"Faith"
"God, You are my God, I am seeking you,
my soul is thirsting for you, my flesh is longing for you,
a land parched, weary and waterless..."
- Psalm 63:1
One's struggle to embrace belief in the face of logical doubt amounts to an unrelieved, lifelong ordeal in submission, intellectual surrendering, and self-offering, sweetened now and then along the way by unforgettable instances of spiritual transport.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James puzzled over that uncanny state of mind "in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God."
Why would any of us capsize the raft of self to submerge his mortal ego in this swirling vortex? The deepest appeal of religion is here: through abnegation, our souls drink in the extraordinary apprehension of a greater wholeness, and of our playing a small but meaningful role in that greater wholeness. As James said, we achieve, at long last, the "feeling of being at home in the Universe."
TITLE - "Faith"
WHERE - Vancouver, British Columbia (2016)