Faith (August 2013) by Joy

Growing up in a religious home, ‘faith’ was one of those words that was thrown into conversations with very reverent, deliberate tones, and met with knowing nods and great Christian sincerity.  And it was also one of those words that whenever someone asked me what it meant, my mind went blank and my palms got sweaty.  I just didn't know.  

There was a vague sense that to have faith would make my life better, it would make me better.  And perhaps it possibly somehow related to ‘trust’.  Maybe I believed that Faith = trusting in good.

Sitting to write this now, my mind is blank and my palms are sweaty.  I’m surprised that so little has changed since my evangelical days.  I still want to be a better person living a better life marked by some great faith.  Mostly I want to stop worrying so much and live with a peace that melts the icy knot of fear that burrowed into my stomach decades ago and has never warmed enough to disappear

.

But it turns out that I am so tired (I mean literally exhausted) of living my life with the assumption that to have faith is to trust that ‘good’ things will happen at the exclusion of ‘bad’ things.  It’s difficult to explain, but life experience has taught me over and over again that the one thing we can trust is that beautiful, exhilarating and ‘good’ things are exactly as likely and expected as ugly, defeating and ‘bad’ things. 

Faith is a problematic word for me because I get stuck.  I get stuck in the who’s and the what’s…I get stuck in the nouns that we substitute for the word ‘good’ in my previously stated faith equation.  Some options I've considered for this equation in the past include:

1.  Faith = trusting in (God):  In the God I grew up knowing who was a father, a male.  Who gives caveats to the powerful and consolation prizes to the weak.  Who unleashes violence with some frightening sort of calculation.

2.  Faith = trusting in (nature):  In Mother Nature who provides lavishly and drums out a cadence of life.  But who unleashes violence with some frightening sort of arbitration.

3. Faith = trusting in (reason): In science and technology and innovation that makes life easier for some, more complicated for others, and nearly always perpetuates violence against other sentient beings.

4. Faith = trusting in (the inherent goodness of people):  As in, believing that our violence and hatred will be kept to a minimum.  Or that the propensity to rape and mutilate is the exception whether in war time or peace time.

Faith = trusting in words or rocks or clay or fashion or melodies or silences or vacuum cleaners or football or turkeys or sky or bells or laughter or life or death or saviors or communism or poetry or democracy or the forces of capitalist markets, etc.

At this point in my life I am realizing to choosing to place my faith in anything at all is exactly the reason I’m well on the way to a stomach ulcer before the age of 30.  Putting faith in anything at all guarantees a disappointing let-down of a crash into reality.  

In the end, I am stunned that the definition of faith that makes the very most sense to me, that gives me the most peace about the state of the crazy world comes from the Christian bible:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see.

Faith has no concrete, tangible or absolute noun.  It is a feeling and the vague sense that life is both all good and all bad, all beauty and all pain, all life and all death.  And that it should be lived to the absolute fullest despite and because of it all.

And now a poem, which as usual says everything more succinctly and lyrically than any essay possibly could:

Before He Makes Each One by Rainer Maria Rilke
Before he makes each one
of us, God speaks.

Then, without speaking,
he takes each one
out of the darkness

And these are the cloudy
words God speaks
before each of us begins:

"You have been sent out
by your senses.  Go
to the farthest edge
of desire, and give me
clothing: burn like a great
fire so that the stretched-out
shadows of the the things
of the world cover
me completely.
Let everything happen 
to you: beauty and terror.
You must just go--
no feeling is the farthest 
you can go.  Don't let
yourself be separated 
from me.  The country
called life is close.
By its seriousness,
you will know it.
Give me your hand." 

-Joy