Writer's Block and Lost Faith

Submitted by bill on Sat, 06/09/2007 - 08:25. blook faith faithcommons

Lately I've been struggling against writer's block, which is a bit alien since I'm not a real writer. Actually I'm just an amateur thinker who writes to share ideas with other thinkers—thus every piece is actually incomplete; a work in progress; a marker along the journey. However, researching and thinking about this project on Faith has left me at times confused, clueless, even faithless, unable to see the trees for the ever expanding forest.

Sitting in three stacks on the floor are several of the books that are read with some parts read again, underlined and marked with dozens of crumpled post-it notes, all part of a clumsy effort to understand faith and define it anew for this post-modern, post-rational, existential world—expecting then all of it to be laid out in an organized fashion, with references marking the trail so that others can retrace the path and understand the journey. But it has become a forest of books and notes and underlined phrases. No beginning, and certainly no conclusion. Here and there a cluster rises out of the background, but they are out of focus, inconclusive, indistinguishable, out of reach.

A personal reason for undertaking this quest was, I now think, a holy grail like search for faith itself. That is, I must have hoped that if I could find it, grasp it, examine it, sketch it and define it, then I could know it. Because we live in a faithless time, you know. But it's not because of creeping secularism, as some charge. Many isms are attractors of faith: capitalism, fascism, etc. One can put faith in the secular, the scientific, the logical, after all and many of us have tried. But all the preaching by all the cardinals of scientism will not return our faith to a world view that has taken away our meaning and reduced us to standardized, replaceable cogs in a great, random cosmic machine, competing for our livelihoods against Natural Selection and Free Market forces. Neither will our faith be regained by patriarchal, patronizing religion, and certainly not by evangelicalism. The prophets of evangelicalism have been predicting a great and glorious eschatological end for more than 2,000 years, seemingly clueless of the meaning of their own words. Not only have they failed to predict the returning Golden Age, but they have not brought us faith—not in this age. Instead, they redefined faith and redemption so as to give them power over us and in so doing turn their own teaching upside down and turned us into cogs of their parochial machine. Government has failed as well. Democratic government fades into illusion, becoming tyranny of the perceived majority, with leaders and statesmen replaced by parrots, parading from perch to perch telling us what they think we want to hear and then doing what their largest supporters tell them to do because they too are subject to Darwinian Fitness. Dysfunctional families, governments, religions, philosophies, sciences and we all, leaves us what? Faith lost. There is nothing worthy of faith. Yet there is faith and redemption. It is. Somehow, it is.

All of this failure, disappointment and disillusionment notwithstanding, there must be faith, there must be redemption for humanity's anxieties. The one remaining thread of hope is the obvious reality that some of the brightest, best regarded thinkers to have walked this earth over at least 4,000 years searched for it. Whether they found it or not, they sought it. Whether they called it faith or realization, enlightenment or salvation, Allah, The Good, The All, or God, they sensed something transcendent, something beyond themselves, something worth seeking, even if it is forever out of reach. Which is our next clue.

Faith is unfortunately a noun in English without a verb form. Believe should be the verb form but has been put to other uses, as previously discussed here. The consequence of this is that we think of it, at least I think of faith as a thing when it should be an action. It is a pursuit. Maybe the term journey is a bit overused these days, but it is all I know of right now to describe a vector that points toward a goal, toward a destination. Vector is of course mathematics speak for a quantity that has not only magnitude but also direction. And faith is a vector quantity that has a magnitude of quality as well as a direction. The direction changes with the obstacles and mistakes of life but on average points toward that which one most values. If that is nothing, that is if there is no value on the horizon toward which one points a life, then the direction of that life will be merely the vector total of all the attempts, mistakes, sidetracks and reversals stumbled through. But a life lived on purpose will trend toward that purpose. Unless the purpose isn't real. A life of faith then, is a journey, including twists and turns, pauses and backtracks but one tending in the direction of a worthy trust. This is the beginning of my understanding of Existential Faith.

