faith

Lately, I have had a bit of a religious conversion. Or a reversion, as it were, since I feel like I'm returning to something. As a child and a young adult, I had a fierce faith. Because of circumstances in my college years and beyond, that faith eroded. It was pushed away by many things, but I would say a big player was my study pf philosophy. And to this day, I am in love with everything I learned, and continue to learn, in that study. But in some ways all I was doing was replacing my faith object; instead of faith in God, I put my faith in the cannon. And while I gained a lot from my readings, I could never get a feeling of safety that I missed when I dismissed God from my life. After years of craving it, and then some years of increasing depression over the fertility issue, for which I could find no comfort from my philosophers, I decided to take the leap again. I know more about the alternatives this time, and I admit to having shopped around a bit for the pieces of my new faith, but it real and it is me.

And then I read Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. A lot of people have told me to read it, and I wasn't interested in it. Then I finally got around to it, this week, and I loved it. It was a beautiful book, and I applaud her journey. I read it at the perfect time in my own journey. I could quote the whole book, but I'm going to give a piece of it because it was such an a-ha moment for me. She could have been writing about me.

There's a reason we refer to "leaps of faith" -- because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don't care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove to you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational; it isn't. If faith were rational, it wouldn't be -- by definition -- faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it owuld not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be . . . a prudent insurance policy.

I'm not interested in the insurance industry. I'm tired of being a skeptic, I'm irritated by spiritual prudence and I feel bored and parched by empirical debate. I don't want to hear it anymore. I oculdn't care less about evidence and proof and assurances. I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water.