Specifically, as I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, borrowing an insight from Andrew Root, our disenchantment in an increasingly post-Christian culture is largely due to attention blindness, habits of attention that direct our gaze away from God. Much of this attention blindness is due to our beliefs, assumptions, and expectations about what can or cannot be seen in the world. Our assumptions can help us see, and they can blind us.
Beyond seeing, our beliefs and expectations about the world affect the richness and variety of our experiences. This is an argument made by George Lindbeck in his widely read book The Nature of Doctrine. Linbeck's argument is that learning a faith, like learning a language, gives us symbols, rituals, and practices that make some experiences possible and enrich the kinds of experiences we have. Here is Lindbeck describing this:
[T]o become religious--no less than to become culturally or linguistically competent--is to interiorize a set of skills by practice and training. One learns how to feel, act and think in conformity with a religious tradition that is, in its inner structure, far richer and more subtle than can be explicitly articulated. The primary knowledge is not about the religion, nor that the religion teaches such and such, but rather how to be religious in such and such ways...[I]t is necessary to have the means for expressing an experience in order to have it, and the richer our expressive or linguistic system, the more subtle, varied, and differentiated can be our experience. To be religious, then, is learning to become competent. Learning to interiorize a set of skills that allow us--in ways we can't all on our own--to have certain experiences, and more subtle, varied and richer experiences at that. There are some meanings that only the practice of the faith can reveal.In short, faith isn't a list of propositions that we "believe." Faith is an experiential pathway leading us into a deeper and richer experience of ourselves and the world. Lindbeck once more:
There are numberless thoughts we cannot think, sentiments we cannot have, and realities we cannot perceive unless we learn to use the appropriate symbol systems. It seems, as the cases of Helen Keller and of supposed wolf children vividly illustrate, that unless we acquire language of some kind, we cannot actualize our specifically human capacities for thought, action and feeling. Similarly, so the argument goes, to become religious involves becoming skilled in the language of the symbol system of a given religion. To become a Christian involves learning the story of Israel and of Jesus well enough to interpret and experience oneself and one's world in its terms. A religion is above all an external word...that molds and shapes the self and its world...It is necessary to have the means of expressing an experience in order to have it, and the richer this means of expression the deeper and more varied will be our experience of the world. For there are numberless thoughts we cannot think, emotions we cannot feel, and realities we cannot perceive unless we become skilled and competent in these expressive systems. There are some meanings that only the practice of faith can reveal.
