The curiousness of 'having faith'
And thoughts on Santa's list
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Today’s essay is deliberately brief and meant to serve as a quick and hopefully fruitful distraction from all the excitement and chaos the festive break typically brings. Beyond the merriment, food and drink, and rekindling of familial ties (replete with awkward pauses at the table when everyone has exhausted everything there is to say on the latest misadventures of a certain spiked-protein), it is also a time for reflection.
With that in mind, I thought it would be timely to write about the concept of ‘faith’ from a secular viewpoint, one that remains philosophically neutral and untangled from specific beliefs or dogmas. I’ve been told that my understanding of ‘faith’ is fairly unorthodox (as with most things!) so I’d love to use my readers as part of a litmus test to gauge just how relatable my rather non-formalistic and non-theological understanding of it is. With that, have a wonderful new year and stay safe always!
“Have faith”. Two words, one instructive (‘Have’) and the other impressing upon a sense of conviction (‘Faith’). It is a phrase that has found homage in a variety of domains from religion to sports psychology, or more recently in popular culture, courtesy of Ted Lasso’s innumerable (and endearingly cringeworthy) life maxims. Underlying its use is a rallying call for surrender to the uncertain, with the affirmation that what is unsettled will, in time, assume a natural order. “You just got to have faith!”, is what our parents and mentors have lovingly said to assuage our deepest fears, as a way of reminding us that life’s pitfalls have a way of flattening out in the long run.
But the meaning of ‘faith’, has over generations, been harder to define.
Faith has been a central protagonist in a rather mixed bag of narratives. It has showed humanity how it can seduce and paralyse, build hope and shatter dreams, empower and disenfranchise. In fact the common thread in any secular explanation of faith is one of duality and paradox. Rise and falls.
However this duality sits uncomfortably with our instinctual need for certainty.
“Having faith” in a particular creed, ideology, cause or even in one’s self has become a convenient shorthand for expecting what one desires from life - tailored consequences that snugly fit within a preconceived worldview of how things should transpire. It follows the same logic of how kids have been traditionally told to behave well if they want to avoid being on Santa’s ‘naughty list’. Unbeknownst to them of course, is mummy and daddy’s tireless pursuit to fill those Santa stockings by Christmas morning! We abide to this ritual for cultural reasons but also because it simplifies reality and imbues it with a positive sheen (with a touch of the fantastical) for the little ones amongst us.
But the myth of Santa’s ‘naughty list’ caricaturises a deeper observation about the human need for simplicity and systemisation. When confronted with the world’s complexity (e.g. morality), we default into navigating it by creating artificial binaries, perceiving contradiction where there might in fact only be complementarity - why are the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mutually exclusive? We regard this tendency to divide the world into polarities as one driven by the rational mind. It isn’t. In fact, this is an immensely limiting impulse.
Anne Lamott‘s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life stunningly captures the above sentiment. She writes:
“The rational mind doesn’t nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating”
Intuition on the other hand stems from a place that accepts both perfect and imperfect life consequences as a natural by-product of existence. It demands an inner acknowledgement that life is a complex cluster of contradictions, coexisting and in perpetual flux. Intuition recognises that not all realities are mutually exclusive (no matter how logical they are) and there are times when they remain mutually incompatible. And the ability to acknowledge this messiness is, from presiding evidence, a rare human trait to possess. It was probably what motivated Albert Einstein to allegedly regard the intuitive mind as a sacred gift and a humble servant to rationality.
So, where does faith fit into all of this?
In my view, having faith is really about embracing the charisma of disorder. It is the ultimate union of heart (intuition) and reason (rationality); to dare, to think the unthinkable, yet to act within the limits of the realistically possible.
There is a spiritual bent in the expression of faith because it requisites stepping outside the notion that life has to dance to an ordered symphony. Faith, in its rawest form, recognises that the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are simply flattened labels we use to seek deceptively fulfilling answers. The truth lies in the complementarity of all realities no matter how unfathomable this may seem.
Most importantly, having faith, requires that we accept that no one approach, however clever, can provide answers to all possible questions. To do full justice to reality, we must engage it from different perspectives. This means improving our questioning mechanisms to better address complexity and entertaining the possibility that there will always be space for opposing views and ideas to collide, combust or even merge. That to me, is the philosophical cornerstone of faith. Faith is both a feature of physical reality and a lesson in wisdom.
The expression of true faith isn’t about developing an unbreakable bond with a specific world view or belief in times of discomfort. Rather, faith manifests when we are able to facetiously wink at the less favourable moments in life, holding on to the true knowledge that reality never conforms to a single narrative. There is always more than meets the mind.
Santa, are you listening?