Faith
is precisely no-thing. It is nothing you can prove to be right, or use
to get anywhere else. If you want something to believe in (which
is where we all must start!), you had best be a totem and taboo
Christian, with clear ground, identity, and boundaries. But that is not
yet faith! That is merely securing the foundations for your personal
diving board.
Faith is the leap into the water, now with the lived experience that
there is One who can and will catch you—and lead you where you need to
go! Religion, in some sense, is a necessary first half of life
phenomenon. Faith is much more possible in the second half of life, not
necessarily chronologically but always spiritually. As the Danish
philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wisely said, “Life must be lived forward,
but it can only be understood backward.” Jonah knew what God was doing,
and how God does it, and how right God is—only after emerging from the
belly of the whale. He has no message whatsoever to give until he has
first endured the journey, the darkness, the spitting up on the right
shore—all in spite of his best efforts to avoid these very things. Jonah
indeed is our Judeo-Christian symbol of transformation. Jesus had found
the Jonah story inspiring, no doubt, because it described almost
perfectly what was happening to him!
Richard Rohr
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