Faith

In my recent, and seemingly constant, struggle for balance between responsibility and pleasure, I have found myself reading A LOT! I love to read and no matter how tired I am from the day, I'm never too tired to read. So if I only read for half an hour, it helps me find at least some small amount of balance each day. My hope is that by doing this small thing every day, I can eventually built upon it and include more activities that make me happy in my every day life.

Anyway, I cleaned and ran errands this morning, so I decided to spend my afternoon reading. Right now, I'm reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. It's a really insightful book about the author's journey to find balance in her life and I feel like I'm reading it at the perfect time in my life. But all of that is not why I decided to write a blog post. I just read this one section and it not only relates to a recent post of mine, but it is so beautifully written that I just felt like I had to share it. So here are her thoughts on faith:

The devout of this world perform their rituals without guarantee that anything good will ever come of it. Of course there are plenty of scriptures and plenty of priests who make plenty of promises as to what your good works will yield (or threats as to the punishments awaiting you if you lapse), but to even believe all this is an act of faith, because nobody amongst us is shown the endgame. Devotion is diligence without assurance. Faith is a way of saying, "Yes, I accept the terms of the universe and I embracein advance what I am presently incapable of understanding." There'sa reaction we refer to "leaps of faith" - because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don't care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sityou down with their stacks of books to prove to you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational; it isn't. If faith were rational, it wouldn't be - by definition - faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be...a prudent insurance policy.

I don't have anything else to really add to that. I just thought the words were beautiful and meaningful and I felt compelled to share them with whoever might be reading my blog today.