Faith is NOT intellectual assent but nourishing reverence...

When I was a hot shot young university student on the 10 year plan (yes, it took me 10 years to complete my under-graduate degree given a number of detours including getting my Conscientious Objector status during the Vietnam War, working with the farm worker movement with Cesar Chavez, following the Grateful Dead for a summer and related diversions) I was certain that I understood religion.  Forty years later, I'm not nearly so certain - and that's a good thing. 

I have found two quotes that get close for me; both come from Ralph Heintzman's book Rediscovering Reverence.

+ Rejoining the spiritual conversation of your tradition means listening again to its stories, myths, symbols, art, music and poetry, but with a new mind. This may involve shedding many assumptions about "religion" that Western culture has been gradually building up for five hundred years... Contrary to our settle assumption since the 18th century, "religion" is not primarily a form of thought or a set of propositions, but a form of action or practice.  Faith, as Terry Eagleton says, is "performative rather than propositional." Before it can become something you think or say or agree to, it has to be something you do.

In another part of the book Heintzman quotes Karl Rahner as saying "that the answer to the question, 'Who is God' is 'love your neighbor... so that you genuinely transcend yourself in a properly incomprehensible unselfishness, and then you will know what is meant by God, even if you were never to hear the word, the name, God."

+ To sum up: a religious life is a life of reverent practice, individual and collective actions that, by their very reverence, bring the seeker continuously or repeatedly into the presence of a sacred mystery or power, always hoping and seeking to participate in the mystery and to be empowered by its presence - empowered for reverent and transforming actions in the world and within themselves.... People do not go to church or to a synagogue, mosque or temple in order to be made more ethical, more moral, as many 18th century thinkers assumed, though that is normally one of the results.  And they do not do it for motives of psychological hygiene, as many 20th century thinkers assumed, though that too is one of the usual outcomes. No, they do it, instead, out of an unquenchable desire to come into the presence of a sacred mystery, to participate in it and to be empowered by the experience.  As Paul put it, "The kingdom of God depends not on talk but on power."

And so the journey of this ministry of renewal continues:  our emphasis is on the practices of faith.  As Heintzman concludes:  the only thing you need to bring to the journey is a spirit of reverence, hope and trust.  Thanks be to God.