The Substance of Faith

Lina and I have started to notice, when we go out to feed the sheep and get the eggs, that the sun is finally starting to rise a little earlier. We’re still taking headlamps and flashlights with us, but the darkest days have started to give way, at least a bit.Then, yesterday evening we went for a walk, and the sun was just starting to set a little after five, another sure sign of the lengthening days. We talk about you kids a lot when we walk together, but sometimes we can drag our attention onto other admittedly less fascinating topics, and yesterday our conversation on the walk came back around to faith.Our meeting from last week had been turning over in my mind. I suppose it’s not too surprising that I wasn’t able to completely figure out faith in one week, or even in fifty years for that matter, but I do think I got some things wrong last week. Though for me maybe faith is a puzzle to think about. Like Zeno’s Paradox or the Ship of Theseus, it’s not there for us to settle on an answer.All week this week, I had this line about faith from the Epistle to the Hebrews turning over in my head. I memorized it as a kid in the King James Version, and in that translation it goes, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”Thinking of anything, including God, as supernatural, doesn’t really work in my brain, which means I tend to hear some explanations of faith as, “when you gaslight yourself real hard so you can stop trusting what you really know.” Doing that is probably not very healthy, and I also don’t think it’s a plain reading of the text or the wordThis week, I’ve been reading from that book that I told you guys about at Christmas, Bart D. Ehrman’s Lost Scriptures, and it has reminded me that lots of different people have had lots of different ideas about what any of this means. Waves hands. Even inside the canon of the New Testament, some writers had different ideas about faith, but I kept coming back to those words of the anonymous writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. And with that in mind, this past week I’ve kept thinking about the words substance and evidence there alongside the word faith.And with that in mind, maybe faith is a sort of a stepping stone to understanding, to knowledge. But it’s not meant to be a replacement for it, and it’s definitely not meant as a replacement for certainty. Knowing why the sun rises a little bit earlier at the end of January isn’t in tension with faith, it’s the logical next step. Faith, in the way I understand it this week at least, is acceptance of my own partial understanding. This acceptance gives me the confidence to move forward.Looping back for a moment to my own difficulty keeping supernatural ideas in my brain, when I think about God, I think about the eternal, immortal, invisible, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent Existence with a capital E.Existence itself, all of this, waves hands around again, all of this is faithful to us. God is faithful to us. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still puzzling to me, but I think these ancient writers were onto something when they talked about it.Maybe I can understand faithfulness as constancy, walking through uncertainty. Your mama and I are faithful to one another, which means we have made a commitment to count on one another, and there’s that same mutuality to it. Each of us have to be faithful, and each of us have to exercise faith. It’s a great metaphor, and it’s also a great thing to actually do.Faith is evidence and substance, faith is mutuality, faith is a stepping stone to knowing. We have faith in ourselves and faith in each other and faith in God, and what I think each one of those things mean is that we only know partly, but we let that be okay. Paul said, “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”Before we light our candles, one of the reasons I’ve been thinking about this so much the past week is that tomorrow is the day we celebrate the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King taught and talked about faith, and this morning I wanted to spend a little bit of time while I was writing, thinking about him and his ideas on it. So, I typed “MLK faith quote” into a search engine, and then got back a great quote and an AI generated answer about where it came from.I don’t mind saying that I didn’t have very much faith in the answer, but there was a citation, so I went and followed the breadcrumbs. The quote in question is, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” Following the crumbs took me to a page that pointed me to an MLK speech from 1962. The speech is 26 minutes long, and I listened to it, thinking to myself that I’d like to both hear the quote in his own voice, and that I’d be able to verify it.Listeners, I bet none of you are going to be surprised to hear that no, it is not real, and that the closest thing that we have of any evidence that Dr. King ever said such a thing is a quote from a friend of his who said she learned that lesson from him. But have faith! There’s still a silver lining in this story, which is that the New York State Museum has preserved both a recording of the speech in question and a copy of Dr. King’s own prepared notes. Dr. King did have something to say about faith in that speech, which I find even more inspiring than the fake quote, in part because it is actually real.“We must all maintain faith in the future, and believe that the American Dream can and will become a reality. This is my faith.” And a few moments later in the same speech, “And with this faith we will be able to adjourn the counsels of despair, and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism.”Thanks everyone for thinking about this with me. I can’t wait to see you all later this week, but for now let’s light our candles wherever we are and think one more time on faith, and on the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Junior. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com