So this afternoon, while having coffee with a friend and complaining of my blocked-ness, he asked: “Are you writing as you go?” No, I answered. He was right on target. Always before, I wrote along the way, because that's where I was, and I knew it. That is, most all I had to write about was the present. The past would often come in to inform it, but the present was usually the tense. Lately I've tried to get all my eggs in one basket so I can better organize them. I've tried to approach a big subject from an overarching perspective. But I've never been able to organize anything like that before, anyway. I always work from piles, project piles, because in my minds eye most everything is connected in some way to everything else, so that I've never found myself capable of cutting things (ideas, materials, resources) up into neat packages and filing them away. My brain doesn't contemplate discrete packages in Aristotelian logic, it just doesn't pack things away in complete form, it always expects one or more parameters to change. Then my friend confessed that he rarely reads a book through to its conclusion. “I don't care about the conclusion,” he said. “I care about the journey. What I want to read about is how the author got to where he or she ended up,” he added. What I heard him say is that the events that lead up to the conclusion are real. What the conclusion is, I don't know, but it has to be some sort of filtered, massaged, compressed summary. Sometimes only the conclusion is real, and the steps leading up to it are just rationalizations to justify the conclusion. Other times the conclusion is all that's needed because it lives within Euclidean space, that is 3-space plus time, and all the reader needs to do to reproduce the writer's findings is to plug numbers into a formula—as it were. I'm not talking about geometry, actually. I'm trying to explain that objective, reductive “knowledge” or propositional truths can be repeated by plugging and chugging, as the saying goes. But there are other truths, or knowledge, that are not so easily repeated.

We live in a spacetime.

In spacetime, an event occurs at a point. Different than, as in Euclidean or Cartesian space in which an object exists at a point. I'm drawing a distinction between an object merely existing at a point, and an event occurring there. It's a happening. An occurrence. Not merely a thing. Events are more than objects. They are not objective, and neither are they subjective. They are both. Subjects act on objects during events. This is much more than reductive factoids. But I'm explaining what I learned from my friend telling me something I already knew but didn't really know. And that is that I just can't write about conclusions because I rarely ever come to them. Conclusions are way-points. They are what you know before you know something more. Conclusions can rarely be complete, tied-off, categorized and put away. They are rarely done. Conclusions are merely an event on the spacetime continuum of knowledge about something. The only way they are final is if you stop learning. Knowledge is always incomplete.

In the end, faith is like the path to enlightenment or redemption, plus the trust in there being such a thing worthy of pursuit. But enlightenment is itself a pursuit. Some would have us believe that they have already achieved this goal by way of degree, decree, a state of consciousness or by assenting to a set of propositions. But I think it is more a matter of magnitude and direction.

There are still two issues that remain. First is to go back to writing almost directly onto the website. I have a dozen or so pages, written over the past few months, that I've not posted because they're waiting for something to tie them together. They're waiting for the grand plan that I now realize I will not likely ever produce. The second issue is to figure out how to organize gobs of free standing essays into some cohesive whole. But maybe there just isn't one. That's what I promised, but maybe I can't fulfill that promise.

Being Baptized in the River

Submitted by reido on Sat, 06/09/2007 - 10:49.

Bill

I wanted to comment these last two days on your passage New Life From the Dead. This one fits very nicely into the thoughts that you gave me from the aforementioned.

First, let me quote something from "The Wisdom of the Desert": "A certain brother came to Abbot Silvanus at Mount Sinai, and seeing the hermits at work he exclaimed: Why do you work for the bread that perisheth? Mary had chosen the good part, namely to sit at the feet of the Lord without working. Then the Abbot said to his disciple Zachary: Give the brother a book and let him read, and put him in an empty cell. At the ninth hour the brother who was reading began to look out to see if the Abbot was going to call him to dinner, and sometime after the ninth hour he went himself to the Abbot and said, Did the brethren not eat today, Father? Oh yes, certainly, said the Abbot, they just had dinner. Well, said the brother, why did you not call me? You are a spiritual man, said the elder, you don't need this food that perisheth. We have to work, but you have chosen the best part. You read all day, and can get along without food. Hearing this the brother said, Forgive me, Father. And the elder said, Martha is necessary to Mary, for it was because Martha worked that Mary was able to be praised."

This was probably intended to be a simple lesson on piety and judgment, but since I had interconnectedness on my mind after reading your post, it came out something different. You pointed out several myths (by "myth", I do not mean "Untrue") with common themes relating to Existence. Could there be a common Source? And is that source what people call "God"?

Excuse this simple analogy, but the picture is in my mind... If we come to a great river there are a number of ways to think: We could simply consider the river as it is, where it is. The water may be good, but as it is a collection of many waters, it may have to be filtered and treated to make it good. Or we could prefer the waters upstream, and begin to search out the tributaries and mountains for the clear source. Or maybe we could settle somewhere in between -- not perfect, but still suitable. Even so, the river continually cycles and changes with the seasons and the weather conditions, so what may be good at present may not be good later and a journey to find the clearer water would ensue. But regardless of our particular point of place and time on that river, we are still involved necessarily with the sum of its own journey as it meets our own.

In considering the totality of Life, there are no parts that are not useful. Each has its place -- even if so transitory that one particular place serves only to give birth to a different direction. To return to an earlier question, could this be what people call "God"?

reido

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