These
moments provide an intimation of ethical perfection and merciful love.
They arouse a longing within many people to integrate that glimpsed
eternal goodness into their practical lives. This longing is faith. It’s
not one emotion because it encompasses so many emotions. It’s not one
idea because it contains contradictory ideas. It’s a state of
motivation, a desire to reunite with that glimpsed moral beauty and
incorporate it into everyday living.
It’s a hard process. After the transcendent glimpses, people forget. Their spirits go dry and they doubt anything ever happened. But believers try, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, to stay faithful to those events. They assent to some spiritual element they still sense planted in themselves.
The
process of faith, of bringing moments of intense inward understanding
into the ballyhoo of life, seems to involve a lot of reading and talking
— as people try to make sense of who God is and how holiness should be
lived out. Even if you tell people you are merely writing a column on
faith, they begin recommending books to you by the dozen. Religion may
begin with experiences beyond reason, but faith relies on reason.
In
his famous fourth footnote in “Halakhic Man,” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik
writes, “The individual who frees himself from the rational principle
and who casts off the yoke of objective thought will in the end turn
destructive and lay waste the entire created order. Therefore, it is
preferable that religion should ally itself with the forces of clear,
logical cognition, as uniquely exemplified in the scientific method,
even though at times the two might clash with one another.”
Or
as Wiman puts it more elegantly: “Faith cannot save you from the claims
of reason, except insofar as it preserves and protects that wonderful,
terrible time when reason, if only for a moment, lost its claim on you.”
Insecure
believers sometimes cling to a rigid and simplistic faith. But
confident believers are willing to face their dry spells, doubts, and
evolution. Faith as practiced by such people is change. It is restless,
growing. It’s not right and wrong that changes, but their spiritual
state and their daily practice. As the longings grow richer, life does,
too. As Wiman notes, “To be truly alive is to feel one’s ultimate
existence within one’s daily existence.”
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