we pushed them out of our life and it becomes very narcissistic and turns into a fight faith in ourselves. So that sympathetic faith, that mutual experience slowly moves. What I believe in to tribalistic faith, which is different from community faith, which you mentioned above this idea that we're all together in this mutual experience against the world. It's commonalities about mutual anger and frustration. Have you seen this? I've seen this all over the place. It's hard to witness because part of these people are part of my faith community, but yet it's not the way I want to live my life. So this idea that we need to bring our faith to the world, because it expands our ability to have a deeper faith life and matures our faith and expands our faith. And deepens our faith. And I'll give you a powerful story by which it did that to me in my own life, a number of years ago. And the second air is this idea that when belief becomes the priority over faith in relationships, I think it's a great metaphor. Is this idea of connect the dots, drawing that I see my sons doing every once in a while with connect the dots, you have the dots with the numbers and the boys have to then go and follow the numbers through the dots to create this. Portrait this image that you see of an animal or a cartoon character. And when it comes to this idea of belief, and faith beliefs are like those little dots, those little Dodges, little concrete anchors that show concrete elements of this page, but it's all it is. They're points of reference and faith are the lines that connect the dots without faith. The paper remains scattered dots across the page. But we're phase reveals the beauty, the image, the meaning, the purpose, the person behind the dots believe focuses on the dots. The things that people do, faith focuses on a line between the dots, which reveals the person trust is grounded on a series of beliefs, grounded in dot credibility. Faith is not even considered dots. And places, the confidence in the person for being that person now, again, not at a blind faith, but because you've established a relationship, you don't have faith in someone you've never met before you meet them. You become acquaintances you increase trust and maybe at some time it becomes a person of faith. You are faithful to them. Go again, go back to Carol. was quoted as mentioned from love and responsibility. This idea that even the midst of a heart. Even the midst of a difficult situation of a hurt of a transgression of an offense. We actually lean into the relationship because we're faithful to it because the emotion, my desire remains faithful to the value of the person, not their production. This is a life of faith. It's hard to get there. This is why many people consider these supernatural virtue. Now I understand that some of you may not have faith in something beyond that, of the visible and empirical world. My invitation to you is simply discovering the indispensably of faith for fulfillment in general. As I suggested earlier, without faith, all relationships end without faith, love dies. Without faith discoveries are placed with the term determination and control and without faith suspicion becomes the virtue of the day. Because faith is seeking the person for the person's sake. Now, my hall of fame story revolves around my time at Starbucks. This was decades ago. I maybe 15, 16, 17 years ago when I worked at Starbucks, this was an incredible moment for me because I was a person still in a person of faith. And the environment I worked in was very diverse and people with all different types of faith, life and beliefs. And those are some of my best days by which I felt like I was the most faithful to my own spiritual practice and my beliefs. Why? Because I brought my faith to that world and they knew what I stood for, what I believed in and I was true to it and they were true to me and it really deepened my faith life and it profoundly deepened my relationships because they were not shallow. Cause in the midst of strong disagreement, we still profoundly appreciate each other and love each other. And in fact, this is hard for me to say, because this just shows, it reveals a number of things, but I know to this day, if I needed something. From one of them, even though I haven't really talked to them in over 15 years, Claire clean, Rissa Stephanie van, Kathy, Diane, Spencer, Trevor, Heidi, Shannon, Kristen, the names go on and on. If I needed something today and I reached out to them, I know that a doubt they'd be there to help me. And I'm not sure I'm convinced that's with all my people around me today. That's fascinating though. We thought very differently about issues. We're still able to profoundly love each other and appreciate each other. And man, my faith was big and deep, then both in my spirituality and in the relationships around me. On the other side, I have a negative story and there were, why was a time of when I was really zealous and faithful about my relationship and spirituality. And I went to my sister-in-law at the time and talked to her about it and how incredible it was and how she was wrong. And I was right. And I remember by the time I was done that conversation, she told me. You're the single reason