Compare that thought to Rilke's famous quotation about living in the questions... "Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers."
So many of us are far more comfortable with certainty, than in wrestling with uncertainty. It takes a certain amount of courage to be able to sit with uncertainty, having faith that an answer will be vouchsafed to you, in God's own time. Even if that answer is, by then, far from what you expected it to be.
There is an (I think) erroneous belief that, faith and reason are polar opposites. I believe that using our reason is part of the path of "living into the answers". My belief is that the true opposite of faith is certainty.
Mr Google's definition of faith is "strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof." And the Epistle to the Hebrews, in the New Testament, says, "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
I wonder whether uncertainty is actually the true basis of faith? That we have to take a "leap of faith" in order to believe in something, someone. And that it is the very *un*certainty which excites us about God, the divine, the Source of All Being... Who by His / Her / Its very nature cannot be known by us, but only believed in, hoped for...
A mist makes things beautiful...
No comments:
Post a Comment