Despair and Faith

Faith is not a thing you believe. It's a thing you do.

I feel it all too often, especially at night when my energy is at low ebb, but sometimes from the start of the day too. The sour black taste of despair.

There is no shortage of things to despair about. There wasn't any shortage before, before the deaths and the looming economic conflagration that will no doubt cause death or great suffering to so many. So many. Personally I am relatively unaffected by the virus, except for knowing that I am precisely the kind of person it is most likely to kill. Over sixty, damaged lungs. When the despair is particularly black, I think it would kind of be a relief.

It is not just lately that I have felt that, though. There were a number of times in my life when I went to bed praying I would not wake up. I am not saying this so you will pity me, I am saying it so you will understand the realness of what I am saying.

It is not even necessarily adverse circumstances in my own life that is the cause, though as I grow older it can be harder and harder to feel good, to feel strong. Granted, if I always felt strong and able, the other things would be easier to bear up under. But usually if I bear up first, then I will feel strong.

But the feeling that is with me most consistently is the feeling that the world itself is a dark, malign place. I mean, fuck that, I KNOW that it is. We live in a world where people take their pleasure and sometimes their survival at the expense of the suffering of other people or other creatures or even that person their own selves. How many eat to bury their pain or take drugs to bury it, or engage in cruelty or sexual immorality or dark sickness to bury it? And when they do that it is their own selves they prey upon. In addition to others.

We are living in a world we are destroying. We bunch up together in city cockroach towers like some sort of lab rat experiment and damage each other and prey on each other's weakness. Lies and liars are like the sand of the shore, beyond number.

Love your neighbor as you do yourself. How alien that is, to this world.

When people send me mail trying to get me to buy some come-on bullshit I neither need nor want, they want to make me the food and themselves the eater. It may be money not flesh they want, but the principle is the same. Is it not my flesh and blood if I worked for it? Expended some of my few years of life to earn it? It is my blood they want, in fact. Economic vampires.

It's not just humans, we are the mutant offspring of the natural world, and nature is extremely vicious. In a sense, we just did nature better than any of the other monsters on this planet, we progressed without balance, and so now we can dominate all life. Congratulations, Homo Sapiens, you won the three billion year long asshole contest on the planet Earth. You get the prize.

I want to set this stage of despair for you, because if you don't understand this part fully, you are in danger of practicing pollyannaism, not faith. Blind unreasoning optimism, not faith. I see this all too often.

Faith can only become what it truly is when you  UNDERSTAND  the darkness. Faith does not live where you are standing on the deck of the Titanic and believe yourself to be standing in a sunny green meadow. Faith only lives where you see the icy water coming up, claiming the lives of the poor struggling souls slipping into the sea. Faith is only faith in the face of darkness.

Do not succumb to the darkness, but know it.

What does this darkness have to do with faith? We often think of faith as being synonymous with belief, but it's not. Faith at core is an action, not a thought, not a belief. Thoughts and actions may go into it, may prepare the ground for it, but where the rubber actually meets the road is in courageous action in the face of darkness, in the face of limitation, in the face of despair or even death.

In this sense Yoda was right. Do, or do not. There is no try.

Or in this case: Do, or do not. There is no belief.

If I were to try to proceed logically in the face of this overwhelming darkness, how could I even proceed to do that? Like Luke trying to lift the X-wing from the swamp mud: there is no way from here to there. Logically what I should do is try to score a whole lot of heroin so I can try to erase myself chemically from this existence.

Or like Peter stepping out of the boat onto the sea: you do know you will fall straight through that shit, right? You can't walk on water. He could try all day long, he is never going to believe that he can walk on liquid water. That's crazy.

What he can do is say, "that IS water, it IS liquid, and I am going to step on it anyway."

What I find is this: the only way I can extricate myself from the blackness is not to think or believe that G-d will deliver me from it. The only way I can extricate myself from it is to act faith. I throw myself out there and pray that G-d will catch me as I fall.

I do, not believe. You cannot truly believe your way to faith. You can only act your way to faith. I don't mean act like in a play. I mean, He tells you to step out on the water, you step. You may wind up neck deep, or you may be dancing on the wavelets, but you step regardless. And you can never think your way into that step. You cannot believe your way into it. Because if you trust the evidence of your eyes and mind, there is nothing out there but the cold depths.

It is a matter of pure raw trust in Him expressed in action, and nothing else.

And there has never been a time in my memory when I did this (and was following His will) and He was not faithful. He is always faithful, I am the one who has the problem.

I woke up this morning pretty miserable and a bit pissed off that I cannot regulate my sleep very well. I woke up at 11 after a restless night and I have a lot to do just in general these days, so after coffee that's half the day gone. And I have been feeling kind of grungy lately. Nothing specific, just overall bleh.

But I was like, "whatever, lets just go. I can't control how I sleep, apparently, but I am going to give the rest of the day my best shot." And you know, before long I was feeling pretty good and even blessed. I could have turned around and gone back to bed, in which case I would have missed the blessing.

Don't wait to feel good before you act. Do not wait to defeat despair before you act. Act, as long as you are acting according to G-d's will, and you will draw the strength you need in acting. Faith is not what you believe, it is what you do.