Faith is a very curious word. Is it a concept? Is it a thought? Is it an emotion? Is it a way of life?
I thought I knew what it was. I thought faith was just faith. An innate belief, streaming from a deep place in one's soul. A river flowing out from the earth's bosom, granting life to everything around itself. I thought faith was the equivalent of trust, even. Having faith was like having a reason to believe things will work out in the end, no matter how rocky they seem at the moment. Having faith was the reason to face each rising sun and bid farewell to each setting sun.
But then, there is a fundamental problem with faith. You only see it when your soul breaks into infinitesimally small pieces, and that deep place where that faith originated is exposed. You peer down into the wreckage. You follow its current, the last drops that trickle out onto the dying path. You run after it, trying desperately to preserve the smallest bits, to nurture and foster into that stream again, but it shows its true nature. It resolutely keeps trickling away. It keeps slipping, you keep sliding, getting bruised, battered and even further shattered, but the descent just gets steeper. Steeper and pricklier, with sharp barbs sticking out from every surface. Until you hit rock bottom.
It is here that you realize the fallacy. Faith, is just a device. It is never absolute. It is always "faith in someone or something". So when you finally see it for what it is, you find it is a parasitic tether. You find a void where the last drop trickled into. A lifeless, dark void in a deep deep place in the wreckage of our soul. There you find all the missing pieces. Pieces that were the foundation. Pieces that the flow corroded, and dragged away with itself, across the tether and into the entity you put your 'faith' in. Pieces without which the structures collapsed.
The ironic bit is, the structures were already weakened, and it really was the tether that had sucked away their strength that was actually propping them up to fool the outside world. It wasn't the falling of the structures that snapped the tether, it was the snapping of the tether that demolished the structure of your soul. The weight of expectations, the burden of responsibility, the sapping outflow of emotional strength, all fed by that same tethering entity come crashing down as the tether snaps. They don't trickle away. They land with an almighty thud on the fuselage.
Now you see where you really are. Where that blind rush for the last drop has brought you. You're at the mercy of Faith's cruelest accomplice: Hope.
I thought I knew what it was. I thought faith was just faith. An innate belief, streaming from a deep place in one's soul. A river flowing out from the earth's bosom, granting life to everything around itself. I thought faith was the equivalent of trust, even. Having faith was like having a reason to believe things will work out in the end, no matter how rocky they seem at the moment. Having faith was the reason to face each rising sun and bid farewell to each setting sun.
But then, there is a fundamental problem with faith. You only see it when your soul breaks into infinitesimally small pieces, and that deep place where that faith originated is exposed. You peer down into the wreckage. You follow its current, the last drops that trickle out onto the dying path. You run after it, trying desperately to preserve the smallest bits, to nurture and foster into that stream again, but it shows its true nature. It resolutely keeps trickling away. It keeps slipping, you keep sliding, getting bruised, battered and even further shattered, but the descent just gets steeper. Steeper and pricklier, with sharp barbs sticking out from every surface. Until you hit rock bottom.
It is here that you realize the fallacy. Faith, is just a device. It is never absolute. It is always "faith in someone or something". So when you finally see it for what it is, you find it is a parasitic tether. You find a void where the last drop trickled into. A lifeless, dark void in a deep deep place in the wreckage of our soul. There you find all the missing pieces. Pieces that were the foundation. Pieces that the flow corroded, and dragged away with itself, across the tether and into the entity you put your 'faith' in. Pieces without which the structures collapsed.
The ironic bit is, the structures were already weakened, and it really was the tether that had sucked away their strength that was actually propping them up to fool the outside world. It wasn't the falling of the structures that snapped the tether, it was the snapping of the tether that demolished the structure of your soul. The weight of expectations, the burden of responsibility, the sapping outflow of emotional strength, all fed by that same tethering entity come crashing down as the tether snaps. They don't trickle away. They land with an almighty thud on the fuselage.
Now you see where you really are. Where that blind rush for the last drop has brought you. You're at the mercy of Faith's cruelest accomplice: Hope.
My friend Faith is a cruel mistress which requires absolute submission.....
ReplyDeleteWrong. Faith is a parasite. For some, it acts as a symbiote.
ReplyDeleteAbsolute submission equals absolute destruction. Once you've gone through it, there's no turning back, and if that faith then suddenly leaves you, you're finished.
I would say Hope is the emotion that makes you strong enough to see the coming day to tide thorugh the dark night. For me, hope is stronger than faith!
ReplyDelete