What It Would Cost You | Faith In Real Life

You've done the arguments already, and not casually. You know the cosmological one and the place where it thins out. You know what the better writers say about suffering, and you know the better answers still leave a residue. Hand you one more book and you'd read it, probably enjoy it, and end up roughly where you started, which is somewhere fairly specific: close enough to the thing to touch it, then setting it down for a few months, then back again.

If the evidence were going to settle this, it would have settled it by now.

So my guess is that what's holding you is the bill. Not whether it's true, but what agreeing it's true would cost, and I suspect you've priced that out more carefully than you've admitted to anyone. Let me try to say the price out loud. Unnamed fears run the show. Named ones at least have to argue their case.

One: you'd have to stop thinking.

This is the big one, and it isn't stupid. You've spent years building a particular relationship with your own mind. You check things. You notice when you want something to be true and you discount accordingly. You can stay inside not-knowing for a long stretch without flinching, which most people cannot do, and you're right to be quietly proud of that. It took work.

Then you look at how faith actually gets practiced and it looks like the machinery for undoing all of it. People arrive at the conclusion and reverse-engineer the premises. Certain questions get a small cough and a change of subject. Doubt becomes something to be managed rather than followed where it goes. Whatever else is happening in that room, it doesn't look like the disposition you've spent your adult life cultivating, and the fear is that walking in means checking that disposition at the door. That you'd trade down to a smaller kind of thinker in exchange for a warmer kind of life.

I don't think that's the wrong worry. I think it's aimed a few degrees off. But I'm not going to try to dissolve it in a paragraph, because a fear that's been earned deserves more than a paragraph.

Two: you'd turn into somebody else.

You've watched it happen. Someone you knew, someone genuinely interesting, someone who could hold two ideas in tension and enjoy the discomfort, goes through whatever they go through, and a year later the conversations have changed. There's a vocabulary now. There are positions they hold that don't seem to have arrived by any process you'd recognize as thinking. They're more interested in where the group ends than in anything happening inside it. They're not worse people, exactly. They're less porous. Something that used to be open has quietly shut, and the part that unsettles you is that they don't appear to have noticed.

That fear sits underneath the first one and it's more personal, because it's about the man who'd be standing there afterward and whether your current self would want to have a drink with him. Or whether you'd catch him saying something at a dinner table and feel a faint embarrassment you couldn't quite locate the source of.

People do change like that. Pretending otherwise would be an insult to your eyesight.

Three: you're tired.

This is the one you'd be least likely to say at that dinner table.

Not sleep-tired. Tired from the maintenance. Decades of keeping up a self, a coherent and capable and reasonably interesting one, for other people and, more exhaustingly, for yourself. Nobody sees the labor involved, which is the whole point of doing it well, and also the problem, because invisible work never gets relieved.

So when you look at faith, part of what you see is another job posting. Vocabulary to acquire. Markers to hit. Attendance. Correct opinions, sincerely held or at minimum convincingly held. A second identity to keep polished, with its own audience and its own ways of failing in public. What you feel in response isn't really an objection. It's fatigue. If this is one more thing to perform, you'll pass. The slate is full and none of the current productions are going well enough to justify adding a new one.

That's the fear worth the most time, because I think it's accidentally pointing at something true about what the thing is supposed to be in the first place.

None of these are the objections of a person who hasn't thought about it. They're the objections of someone protecting things worth protecting: honesty, character, and whatever energy is left.

I've been carrying them around a long time and I don't have the sort of answer that fits neatly at the end of a post. What I've come to think is that all three are aimed slightly off-center. Not wrong about the danger. Wrong about where the danger actually lives.

Which is what I will get into in the next post. If you want to follow that thread, you'll find it on the blog next week.