DAY 056 – DESIGNING DANGEROUSLY

On Faith

What a dangerous blessing to be so certain of life, to be so sure. So much evil comes holding the train of blind certainty. Our brains discard the noise, re-labels the things that don’t agree with what we hold to be true. That certainty is a salve to some. It soothes the itchiness of existence. To have a life unexamined means not having to explore your own bullshit, not having to own the farm that you’ve bought.

It leaves no place for nuance, for a gradient of meaning. It leaves no room for “I don’t know.” I grew up firmly on the verse extolling us to always have an answer for the hope that we have: read through the entire Bible, memorize, Bible quizzing, the whole kit-and-kaboodle. Accruing knowledge, reading the Bible as history, science, philosophy, and theology was the key to staying firm. Scripture was a scalpel dividing us and them, right and wrong, the certain and the lost. I had to find out on my own that the war we wage is against the polarities of meaninglessness and certainty, apathy and unquestioning action.

How can we be confident in anything beyond the vasty ocean of what we do not know, The Question? Some of us stay on the shore, the terra firma underneath our feet pulled out with the tide, and we remain unknowing, unseeing, thinking that we are safe when we are not. Some of us get too far out, terrorized by the undulating, infinite waves, not knowing when we are going under. The middle way is playing in the breaks, feeling the sand beneath our feet but knowing that everything is constantly in motion, buoyant, moving our bodies as it pushes and pulls.

Faith is not a wall. It is the music dancing on the edge of our brain we can’t quite recall. It is the word we can visualize but can’t get our lips to utter. It is both in us and beyond us.