Lord, I believe…
…help thou my unbelief.
That’s how St. Augustine put it.
Around 24 hours ago, while I was asleep and my computer was supposed to be backing up, it crashed. This meant that the backup failed and also that the previous backup was corrupted. My hard drive has turned into a terabyte of paperweight, it seems. Is this disaster, calling for a wailing and a gnashing of teeth? It would have two weeks ago…
But no.
I talk of Scientific Rationalist Chris (SR) and Emotional Chris (EC) often, and sometimes they talk to each other openly in places where no-one else is listening, like this blog (do not worry, I know these are only a story I tell myself about how thing work, because it makes sense of it for me – actually, things are much more complex than that and all the bits of Chris I identify are one person, with SR EC and something else I call GF all inhabiting and sharing one set of brain cells and one identity).
SR was worried and pointed out that a lot of the great creative flurry over the last 10 days had been lost, but EC is now happy and doesn’t want to feel sad or angry or frustrated if he doesn’t have to. So we said “Feh, we can write it again”, trusting that GF, which prompted that activity, could do it again if necessary – and in any event, someone more skilled than us could probably get the information off the doorstop. It wasn’t worth getting hot and bothered about.
And this was a teaching moment. I talk of a reductionist concept of what GF is which satisfies SR in some of my writings; in this conception GF is nothing more than a part of Chris, and just as much resident in Chris’ brain. This keeps SR happy; it is a sufficient reason for SR and he can believe it strongly (though not have faith in it – it is only a model, an hypothesis). But EC is not satisfied by that, to him GF is more than that, MASSIVELY more than that, because he FEELS that. So EC tells us we must believe panentheism, which is the way of thinking of the box [ ], or GOD, which agrees with this feeling.
SR protests that we have no evidence of anything more; EC retorts that we do not have any evidence of not-more – and SR agrees, and can believe as well, though less strongly. Maybe if he can find a way of testing that hypothesis, he’ll insist on it, but he can’t yet. And we are happy.
I have also written about the difference between faith and belief. Faith is love and trust. I love my wife, I trust my wife with my life, let alone my possessions; I love and trust her abolutely. But I do not believe absolutely – I could trust her, and my possessions or my life would not be safe, in fact – but I trust anyhow, I love anyhow. I believe that I am taking a calculated risk.*
And here we are. I have just had ten days of incredible writing productivity less than half of which has appeared here and the other public places I write, and I can be happy trusting that GF will, through EC, inspire SR to do it again, only better. Before this, I was writing all the time, fearing that the depression would return and that the creativity, without GF, would wither, and I wouldn’t remember enough of it unless I wrote it. I was not trusting GF, not trusting God, at least not fully. So my faith was weak.
Lord, I have faith, help thou my lack of faith.
Through the dark days of the depression I have for most of the time had behind my chair near my desk the poster “Footsteps in the sand”. I could not see how this was really relevant, because, of course, GF had deserted me, us. According to SR. at least. We hadn’t felt GF for over 6 years, after all – it had been our footsteps, waiting for GF to return. We had not had faith.
And yet EC had liked the poster and we put it up to please him. And that, to us, looking back, proves that GF was there all the time. Chris is still here, the footsteps continue, but Chris walks with God (or GF, if you like) now and there are two pairs again. But we have faith that actually, GF was always there – Chris, the whole Chris, including SR, EC and GF could not see, because SR had locked up EC, and with him GF. We had made ourselves blind.
God did not leave us. God wil never leave us. My faith is strengthened.
Lord, I have faith, help thou my lack of faith.
We believe, in some measure. We believe strongly in GF, in the God within us, the God which Buddhism recognises well; we believe less strongly in the panentheist conception of God, but we believe nonetheless
And we believe it, too. Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief…
* I would like to apologise unreservedly to my wife for writing that; she has read it, and cannot separate faith from belief in her mind, and therefore I have hurt her, and I would do anything not to have done that. But once said, it cannot be unsaid. I will write more separately about this, as I realise that people may still not grasp this important distinction.