It's believing something that you know with your mind isn't true. It's some kind of overdrive that you push in with a button of some kind in your mind or your emotions. Or, somewhere as "they" say down in your heart, to get you to accept something that you know with your intellect could not possibly be true. And so many of us, in this world today are sceptical of the whole idea of faith, because we think of it as something not connected with the ordinary processes of the mind at all. It's actually opposed to the convictions of the intellect. And so many of us who have been through some kind of education and especially some kind of scientific education, get the idea that to have faith you have to in some way close your mind, or put your intellect to sleep, or ignore the conclusions of science and research.
That's absolutely ridiculous. Faith is not that kind of an irrational
thing at all. Faith, in fact, is something that you and I exercise every day in
our lives. And we've exercised it from the very moment we were born. I suppose
it's true that your mother even encouraged you to feel that we could trust her
when we lay in her arms. And we learned day by day that was true, she
would not drop us, that she was reliable, and we could put our faith in
her arms.
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Quote of the Month
“I discovered later, and I'm still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world. That, I think, is faith.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
Letter to Eberhard Bethge
July 21, 1944
Is it safe to take a breath?
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