My faith.

When I was younger, God wasn’t so hard to believe. See, for most children, the Whats of religion don’t always require a Why; after all, life is just splendid, these matters are all so trivial, and the reason, if they ever discover it later, is probably very reasonable. And if ever any one of these questions gave me too much of a bother, I could delve into yet another book on my dad’s shelf explaining why evolution is a bunch of fairy tales and how God is so easy to believe. And it was splendid, after all, and they were trivial, and it would have been magnificent if things could have stayed like that.

But as kids grow up, they develop this skill—logic—until alas! there comes an age when doubts all grow too heavy,
when the Hammer of Empiricism smashes on through every one of their beliefs,
knocks them down,
sends away the ex-children scrambling for and clawing at whatever pieces are left huc illuc.

And I don’t think it was so bad that I was barely a teenager when I decided to let it reduce my religion to sweet neological nothings—
tis better to let it strike early, I think, when you don’t have too much to lose and still 5/6 of your life left to rediscover it.

But then, of course, I suppose many a Presbyterian preacher would have told me to neatly tuck these doubts away into the dark recesses of my mind and know that there is an answer,
but My goodness, what a horrible answer!

If God is God, what are they so afraid of? Wrestling with him, as Jacob had? And defeating him, perhaps? Some God they make him out to be!

Or maybe,
Or maybe those doubts which had the potential to sabotage our beliefs weren’t quite so important to these fundamentals, tenets, doctrines. Yet if this be the case, how seriously would I be taking faith, dismissing so lightly these doubts that undermine it so heavily!

Then, I would think the only proper response would be to let them run amok in your mind until they find themselves before the Divine Countenance, until God addresses them and you realize how completely unfounded they were.
Yet this is so hard for so many,
and for me Herculean.

Perhaps one reason for this is because God, for one reason or another, is given to frequent bouts of silence, often when you least expect them.
The late Job has experienced this, to which he cries out, “But God will answer in the end!”
But of course—a perfectly loving God would certainly not ever abandon anyone, ever!
But I wonder how much of that you can believe all at once when your head is so plagued by these worry-flies beating themselves to death against two layers of glass:

Perchance he’ll be silent for a little too long,
Perchance I’ll abandon him altogether!
and Perchance—
if I happen to die on some bleak, godless winter morning—
I’ll find myself the murderer Nietzsche before the face of that clandestine God (very much alive!) at death!

And so I hold on to my doubts,
not yet brave enough (and not exactly sure how) to hand them all over…

And…

I’m not sure what else to say.

After all the “hold ons” and the “never let gos” are all wasted, I suppose I don’t have much else useful to talk about…