faith
A friend asked me a while ago what my definition of faith is. The usual cliches jumped to mind.
Faith isn’t faith until it’s all you’re holding on to…
Faith is believing in the things you can’t see…
Faith makes all things possible…
I have a lot of cliches rolling around my head at any given moment. But when I actually found time to sit down and think about this question, I became more and more uneasy with those predictable definitions.
As a human, I have only one perception of the world; mine. I have experienced it only from my eyes, and find it incredibly difficult to be any other way. It’s one of those special traits we hold as human beings.
So when it comes to discussing, and defining faith, I can do it only from my experience, and my point of view. It strikes me, therefore, that faith can be used as just another thing in which we tell the other person they are wrong. “No that’s not my experience, you can’t be right.”
Or, “Um, are you crazy? How can you have faith in something I have no experience of.”
I am aware by even writing this down as my experience of faith, I am putting it out there, that this is faith. This is how everyone should view faith, and how everyone should approach faith.
This is my biggest issue with faith. The self centered-ness of it. Ask somebody why they have the faith they have, and they will relate to you a whole bunch of stories from their lives. Good times, bad times, times that made them the person they are, and helped form the faith they have.
More often than not, they will tell you how their faith reassures them that there is a plan for their life.
That they have a purpose.
That they have a reliance on a greater being that guides them.
Their faith provides answers for unanswerable thing, even whilst they claim some things will never be understood.
So yes, I guess my response to this question, was a response to all those things I can not bare. It is a response to the society of self that even seems to have invaded my experience of the christian church.
My definition of faith would be one word. Jesus.
My definition of faith is one person. Jesus.
My definition of faith is choosing to believe there has been one person that was so overflowing with love, it would seem crazy not to take note of him.
But my definition of faith has to assume most of these things will never be understood. That this life is messy, and hard, and will break us down, mostly for no other reason than that is life.
And that I am just as susceptible, just as deserving of that brokenness than anyone else. That my faith in one person will not cause me to live one step above others, or one step away from disaster at any given moment.
My faith has to rely on the fact, that whatever goes on, Jesus remains. The things he stands for, remain. That love and goodness and grace, will always remain, and will always be available.
I guess what I came to, is my definition of faith has nothing to do with me at all. It does not depend of my life experience, or if i have been brought through hard times. My faith is quite simply living as close as I can get to a man who I believe was pretty damned revolutionary in his approach to life.
I just wish there was a way of defining faith without the words, I, me, my.
