When I Look At The Stars
Can you have faith without beliefs?
And am I losing something I cannot get back?
It feels like I am cheapened or damaged by spiritual searching. Like each loss of certainty waters down my capacity to have certainty at all, my ability to feel safe and at home in the world. Much of the pain in my faith journey is the sense I am losing something I cannot get back.
Logically speaking, it would seem the more exploration, the surer the conclusion. Without having sought, there is no sense of comparison or conclusion, only something untested and thus potentially fragile.
So why hasn’t this logic helped at all? Because I was taught that holding certain beliefs is the one and only metric for whether a person has faith. My pain was inevitable given that version of Christianity. Shifting away from the belief that beliefs are everything is necessarily disorienting. It sounds like gibberish from my old vantage, like a breach in logic.
But then again, the word “believe” didn’t mean “accept as true” until the Middle Ages. The famous Biblical patriarch Abraham had no concept of modern Christian theological mainstays. He shared few or perhaps none of the beliefs today’s Christians use as a basis for determining whether a person has faith, yet “he believed God,” and to this day he is known and celebrated worldwide for his faith.
Before the Middle Ages, the meaning of “believe” was much closer to “trust,” as one would a person, than anything regarding specific facts, statements, sentences, boxes to check. If the Bible (which of course predates the Middle Ages) is supposedly the basis for believing beliefs are everything, then this fact of etymology must be addressed, however inconvenient.
