Faith as relationship, not certainty
A working note on what faith actually does for the inner life when stripped of doctrine.
A working note. Faith, in the way I use the word, is not a set of beliefs about a deity. It is a posture toward the unknown. Specifically, it is the willingness to remain in relationship with what you do not understand without forcing it to resolve.
This is psychological before it is theological. Most adult suffering, in my reading, comes from one of two refusals: the refusal to feel what you actually feel, and the refusal to stay with what you do not yet understand. Faith answers the second refusal with a slow yes.
The clinical word is negative capability — Keats wrote about it. The Kabbalistic word is emunah. The everyday word, when it works, is trust. They are all describing the same muscle.
Open questions I am sitting with this season:
- What changes when faith is taught as a capacity rather than a content?
- How do you teach faith to people who were betrayed by the institutions that first introduced it to them?
- Where does faith end and denial begin? (I do not know yet.)