Faith. I’ve been struggling with it.
Faith seems silly and foolish. Why believe something without
experiencing it yourself? It could be a lie. Then why do we believe our science
and history textbooks? Because the authors have citations and degree letters after
their names? Those people could be lying, too, and often they are.
The obvious solution to the possibility of deception is
skepticism. The only problem is, skepticism robs the world of joy. You must experience
everything, touch everything, or else not care at all and fall into apathy. I
know both these extremes, and both stem from a lack of trust. Trust may get us
hurt when we trust humans, fallen sinful changeable humans, but it will never,
I repeat, never, get us hurt when we trust God.
But back to the basic premise. How can we even know there is
a God if we don’t have physical, substantial proof? Well, we do. That’s a topic
for another article though, because the primary way to trust in God is through
faith. We are obliged to believe things when we can’t see them at the moment.
We are obliged to believe the word of mouth and word of thousands of other
people on the idea of God.
See, that is the beauty of logic. It’s relieving that we
have a built in scanner for reasonable claims. We can examine the process of
deduction or elimination someone asks us to follow and determine if it is right
or wrong.
At some point we must go beyond logic, for obsession with
rational step-by-step thinking is confining. That is what has led to this wild embrace
of lawlessness and “freedom” in our current society, or spur-of the-moment
decisions and the live-it-up mentality. Rules, guidelines, fences, paths, are
confining in themselves. After all, if you follow the path, you never see the
rest of the forest. It takes trial and error for us to sometimes understand that the path was
chosen because it was the best one.
We have to move beyond a self-centered point of view and realize someone before
us was wise. Of course, not every human path is the best, and exploring off
roads may lead to a better one, eventually there may be many good paths all
crisscrossing about in the woods. The important part, though, is that they
reach their destination. A path that goes in circles is no good at all. This is
where I must depart from the path analogy.
Look at these pictures. These are the virtue of Faith. They
all relate in a way as apparently complex and yet as simple in intent as that
spider web. How?
God, as St. Thomas More said, made man to serve Him wittily
in the tangles of his mind. The tangles, the spider web of seemingly infinite
complexity, the billions of choices we make in our lives, the subtle influences
of our body chemistry, our neurotransmitter levels, our hormones. Yet He, with
a Mind so far above, so far beyond, so encompassing in comparison to ours, sees
each and every fragile strand that has been created since he started us
spinning, and to Him it is all incredibly simple. So He is constantly giving us
little nudges, little tugs on our strings to remind us, “Hey, back here. This
way. This is where you are going.” And slowly we my wander and weave our way
back to him. The heartrending beauty of it is, however, that we may not. Being
the obstinate little spiders//creatures that we are – only because He made us
with free will – we may tug back and
pursue our own direction, walking in a straight line away from him or going
round and round the same one. Eventually, we wear out. He never does. We either
give in or stubbornly shut our minds entirely off to His warning pulses.
There has always been something lacking, a shallowness, not
about profound beauty like a sunset or a field of wheat in late August, but in
my experience of it. I’ve striven to unite myself with it, and felt helpless
and frustrated with this lack within myself. Sometimes, seeing the golden-red
rays of a sunset spill across house fronts on my way home from work, I look
away. I don’t know what to do with such beauty. You can only stare so long, and
the feeling does not go away, that frenzied desperation and simultaneous silent
awe.....
I can only be at peace with
intense beauty, I have found, when, like intense pain, I lift it up to God and
let it go. Stop trying to understand why it provokes such reactions in me. Stop
trying to wrap my peabrain around its depth. In fact, I would argue the only
way to properly see beauty, to appreciate without the blinding wince that
arises from our lack of comprehension, is to understand first that it is a mere
shattered fragment reflecting God. In other words, all we see must me ordered
to lead us to God, if not in its very essence at least in our perception of it.
If we look at horrific ugliness, at the hideousness of evil acts, the squalor
of suffering, “with the right eyes,” it will not disturb us. Faith’s armor, or
clarifying pair of glasses, if you will, protect our souls from the fallen emotions associated with the object.
If we look at magnificent, transcendent beauty, at a breathtaking scene in a
master’s painting or that particular crystal silence of a dawn by a mountain lake,
with the eye(glasses)s of faith, we will not feel hopeless or hurt. Oh, the
beauty might wound us. Faith’s eyeglasses are not sunglasses. To look at the
sun through them would be only to increase its dazzling, terrible brilliance.
But we would see the truth, for the glasses of Faith do not obscure, do not
dim, do not confuse. They do not change the world, they correct a fault in our
vision. Just as a nearsighted person does not see a distant horizon as it
really is, unless he puts on his convex (concave??) lenses, we cannot see
anything for what it really is unless we put on the corrective sight of faith.
