Faith is so much easier when you are in control, when it is just you making a charitable donation online, or counting to ten lest you say something arrogant or hurtful, or reminding yourself at 3am that your god has a plan for the morning you have been up all night dreading. It is even easier when you are out of control, when you can miss your deadlines and leave your duties incomplete and say ‘I am fallen and imperfect, so I will leave it to god to get me through.’
It is much less easy when those you support and care for, out of their own needs and insecurities and ignorance, bring you down with them. It is much less easy when people you have never met, to whom you owe nothing in any real or moral or spiritual sense, out of their own greed or plain stupidity strip from you time and composure and determination. Or perhaps your livelihood. Maybe even your life.
If one is graced, it is then that a new faith, beyond hope or fear or desperation, uncalled for and without warning, surges up within you and strips from you the care and anxiety and responsibility to things that have no ultimate significance. It is not exoneration, for you are not excused. Nor are your efforts rewarded or your shortcomings vindicated. It is compelling, frighteningly simple, impossible to ignore. It asks nothing of you but to give yourself over to it, to be immersed in it.
Yet at that same moment the pain and exhaustion, the regret and anguish, the subtly consuming despair that is the sense of failure – the inevitable effects of the very same qualities that brought you this moment of grace – stand in your way. In that moment lies the test of faith, not in your god’s existence, but in the purpose of your own.
But this is still too easy. In the grand scheme of the cosmos, it doesn’t matter what you or I do when the dawn breaks.
Surely I cannot be the only pagan who has ever asked to be taken to the Nazarene’s side the night before his crucifixion, to be where neither Jew nor pagan dared be, to provide what comfort there might be in a single human’s care, to touch the hand, to hear the words, to look into the eyes, to learn how, despite the deepest anguish in the betrayal of all betrayals, he still could give himself over despite being overcome, could still believe he could better the very best he had ever tried to be, when everything, absolutely everything, would be risked come dawn.
