Faith²

When the reasons expire and the pretexts commit suicide, when hopes crumble and horizons fade away, when the dreams vanish and the projects fail, when logic breaks and despair settles in, when love weakens and imagination dries out, when the difficult questions are asked and the answers don’t come, when intelligence surrenders to the stupidity of the world, when the givers depart and the takers remain, when the souls of harmony leave and the seekers of trouble stay, when suffering becomes unbearable and fear of tomorrow takes hold of our minds, when the strong falls alone without support and the weak leans on the courage of the strong, then the only thing we have left to continue our journey in this eternal comedy and hopefully reach the end of our road is faith!

And yet we still need to decide in what we should believe?

In a God that chooses a subset of humanity and call them his chosen people?

In one God, the father almighty, creator of heaven and earth?

In Allah the Great and the Merciful?

Or in a multitude of heavenly and earthly Gods?

From where I stand, after many years of living and observing the livings, I can say with a high level of confidence that none of the above objects of faith is enough! The faith we place in God, Allah or all the gods known to humans doesn’t have the necessary longevity or power from which we can draw the strength to carry on in this world of contradiction and absurdity. We need a more resilient faith, devoid of any doubt or disappointment, a faith that will accompany us each step of the way with the same strength, and a faith that will not falter or abandon us, no matter what the circumstances might be!

There is only one kind of faith that encompasses all these qualities and meets all these requirements; it is the faith in our faith! Faith² is the faith in the strength, the power, the rightness and the righteousness of our faith, in its superiority above all other kinds. Faith² is founded on the wrongness of any other faith: those who don’t believe in the same way or in the same things as us are lost on the wrong path. Faith² is the absolute and extreme faith because its object is a pure creation of our own. It is the faith that never disappoints because it is made solely from our fabric. It is the only true way, bearing no doubt, to our designed end. It will carry us all the way, because the saints might be canonised or not, the gods could be blamed or not, Jesus could doubt in his father and regret, Mahomet might oppress his closest companions, Virgin Mary could be a woman and a repudiated mother, the Holy Spirit may abandon his son on the cross, Yahweh could punish his chosen people and abandon them 40 years wandering in the desert, every god may be replaced by another, every universal force may be defeated, but it is nearly impossible for the object of faith² to go away as long as we are breathing. With every beat of our heart and every thought in our brain, our faith will remain alive, moving from one god to another, from one energy to another, creating its own gods, fit for purpose; allowing thus, our faith² to continue to exist and keep us going, determined, motivated, fanatic, extremist, obsessed, close-minded, and contributing our unfair share in the contradiction and absurdity of this world.

Faith² fears anything that can put its object in question. Thus, it fears uncertainty, doubt, curiosity and open-mindedness, they jeopardise the validity and therefore the existence of its foundation. And above all, faith² dreads clarity of thinking, even if it is just for a moment. It is terrified by that moment where reality prevails, where the illusion of fabricated things comes to an end, and where the true nature of what matters comes to the light. Faith² crumbles and dies when we have a glimpse of the simple truth, and we scream: “my faith, my faith, why have you forsaken me?”.

When faith² vanishes, we either follow, bitter from disappointment and depressed, the passing time into the arms of the awaiting death, or we are reborn from the ashes of our self-imposed ignorance and wishful illusions with a new clarity of purpose, wanting to enjoy every bit of enjoyable life there is. At which point, with this renewed clarity of thoughts, we start asking the real questions, away from the “why’s” and into the “how’s”, which ineluctably leads to the question “with whom"?

With every question and every answer, the attainable joy lessens, and the “with whom” question becomes irrelevant as it always brings the same answer. Until a certain day, at a certain hour, we realise that there are three choices in life: the big lie (faith²), the painful truth (life-made), or …