Faith
When you get to the end of all the light you know
and it’s time to step into the darkness of the unknown,
faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen:
either you will be given something solid to stand on,
or you will be taught how to fly.
The Experience of Faith
"Most of the things we know are known by experience. The taste of chocolate ice cream, a day in the Autumn of the year, the sting of a bee. In fact, love itself is a matter of experience. Some psychiatrists deny the very existence of love. They say it is a delusion. But when one has either loved or been loved, it is all clear. Love exists. But we can know this only by experience.
In the movie, A Patch of Blue, the blind girl asks her grandfather:
“Old paw, what’s green like?” The irritated old man answers:
“Green is green, Stupid. Now stop asking questions.” There follows a pathetic scene in which the young girl paws the grass with her hand and rubs a leaf against her cheek. She is vainly trying to experience the reality of greenness.
The playwright, William Alfred, author of Hogan’s Goat, once said: “People who tell me that there is no God are like a six-year-old saying that there is no such thing as passionate love. They just haven’t experienced God yet.”
Does the condition of desperation release us to the power of God? I keep wondering if, when we finally decide we are nothing, and cannot make it on our own, God decides to give us the grace that will enable us to make something of ourselves. Maybe some of us have to be desperate.
Leonard Cohen once wrote a song called Suzanne. In it he says:
And Jesus was a sailor
when He walked upon the water;
only drowning men could see Him."
John Powell
