There was a time when I was attracted to religious practice. I engaged quite vigorously with my religious tradition for a period of almost two decades. I attended synagogue weekly, learned the prayers, honoured the Sabbath in my household, and followed the holidays. I found the structure and regularity comforting. Ultimately, however, since it was the utility of living a religious life that attracted me in the first place to it, once that utility lost its value, so did my desire to practice. The structured and circumscribed aspects began feeling restrictive, a negative instead of a positive. The one thing I did not possess, after all those years of practice, and could never acquire, was faith.
Throughout my 'religious stage' the nature of faith eluded me, and I often wondered why. Is faith something you can acquire, or is it something ingrained, genetic, inherited. In other words, was faith something you possessed or was it something that possessed you?
In my experience it appeared to be the latter, and faith never possessed me. I determined, after years of trying, that faith was not something you can simply decide to have, or choose to have, because it's not rational. When it is developed in a person it is more like a talent than a skill. It can be cultivated, enhanced, or nourished in you, or conversely, it could be starved, but it cannot be acquired if you lack it. You can discover that you have it, maybe it was there all along and you were not aware. But you can also discover that you don't, and not for lack of trying. You can't convince yourself of something that's untrue, at least that was my case.
People of faith are sometimes loving, hopeful, joyous and open minded. People of faith are also sometimes hateful, close minded and suspicious. Some are generous and some are cruel. This leads me to conclude that faith plays no part in whether a person acts one way or another. However, I think one thing is undeniable: People of faith are fortunate indeed. Because to believe in God, the Creator, the Almighty, is to believe that life is inherently imbued with divine purpose and meaning.
Without faith, without the sense and conviction that life is imbued with Divine merit, the question of life's meaning becomes a strictly personal one. There is no necessary overarching, inherent, guiding principle to guide one toward an inevitable answer. The meaning is whatever we say it is, whatever we decide it is. In essence, the meaning of life becomes as idiosyncratic and banal as we are. The answer to a question that is no more meaningful than what am I going to have for dinner tonight, or what clothes am I going to where today. It also means that when things happen in life, usually bad things, there was no 'reason' for it. Bad things just happen, planes fall out of the sky killing hundreds of innocent passengers, children get cancer, people are victimized because they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, good people suffer and bad people prosper, life is haphazard and uncertain, and to say, as in the biblical story of Job, that this is somehow part of the Creator's plan, strikes me as illustrative of a cruel, masochistic deity and not a loving, caring one.
What we do know is that life is comprised of moments; moments of love and hatred, of order and confusion, of joy and misery, of comfort and suffering, of justice and injustice. Putting aside the question of greater significance, and acknowledging that we are all more or less in the same boat, with impulses that are selfish and generous, loving and hating, the banality of life should lead one to conclude that they ought to strive toward adding to the love, joy, order, comfort and justice, and minimizing the hatred, misery, suffering and injustice, for themselves and for others, in whatever way they can.
What about people? ... do you have faith in other people?
ReplyDeletePersonally, at a basic level, I don't trust anyone. It's easier, I think, for me, to have faith in a diety than to have faith in humans. On the other hand, it could very well be that my lack of faith in people is an indicator of my lack of faith in G-d. I think the two may be related.
Theoretically, I am a man of faith. I struggle with it, though, on a day-to-day basis. For many of the same reasons that you have mentioned. The other side of the coin of faith is doubt; I believe they are two sides of the same coin, and you can't have one without the other. I am troubled by people who are so convinced and so smug in their faith convictions that they seem to harbour no doubts, and will not tolerate anyone who does. I think of faith as an existential thing, a la Kierkegaard. It's something I have to work at, and re-affirm each day. I may, as you suggest, have been born with a propensity for faith (in G-d perhaps, but not in people), but, if so, I think it only takes you part of the way there.
I also believe that for reasons that are probably beyond our comprehension, G-d programmed a fair bit of randomness into the universe. Accepting this randomness -- or even better, embracing it -- is a first step toward meaningful faith, in my opinion.
.. K
My understanding of the term faith is exclusive to the Creator. It is religious, spiritual, even mystical. The implication of the term faith is that life has some inherently imbued divine essence and purpose. It also implies that there is an afterlife of some sort. When it comes to people I don't think the word is 'faith' I think it's something else, let's call it 'trust'. Do you trust people? A question that implies a certain 'situationality'. Do you trust people to comport in a certain way, or do you trust them believe in certain basic values and act accordingly? My answer to that would be, it depends on a lot of things. I don't have a sense that all people are trustworthy all the time. I don't have a sense that humanity as whole, if we can even talk in such terms, is trustworthy. We are governed by both rationality and passions. I think people are basically self-centered (as we all are in infancy) but capable of rationally understanding that acting in a self-centered way has its downsides.
ReplyDeleteI like the way you said that 'theoretically' you are a man of faith, as if faith is an intellectual process and discipline. What I've always found attractive about religious (spiritual) practice is that it's kind of like CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), it trains us in certain modes of thinking that encourage practices that contribute to wellness. Part of that, maybe the most important part of spiritual practice, is to inculcate a sense of modesty and humility. But I think you can arrive at humility in ways other than religious practice, and in fact piety often leads to self-righteousness, the opposite of humility. By spiritual practice, I don't necessarily mean that the basis has to be faith in a Creator, but rather having a sense of one's 'insignificance' in the vast universe, and yet feeling deeply connected to it (and by 'it', I mean the people too).
Of course, my lack of faith maintains intact, the mystery at the core of it all. Why am I here? What's the purpose? Is there a purpose? And that's something that preoccupies me every day to some extent. I have to come up with some sort of answer to make each day meaningful, and most days it's to do some good. And so the Creator and I are on the same page in that respect, because isn't that what He saw in the very beginning?