Exercise Faith
Matt Litton uses a splitting bar against the ice of Budd Lake in Northwestern New Jersey. We ice fishermen say the ice is safe when it’s four inches thick, as this ice was, but when we venture into a new area, we whack the ice ahead of us to be sure.
Bob Weir
Not long before his recent death, Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead told Ari Melber in a televised interview, “My whole life has been an exercise in faith,” a statement that resonated with me. It gave me the sense of contemplative wholeness I knew especially in my youth. If my life has indeed been an exercise in faith as well as whose no doubt was, that amounts to much less of what can be said about the life, than the exercise itself. I would think anyone’s life is an exercise in faith, whether they know it or not, but a few of us, like Weir, highlight the reality for the extremes it takes us to.
Weir never impressed me as a wide-eyed naif who had no practical bones knocking him around. He was a sensible man who made a large success of his abilities. But some think anyone who used acid to the extent he did must have been without a clue to begin with, let alone after all that acid had its effect. I think to have the kind of balance he displayed, after the Long Strange Trip was finished and age had set in, is remarkable.
Commitment
I’ve never believed in faith, not in the way I’m committed to reason. Reason doesn’t function automatically, so the commitment amounts to the conscious practice of reasoning. But faith gets exercised, too, and for someone who doesn’t identify as faith-centered, I wrote quite a story about it. Every now and then, I come in off the water after fishing, and the words etch a compelling story structure, like the one I’ve linked to, that only the fishing itself could have made possible.
Other than online blogging, I am, of course, committed to my handwritten journals. All these decades I’ve written as if they’ll be taken seriously. I’ve been realistic about that. I’m not so self-absorbed that I can’t accept that they’re probably there for my eyes only. I understand the likelihood is little that, after I’m dead and gone, some of the material will be published and the rest of it kept accessible to scholars. I realize I had an important Dad—Music Director of the American Boychoir and at the top of his profession within American Anglicanism—so it’s natural I feel that way. But it’s even better that I don’t have to, thanks to coming to my own terms. Besides, the best thing is that the journals won’t matter to me at all, unless life after death is business-like. Who knows how people are influenced from within?
And yet, while I’ve tried my best to exercise reason while writing in those notebooks—even in the heat of passion, even when exploring the psyche’s hinterland, and when absorbed in imagination for the sheer wonder of it—it must take some act of faith to believe those journals are important. No matter how brilliant they may be at times. How else can I write them well?
The Natural World is Objective
We participate in it. At some level we are natural. But what I mean by the natural world’s objectivity is its fundamental givenness. Its existence as what we don’t produce. But what we do produce, we arrange and rearrange from natural elements, essentially using that faculty of reason any of us should believe in. In so far as I hope that philosophy—thus social attitudes—shifts from believing sociocultural influences are fundamental, to believing nature is fundamental, the situation is not as simple as rational persuasion winning the day.
It will be no less than a revolution in how we live. Rather than nature being something that threatens us—think climate change—it will be embraced. People I fish with and people who read my stories are acquainted with nature, as I am. I don’t mean everyone will fish but contemplative and recreative lifestyles of varying sorts will supplant dependence on screens. Society in general still thinks it’s entirely sufficient as work and entertainment. But a lot of what amounts to work today will change, too. The cause is not as simple as the sudden presence among us of Artificial Intelligence. I believe there will be less work largely because of the much larger pattern of the need for leisure’s giving us meaning.
I have faith in the coming change.
Revelation
A lot of what my belief in a positive future amounts to is faith, because many times when I think of it, I don’t find a straightforward answer in my mind. I’m groping around in my mind for a sign, just as it’s groping around for my understanding. But fundamentally I have, instead of purely rational beliefs, what amounts to a great faith, which originated in what amounts to revelation.
I treaded clams commercially for more and less 13 years. On one occasion, late in October I believe it was, I dunked under the brine and experienced the vision of swimming in the crystal-clear water of a pool with a beautiful woman. But what made the vision so convincing was how it felt and what it somehow informed me—that it was from the future and the result of allowing nature into people’s lives. The future beyond my own lifetime. It felt ecstatic in a way completely contained, not out-of-the-mind ecstatic, but as a state of well-being normal for the future. Way beyond normal today.
It happened so fast, though it seemed enough to last a long time. By the time I surfaced, it was gone. But it was a vision of the future when coming to terms with nature—by no abandonment of technology as such and humanmade things like pools—will have made feeling really, really good possible.
If reason is strictly instrumental, then no doubt, my life has been an exercise in faith, too. But philosophers, like Aristotle, have written for millennia about contemplative rationality, a love for and abundance of life for its own sake, reasoned about at a higher level than the ordinary. It’s when I’m enmeshed in the ordinary, though, which is most of the time, that faith exists as if it’s a shadow of that presence enacted on the higher level. No less important for what the faith is: the muddling through while committed to reason has a way of fortifying patience.