Faith

Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession. It is on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all. Faith is not being sure where you're going, but going anyway. A journey without maps. Tillich said that doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.

- Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC

Will You Still Love Me On Sunday?

It’s so easy to be head-over-heels under the loud music and the overfull glasses of Saturday night. Everyone loves each other, everyone wants to be best friends. Everyone sees only the best in everyone else. And there is a certain magic in Saturday night, as though you’re so far inside the weekend — so buffered on each side from the unforgiving reality of the weekdays — that everything is possible and real if you want it to be. You say things you might not mean on Monday morning, because for the moment in between the sixth and seventh drink on Saturday, it’s all you can think about.

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But when you wake up on Sunday morning, when your head hurts so badly you feel as though it will never return to normal, when everything that was beautiful and mysterious the night before has been rendered harsh and unflattering in the relentless daylight — will you still want to turn over to me? Will you still be interested in all of the things I have to say, all of the coincidences we took as divine intervention last night when we were only so happy to tell each other how we feel? If the facilitators of alcohol and dim lights and a group of laughing around us are no longer part of the equation, do you still want to hold my hand?

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I will love you on Sunday. If I told you all of these beautiful things when we were standing under the red light of the bar, peeling the label off a beer bottle, it’s because I want you to remember them the next day. I want to pounce on my momentary lack of inhibitions to say all of the things I’ll later want to sweep under the rug, but which I truly mean. I am telling you these things on Saturday because I won’t be able to on Sunday, but I’ll want you to know that I mean them. And I hope you know me well enough to know that I never say anything I don’t mean — even if they’re a bit embarrassing to remember in the morning.

Will You Still Love Me On Sunday? | Thought Catalog

Words of a Stranger

"It's always difficult for me to speak and express my innermost thoughts in person. I prefer to write. When I sit down and write, words grow very docile, they come and feed out of my hand like little birds, and I can do almost what I want with them; whereas when I try to marshal them in the open air, they fly away from me."

- Philippe Claudel, Brodeck


The words of strangers fare so well in describing my very thoughts and sentiments, so much better than my own.

The Day Your Dog Dies

You repeat to yourself - she's just a symbol. She's just a dog. Don't repeat this too many times, before you realize tears will be running down your cheeks to form tiny pools in the cracks in your palms.

The Day Your Dog Dies | Thought Catalog

RIP Max, RIP Jack. 

Brief Interviews With Indecisive People

“Why can’t I just tell him, hey, I’m going through a thing. Sorry if I’m being a crazy butthead right now?”

“You can’t just tell a guy that,” she says.

“Why not? Why am I supposed to just play this game where I act normal when I don’t feel normal? Why can’t I just be honest with him? Why don’t people do that? I feel like we’d all understand each other better if we did that.”

“You can’t just tell a guy you’re crazy.”

“….Fine. I won’t.”

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“It’s so doomed,” I tell him about us (the new “us”) over dinner. “But it’s happening anyway.”

“Well.” He laughs. “You kind of just described life,” he says.

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I cry a little bit to myself while standing on the subway platform waiting for the L to take me from Brooklyn to Manhattan. My phone doesn’t have service so I type in a bunch of text messages to you that I’ll never hit “send” on.

On the phone with you, I also cry. You don’t know I’m crying. I tell you about another time when I cried and you didn’t know, when we’d ended an email correspondence — an innocuous one —and I’d cried myself to sleep for no reason I can figure out.

Even when I’m happy with you, I want to cry.

Brief Interviews With Indecisive People | Thought Catalog

If I Knew Where I Was Going

If I knew where I was going, I’d stop reading maps like they hold some special secret. I’d realize that they guide people toward a destination and not just away from themselves and I’d stop blaming physical boundaries and distance for all of my problems. I’d accept that the reason I always feel stuck is because I’m too afraid to cross the rivers and mountains that I’ve built up between myself and the people around me, between my actions and my ambitions, my muscles and my mind.

If I Knew Where I Was Going | Thought Catalog

Going Home, Away From Home

You’ve done this before, of course, many a time switching back and forth between lives, always leaving something behind as you embrace the new old. A balance would be ideal, but like a straight line or an arrow, your starting point rarely matches your target. So which life is the real one? Who are you? Where is home? Are you the person you left behind, or the person you’re going back to? And if both those Yous should ever meet, will the two different sides of that equation equal who you are now? Or has one side won out?

Going Home, Away From Home | Thought Catalog

Believe

"As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have stopped believing. Believe for the sake of the dead, for love, to keep your heart beating, believe. Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours."