It’s a negative thing sometimes, not a positive, so far as
the definition of those words is mathematical. Often Faith is not so much an
embrace but a turning away. This is a fundamental part of accusations against
religious or faithful people; that they bury their heads in the sand, ignore
facts, blind themselves. The truth of the statement remains despite their
skewing of it. Think about it. To have faith in its essence we must turn away
from doubt, and to protect our faith we must turn away from evil things. To
have health we must protect against sickness. To lose weight we must turn away
from junk foods as well as turning towards exercise. To overcompensate one way
and slack at the other leads to a weak body or a body that is working against
itself. If we were to pursue the ideal body (not that we should…bodies shall
never be perfect and it is foolish to seek perfection in them. This is an
analogy) we would have both to their full extent: demanding yet not destructive
exercise, and the healthiest diet possible. Like G.K. Chesterton said, the
Church has a healthy hatred of pink: it is both red and white together she
loves. Two extremes are both possible and healthy for the soul. To borrow
another analogy from Mr. Chesterton, it is possible to fiercely love life and
to walk into the face of death; in fact, one implies another.
Thus faith cannot be reduced to belief. It is belief and
refusal at once, and it does take up enormous amounts of emotional, mental, and
spiritual energy when one is struggling to do either. However, at times when we
become overwhelmed, we can merely lift up our burden to the God we have been
working so hard to trust and believe in, and it is in those moments that we
have truly experienced faith. When the battle becomes too much, and we realize
we cannot fight alone, well, that itself becomes a source of Faith.
If that is hard to follow, let me expound. I have recently
been undergoing things which no doubt seem trivial in words, or in comparison
to the darkness others have experienced, but which have all but devastated me:
for I had put Faith in the theoretical center of my being, like a peaceful
garden which I supposed nothing might disturb, and when its foundations began
to upheave, my whole self was thrown into turmoil. But now I realize God was
merely tilling the soil to expand His garden, to plant more and greater fruits
and flowers. It was indeed up to me, partially, to force myself back into that
place that had become painful to even think about, once so beautiful, then so
desolate and destroyed. But, in realizing that I could not rebuild it alone, my
Faith was restored. This garden could not have been something I constructed. It
could not be false, either: it had existed. Therefore, somebody must have
helped me, for I am too weak and not motivated to build any such thing. At that
point in time, I decided to desire God’s help again, to ask and plead for Him
to rebuild my garden. Just as C.S. Lewis compared the soul to a cottage. God
does not want to repair that cottage. He wants to make it mansion, even if it
means tearing down all the walls. And even if He did not start right away, my
Faith had been restored. The reconstruction had begun.
The toughest part of all of this is honestly maintenance.
While God has given us a beautiful place to rest, we must at once spring to
uproot any weed that may enter it. I guess my garden had become quite weedy,
for I had grown complacent and taken it for granted. “Oh, it will always be
there. Nothing can disturb God, why should anything enter there?” Well, I was
wrong.
Faith is definitely not passive. Sure, we may put it on like
a pair of glasses given to us by an eye doctor, but assuredly the air and our
fingers make them dirty if we do not take care. Even if we do take care, we
must wipe them down often, or our vision will be imperfect. Our natures have
been made dirty like the air by means of original sin. Their touch will obscure
our faith, it is inevitable. Those glasses can even break. That does not mean
the eye doctor doesn’t exist, or that he was wrong. It means we failed, we
forgot about the glasses at night and let them fall, and we sat on them in our
back pocket. “Oh, they’ll always be there. They’ll be fine. They are
indestructible!” No, for glass is fragile, and our human natures are as of
glass, dim glass. But why should we doubt the very existence of a creator
simply because creation was not perfect?
Infidelity, doubt, seem silly to me now, not Faith. Yet I
never know what my future holds, what choices I will make, what silky spider
strands I will follow. Only He has seen the entire span of my life as I will
make it. This co-creating, co-shaping role fills me with awe and fear. Why would
He even trust someone like me, a failure, with such a huge responsibility as
the eternal welfare of my soul? I am like a bowl, so riddled with vice that I
cannot hold the water of Faith. (even now, I write this in pride, hoping for it
someday to be read, for my genius to be admired. Fickle, self-loving soul! So I
ask any person who reads this to account of it all as divinely inspired, and
not to speak in my praise. Take my ideas and spread them if you find an element
of truth, of God. Do not credit any source but Him. And offer a prayer for my
soul) but He is the clay that will fill not only fill my holes, but soak me
until I am a quivering glob of slimy mud in his hands, and spin me round into a
more perfect vessel. Provided I do not case myself into the kiln. The reason He entrusts anything to any of us
lowly beings is so that we realize our misery. We must appreciate how much, how
dearly we need Him. Only then will we have discovered the light, the salt, the
water of faith. Only then will others be able to drink it from us.
He allows us to walk alongside Him not because He wants us
to trip, but because it is the most adequate expression of perfect Love. Love
(and hope) spring from our Faith. First
we believe, and then we will, and then we trust. If we were robots, if we were programmed to do
only what He directly put into our minds, we could not love nor hope. For love
is free….
But that is the subject for another essay.