why I never want to become what you are, man, that hit hard. And that's a person that is a perfect illustration of someone who has their life and Liz by their faith life and it's everything to them because they couldn't even see the person before me. All I was trying to do is win a flipping argument and not be expanded by her horizons and build a, see her own faith life and how it's different from mine. And if I went down that direction of discovery, how different maybe that conversation would have gone. So I encourage you to look and do some examination and see by which is faith, everything, or do you bring your faith to everything? And are you living a life of faith? That's really just a belief or you're really making that hard struggle to live a life of faith. Faithfulness to your mom or your dad or spouse, or your girlfriend, or a boyfriend, brother, your sister, or whatever it may be. And so I have six things I want to share with you to help you right now. Be able to increase your capacity, to bring your faith to the world and live more of a life of faith or than a life of belief. Number one, for talking about bringing your faith to the world. Is I really challenge you that if you do live in a bubble to experience someone who has a very different faith life than you and discover still what unites the both of you, what brings things in common? Number two, have one conversation, a real conversation with someone who has a different set of beliefs than you, and really lean into the differences. The first one is all about finding commonality, even the midst of difference. The second one is leading in this idea of difference in leaning into it and allowing it to be unsettling, but still be able to embrace the person. The midst of the strong differences in belief do not resort to unhelpful and a reasonable statements like, ah, love is love and no big deal, but really unpack the differences between the two of you. And at the end celebrate the fact that you're still wonderful friends or acquaintances and enjoy life together. Third one. Become friends with people who believe, or have a faith different from you. This is not just a one-stop shop. This is muni to find friends who have a different outlook on the way. Life is different sets of belief, different faith life. It's indispensable because we need to live a faith seeking, understanding, and not narcissism on the context of belief versus faith. Striving to live a life of faith over that. A belief. Step one is to really, as I mentioned before, in previous episodes to fill this gap between experience expectation with Goodwill, when we experienced something from someone, a conflict with someone that we don't go into, amazed suspicion that we begin to approach it through the benefit of doubt. It doesn't mean we still don't confront them. Of course, we try to confront them and I struggle with this confronting them. But we do it in less critical way. And from the framework of giving them the benefit of the doubt, I know you never would have meant this, but this is how it felt to me. What's going on, right? The benefit of the doubt that leaning into faith and not belief in the context of disagreement. If you have a tendency to retreat during times of conflict, disagreement, reject the tendency and lean into the relationship itself, understand why they believe what they believe for the sake of connecting. Th thank them for their courage to share what they shared, because they probably, it was probably uncomfortable for them and tell them you do disagree and that doesn't change your appreciation for sharing what they shared. Don't just let it slide, but embrace disagreement and embrace conflict. And finally, the last one. Participate in difference, enthusiastically participate in a hobby, joy, or someone, which you may not like to participate in. This expands our capacity to really live a life of faithfulness, to someone, not just engaging them for mutual experience that we bought a guy, we would like this. We both like Thien the Marvel movies, but engaging them on a level by which maybe you have no interest. But because it's an interest to them again, then you want to dissipate in it because you don't, you care less about the event, the hobby, the extracurricular activity, but about them. And so it brings them life. And so it brings you life. You see a distinction. One is again, practicing a set of beliefs. One is leaning into faith and being faithful to a friend. And Dean fatal to a friend means it means being part of their life, even when it's not fun for you. So I hope this episode was helpful. I hope it opened up your eyes to the difference between faith and belief in seeing a world by which we bring our faith to the world and how expansive it is and how it can change our life and bring greater fulfillment to it. I hope you have a wonderful week and I'll see you next episode, take care and bye-bye thank you. Listen to this episode of living the real. If you want to check out more information, go to living the real.com and sign up for my newsletter. If you want to support this podcast, you do that at patrion.com/ltr as well as one time. Payments at Venmo and PayPal in the show notes. See you all next episode. Take care. Bye-bye.