Faith?

 Over my years I’ve thought a great deal about faith and have talked about it with scholars and religious people.  I think I began thinking seriously about it as an adolescent, just about the same time I stopped going to the Presbyterian church of my Sunday school years.  As someone who studied and taught about literature, culture and media, I think I considered the subject of faith from its major angles. I think Aquinas and Thomas believed that faith was everywhere, like the air we breathe. They believed that to attempt to discover the meaning or nature of faith is a fool’s quest (and perhaps a sin), because faith is what living a life is. To lose faith is to lose your life, or as Sartre would say, your sense of being. Faith is the joy we feel when the best things happen; it is the relief we feel when we think the worst things have happened but are not as bad as we thought they would be.

Once about 15 years ago I wrote something for myself about the sources of faith (not in the major religions) that are difficult to avoid. I’ve concluded generally that the notion of faith (finding it, doubting it, losing it, regaining it) is really, as they say these days, a process. I think we can’t escape faith, because, as “homo sapiens,” we are all looking for (hoping for) certainty. Faith allows for the possibility of certainty, even though our life experiences may cause doubts about certainty. In my early life, I believed in possibility. That’s why I left a phenomenal teaching job in a phenomenal high school in Chagrin Falls, Ohio to get hired as an assistant professor at a college in New Haven, CT and enrolled in a PhD program at NYU. I learned quickly about the difference between possibility and probability. Lots of life stuff chiseled at my faith in certainty from then until now.  I didn’t get the PhD, but even without it I managed to become chairperson of two different academic departments and represented the college to overseas joint programs and even taught a course in rap and hip hop at the college level.

And even after retirement, after carrying the scars of diminished faith, I managed to try out possibility.  Having no knowledge of managing the forces of moving water, I decided I could build a dam with a spillover and manage the stream in my backyard to create a pond. In the end, my pond was good enough to attract a series of mating mallard ducks and once a giant blue heron.  Everything remained possible about the pond, until I became weaker and lacked the energy (which is considerable) to sustain the pond.

So I guess I can answer the question by saying, “No, I have not doubted faith…at least as I have experienced it.”  I have a book in my library “Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas” by Elaine Pagels that discusses faith outside organized religion.  She basis the discussion on the words attributed to the apostle Thomas (as in doubting).  Thomas’ life pursued the questions of acquiring faith and understanding that you have it. He concluded, with some uncertainty, that we humans simply have it. And we therefore can’t acquire it. It is in our natures, in our lives as we live them. The Judeo-Christian belief is that it comes from The Word, which is what created everything (“First there was the Word…”).  That belief was Thomas’ starting point, which, during his quest, became unsatisfactory. Hence, doubting Thomas.  

Pagels points out that in the Thomas perspective claiming to be an ardent believer is not evidence that you have faith.  In a discussion I once had with a former seminarian about the language of organized religion we discovered something interesting:  The word “believe” has predicate usage (i.e., things happen through it), but the word “faith” has only nominal meaning (i.e., nothing happens through it; it simply is), and this led to a discussion of the meaning of “is”, after which we decided it has no meaning without its complement. In the context of the current discussion, faith as a nominal has humans as its complement.

So hang in there everyone…and keep your faith.