people I meet. I don’t want to use my doubts as a badge of honor to make me seem more reasonable or sophisticated before the world. I fully acknowledge that these doubts probably grow out of my own insufficiency, the years of living life on the upper level of the play. I will just say I don’t experience faith the way some people do, for whom God is as real as the table in front of you. For them, faith is wholehearted. They are in it with all their soul. In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James quotes a woman who can’t imagine dallying with doubt and all this head scratching. “The very instant I heard my Father’s cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition. I ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, ‘Here, here I am, my Father.’ ” There’s something beautiful in that singleness of heart.
But I come at faith from a different angle, based on a different journey, in ways that are undoubtedly connected to my makeup and personality. I connect more with a smaller group of people who struggle with faith, who wrestle with all the ridiculous unlikelihood of faith. I experienced grace before I experienced God, and sometimes I still have trouble getting back to the source. But I find that as long as there are five or ten people in your life whose faith seems gritty and real and like your own, that keeps the whole thing compelling. All you need is a minion of Christians and Jews.
RELIGIOUS REALISM
For these religious realists, there is the struggle to be faithful to faith itself. For these people, faith comes as an expansion of consciousness that doesn’t last. You become aware of an extra dimension of existence, that, once experienced, feels like home, and then it’s gone. As the poet Richard Wilbur put it:
Joy’s trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.
Faith is not so much living constantly in that extra dimension of depth as much as it is glimpsing it and then longing for it. People in this camp describe faith not as a steady understanding but as a kind of desire, or maybe as a kind of hunch. It is not so much knowing God in all his particulars but a constant motion toward something that half the time you don’t even feel.
In this kind of faith, the mystery is always out front. “Lord, I can approach you only by means of my consciousness, but consciousness can only approach you as an object, which you are not,” Wiman writes. “I have no hope of experiencing you as I experience the world—directly, immediately—yet I want nothing more. Indeed, so great is my hunger for you—or is this evidence of your hunger for me?—that I seem to see you in the black flower mourners make beside a grave I do not know…in the bare abundance of a winter tree whose every limb is lit and fraught with snow. Lord, Lord, how bright the abyss inside that ‘seem.’ ”
Water metaphors abound in religious talk because there is so much thirsting. God is said to be the stream of living water for which we pant, the way a deer pants for water in a brook. Faith is said to be a sip that arouses a thirst.
If you read the accounts of faith by even the most profound believers, you see there are dry spells, agonies, and moments of profound challenge. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik notes that “Religion is not, at the outset, a refuge of grace and mercy for the despondent and desperate, an enchanted stream for crushed spirits, but a raging, clamorous torrent of man’s consciousness with all its crises, pangs and torments.” It is precisely the journey down these rocky rapids that purges faith of its superficiality, Soloveitchik argues. It’s not easy and comforting. As Wiman puts it, if God is supposed to be a salve to heal psychic wounds or an escape from the pains of life, “then I have to admit: it is not working for me.”
Mother Teresa had an intense experience of faith on September 10, 1946, while on a train. She experienced God’s love as the “thirst of Jesus’ heart, hidden in the poor.” But as early as 1953, and all the way until at least 1995, she seems to have lost contact with God. In her private letters she confesses, “I have no faith….I am told God