- Mark Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War

Find Your Own Faith

When it comes to Christians, few are more aggravating than those who live as blind sheep, following some distant shepherd, trusting his or her every word, every creed, and never trying to learn things for themselves, never trying to find their own convictions. Humans were given minds with the mental capacities to consider, deduce, and decide things for themselves, and if only, if only they would actually use them. Your beliefs, your values, your praises and condemnations - all worthless if they are nothing but echos of another voice. I am not saying that you should disregard everything you have been taught, everything you have perhaps been brought up in, but please, for the love of God, at some point in your life, detach yourself from it all - and just think.

In the words of John Stuart Mill...

"He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess."

(From his On Liberty - whoever said that nineteenth century political philosophy was irrelevant to everyday life? ;) )

If it is faith that you need, or want, find it for yourself.

I Am Not Sad

"He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded as as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others - the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad."

- Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

Coincidence

I think of a person I haven't seen or thought of for years, and ten minutes later I see her crossing the street. I turn on the radio to hear a voice reading the biblical story of Jael, which is the story that I have spent the morning writing about.  A car passes me on the road, and its license place consists of my wife's and my initials side by side. When you tell people stories like that, their usual reaction is to laugh. One wonders why.

I believe that people laugh at coincidence as a way of relegating it to the realm of the absurd and of therefore not having to take seriously the possibility that there is a lot more going in our lives than we either know or care to know. Who can say what it is that's going on, but I suspect that part of it, anyway, is that every once and so often we hear a whisper from the wings that goes something like this: "You've turned up in the right place at the right time. You're doing fine. Don't ever think that you've been forgotten."

- Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC

Faith

When God told Abraham, who was a hundred at the time, that at the age of ninety his wife Sarah was finally going to have a baby, Abraham came close to knocking himself out - "fell on his face and laughed," as Genesis puts it (17:17). In another version of the story (18:18), Sarah is hiding behind the door eavesdropping, and here it's Sarah herself who nearly splits a gut - although when God asks her about it afterward, she denies it. "No, but you did laugh," God says, thus having the last word as well as the first. God doesn't seem to hold their outburst against them, however. On the contrary, he tells them the baby's going to be a boy and that he wants them to name him Isaac. Isaac in Hebrew means laughter.

Why did the two old crocks laugh? They laughed because they knew only a fool could believe that a woman with one foot in the grave was soon going to have her other foot in the maternity ward. They laughed because God expected them to believe it anyway. They laughed because God seemed to believe it. They laughed because they half-believed it themselves. They laughed because laughing felt better than crying. They laughed because if by some crazy chance it just happened to come true, they would really have something to laugh about, and in the meanwhile it helped keep them going.

Faith is "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen," says the Epistle to Hebrews (11:1). Faith is laughter at the promise of a child called laughter.

If someone had come up to Jesus when he was on the cross and asked Him if it hurt, He might have answered, like the old man in the old joke, "Only when I laugh." But He wouldn't have been joking. Faith dies, as it lives, laughing.

Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession. Faith is not being sure where you're going, but going anyway. A journey without maps. Tillich said that doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.

I have faith that my friend is my friend. It is possible that all his motives are ulterior. It is possible that what he is secretly drawn to is not me but my wife or my money. But there's something about the way he looks me in the eye, about the way we can talk to each other without pretense and be silent together without embarrassment, that makes me willing to put my life in his hands as I do each time I call him friend.

I can't prove the friendship of my friend. When I experience it, I don't need to prove it. When I don't experience it, no proof will do. If I tried to put his friendship to the test somehow, the test itself would queer the friendship I was testing. so it is with the Goodness of God.

The five so-called proofs for the existence of God will never prove to unfaith that God exists. They are merely five ways of describing the existence of the God you have faith in already.

Almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved. I can prove the law of gravity by dropping a shoe out the widow. I can prove that the world is round if I'm clever at that sort of thing - that the radio works, that light travels faster than sound. I cannot prove that life is better than death or love better than hate. I cannot prove the greatness of the great or the beauty of the beautiful. I cannot even prove my own free will; maybe my most heroic act, my truest love, my deepest thought, are all just subtler versions of what happens when the doctor taps my knee with his little rubber hammer and my foot jumps.

Faith can't prove a damned thing. Or a blessed thing either.


- Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC

Word

In Hebrew the term dabar means both "word" and "deed." Thus to say something is to do something. I love you. I hate you. I forgive you. I am afraid. Who knows what such words do but whatever it is, it can never be undone. Something that lay hidden in the heart is irrevocably released through speech into time, is given substance and tossed like a stone into the pool of history, where the concentric rings lap out endlessly.

Words are power, essentially the power of creation. By my words I both discover and create who I am. By my words I elicit a word from you. Through our converse we create each other.

When God said, "Let there be light," there was light where before there was only darkness. Then I say I love you, there is love where before there was only ambiguous silence. In a sense I do not love you first and then speak it, but only by speaking it give it reality.

-Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC