I try not to think too much about faith for fear that if it is examined too closely it will be found to be nothing but an illusion, a vague wraith hovering at the periphery of vision which vanishes when looked at squarely. Peter had no problem when he stepped out of the boat onto the water. But when he looked down and saw the impossibility of his situation, he panicked. The trust he had in Jesus vanished when exposed to stark reality. I have no problem with fides quae (that which is believed), with theology, or with the message of scripture. But I do have a problem with fides qua (commitment, trust). It is an eyes-shut-and-hope-for-the-best stance and that is not good enough. It will do fine for a beginning but finds it very difficult coping with naked reality, and sooner or later we all have to cope with naked reality, because sooner or later we are going to be stripped naked and left exposed, eyes wide open, all our pretences and deceptions fluttering away. That’s when we’re really going to need a strong faith but we’ll find that what we had has dissolved leaving us without a rock to stand on, and there won’t be any boat to grab for either, nor will there be Jesus to rescue us. That is when we start to drown and that will be the beginning of salvation. The nasty bit is that drowning is a slow process.
I am more and more convinced that there is much going on beneath the surface of which we are not really aware – although I have this conviction it has no basis that can be seen, nothing you can point to. Above the surface there is the steady erosion of the false masks we wear. We are riven with contradictions which, up till now, have not been apparent, or we have ignored. It is as though I am inhabited by two persons and neither one is real. One is looking for God, for a purpose in living, an actor uncertain of his role looking for the script he has never seen. The other is a self-centred adolescent looking for gratification, a hangover from a past that has never been properly lived through, examined and seen for what it is, and then transcended. Neither is real. Both are constructs. This blindness to these contradictions and failings is in fact only part of the problem and probably not a major part at that. It is merely a sign of something deeper, something pervasive, all the more insidious because it is unrecognised. I have just remembered a dream I had last night. I picked up a fresh juicy apple only to discover with a shock that the underside was rotten, slimy and brown. Perhaps it is a symbol of my unadmitted awareness of a dichotomous self. I am suddenly thrust back to the question of what it means to be a person. I thought I had more or less decided that a person is a nexus of relationships rooted in God. Quite simple really, and the purpose of prayer is to keep open and amplify the channels through which God’s love flows.
Now, it no longer seems so simple. It is so easy to overlook the bits of the jigsaw that don’t fit – selfishness, self-centredness, the evil which dehumanises, depersonalises and has the power to destroy. This stripping away of masks and illusions does not leave a naked core self but simply a hollowness. Perhaps that is why we so desperately needed masks and illusions in the first place, so that this emptiness might be obscured and covered up. The person is like a tangled skein of multi-coloured strands of wool. It looks so solid and substantial but when you untangle the strands, tracing each one back to its origin, you are left with nothing. The analogy cannot be taken too far. All this raises a whole heap of questions and the answers are not to be found by deduction or analysis. The Buddha was so right to insist that there are questions to which there are no answers, or at least, no answers that can be articulated. Pursuing such questions leads to despair. The only thing to be done is to keep clinging to faith, however feeble, however inadequate. In the empty darkness it is something rather than nothing. And then there is the hope that whatever it is that is going on beneath the surface of awareness will become apparent and love will no longer be blind.