An upward movement

That may be all I know about what faith is.

It’s difficult to talk about faith and stay in the mode of faith* but I want to try.

*a non-intellectual mode, above all

I want to try because I don’t know where faith comes from, what it is, how and why it comes and goes, but I know that when it leaves me, which it’s done before, it’s harder to stay vertical.

The path, which is always full of obstacles, feels more obstructed. I am smaller before the obstacles. I want to lie down instead of climbing over them. When I crane to look over the closest obstacle, I just see so many new ones lying in wait. I could lie down in the dirt and give up, like gravity is always suggesting.

The people who aren’t near me feel farther away. The people who are with me feel shut tighter, sealed-off. They may or may not be sealed-off, since people do open and close, but I feel that I can’t get at the parts I long for, the ones that make me feel un-alone.

That’s when *I’ve* gone closed, I know that, but knowing that doesn’t help. It’s not like I can reopen forcibly. I open and close when I open and close. I can want to open. I can feel the muscles inside my clamshell holding me shut and I can try to guess into the muscles, and see if a person as close-by as myself guessing why they’re closing helps them relax. I can hope it does.

An upward movement and a relaxing?

Is that faith?

I worry about saying “faith”. I think some people will hear “religious faith” and run away. I don’t want anyone to run away. I want everyone to stay. I’m not making a point, I’m not trying to make a sale. Look in my head, there’s nothing there, see? It’s empty. No plan. I don’t know where I’m taking us.

Religious faith sounds crisp and elegant, structured, like a fine suit. I don’t own a suit like that. Going along the path I pass by all the churches and temples, and I hear little bits of the music, recitations of the text as I go by, and some of it is so nice but none of it makes me want to go inside.

Faith has been harder to have.

Universally true, I’d bet real money.

The anti-buoyancy forces, whatever they are, they’re on the move. They’re having a strong quarter, we can say that.

You have to work harder to retain whatever kind faith you use to get your pants on. Faith in enough of your fellow humans, faith in the heretofore-decent-enough luck that has you still alive, faith in powers, faith in benevolence as a real thing that operates somehow in our doings, that wants to, that can and will.

And what is that work? What, exactly, in a real day, comprises it?

What do you do? Do you think of good things you’ve known? Think of all the strongest good things and people you’ve known? Do you count the good things and people? Do you get a friend in front of your face or on the phone? Do you pray? Do you go limp and try and feel if it’s true that life is a force that’s carrying you somewhere and won’t drop you until the right time? Do you hope that large, loving beings are real, accessible and listening, listening to you specifically, feeling about you a way that would make them want to help get you vertical? Do you go straight to somebody you can’t see but you want to be there? Do you beg? Do you put some muscle into it?

I believe we can get it back when it goes but I don’t know how, I don’t know how. When faith is gone it feels obsolete, or extinct. Extinct, that’s more true. A dodo bird. We know it was here once, okay, but be real. We don’t hope for dodos now. Faith, gone, seems impossible to retrieve, like it left the world of qualities altogether.

Today it came back.

That’s why I’m talking about it. I don’t know why faith came back but it did. It’s right in my core, a buoyancy. I’m excited but it’s quiet. I have no idea why but I can go up today. And any amount up contains all the amounts up. Precious property, this thing that I don’t know what it is. A promissory note, some kind of heaven money, but I can spend it inside myself on a good feeling right away, and then another, and another, with no debt. The transactions are clean, they’re done. It keeps going. Riches.