Doubt and faith and nihilism, oh my!
Considering St. Francis' famous prayer, line by line
Where there is doubt, faith;
Faith must be the most written-about subject in human experience. Faith asks us to trust in the unseen. By unconscious habit, I see it as a hallmark of holy people, too rarified for me with all my flaws. Lucky for me, faith is both cause and effect. It flows from the willingness to be an instrument of the divine, and it’s a way to court that willingness. It’s easier to be faithful when my wishes are granted, or in times of great crisis.1
What about all the other daily, weekly, yearly times in between reward and despair? Helen Keller has thoughts:
“Faith is not a cushion for me to fall back on. It is my working energy.” ~ from Let Us Have Faith
While faith requires active choice, it is also an outcome of devotion. I love Helen Keller’s take that faith is fuel. Faith is energy. All energy on Earth comes from the sun: everything alive draws sustenance from it.
Faith, at its most primal level, then, begins with knowing that the sun will rise each morning. We trust that this spaceship we’re all riding on will once again turn its face to the great star that powers all life. I’m reading Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, and so intrigued by the weird wonder of seeing the sunrise spread liquid faith across continents sixteen times a day.2
Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth
“You owe me”
Look what happens with a love like that
It lights the whole sky~ Hafiz, from The Gift, translated Daniel Ladinsky
As someone who wrestles often with doubt, faith is as appealing as it is confounding. Hafiz calls on me to trust in that love and know that I am worthy of it, simply by virtue of being alive on this marvelous blue-green planet.
Practicing faith is no small thing. Its flame flickers in the darkness of doubt, yet never seeks to negate or deny that darkness. Tapping our prodigious powers of imagination, faith leaves space for doubt, accepts it with gritty realism. Maybe, with enough care and attentive practice, there’s even room for compassion.
Having said all that, I feel compelled to address nihilism, that strain of belief3 that that life is without meaning, purpose, pattern, or value.4 Every era has a story that theirs is the worst in human history, and ours is no exception. Superstorms, extinctions, genocide, epic floods and wildfires, rising fascism and other dark events all fuel the feeling of momentum towards the disastrous end of human tenure on earth.
In a fascinating exploration of our culture’s embrace of nihilism, Brooke Gladstone suggests that nihilism is the flip side of faith.5 Nihilism is a fancy word for doubt—a particularly vivid, even hip, strain of it. Gladstone proposes nihilism as the secular rationalist’s version of the more dowdy doubt, burdened as that word is by long spiritual associations. Like all rationalists, the nihilist looks for proof in the physical world of the meaning and value of life. And of course, the world is far more complex, contradictory, and paradoxical to be captured by a reduction to mechanics and measure. Finding nothing definitive, then, the nihilist must, by virtue of their own internal rules, conclude there’s nothing to be found.
As faith’s trendy opposite, nihilism will always be with us, to remind us that we have a choice of where to align our hearts and minds. We can trust in the unseen, in our prodigious powers of intuition, or we can choose to insist that only the material and rational are real. Life is short and precious, and its very paradoxes teach us that things are never as black and white as we sometimes insist.
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” ~ Albert Einstein
Why not accept that doubt and faith are present together in every human heart, and in every moment? I recently learned that the Sanskrit word for “faith” is shraddha, which also means, “Where we choose to put our heart.” I love that faith relies on choice, which suggests to me that it must be cultivated—or, as St. Francis puts it, sown—each day, with the love of my heart.
Today, I will cultivate my relationship with faith through my fountain pen on the creamy paper in my journal. I commit to honor faith by being present to my own longings and intuition and by doing what they prompt me to do each day. My journaling time can be mundane, even boring, or it can surprise and delight. It often leaves me feeling humble and grateful, supported in tangible ways.
Faith celebrates life and imagination, expressing confidence that, despite sometimes overwhelming evidence to the contrary, things will work out. I can trust that my trials, challenges, failures, and weaknesses are part of a larger pattern that I will understand in time (or not). Even if I never do fully grasp it, as long as I trust my heart, I know that I’m on the right path.
The previous line of the prayer, Where there is injury, pardon; is here.
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Thinking about the “law of attraction” and “no atheists in foxholes.”
Imagine the faith behind being “shot into the sky on a kerosene bomb.”
Itself a kind of “faith”?
And, by extension—a particularly acute malady these days—without verifiable reality or truth.
You have set the table with a feast and invited us inside. What a spread. What a gift. Thank you, Julie.
I love this... thank you for the post. I also live with the tension between faith and doubt. One book that helps me with paradox, ambiguity and uncertainty is Esther de Waal's book Living With Contradiction.