Faith is a Fluid

For a long time I was not happy with the common explanations of what faith was.  They either seemed to describe a weird exercise in willpower where you tried to make yourself believe something really intensely because you felt you ought to; a statement that you believed something despite having no good reason to; or hoping or wanting something to be true and therefore trying it out, which was a definition that made sense, but which wasn’t any different from ‘hope.’

The scriptures and the prophets don’t have to use terms with a precise constant definition, especially because we are working with truths that are probably at least a little beyond us all.  But for my own purposes, I wanted to have a meaning I could get.  I also wanted to know what faith felt like from the inside.  What feeling or experience that I had had was “faith”?  If this doesn’t make sense to you, my amigos, sorry, but I never claimed to have a standard issue personality type.

I eventually hit on two ways to understand faith that made sense to me.

First, I realized that faith meant trust or loyalty.  Faith wasn’t about concepts or beliefs.  Faith was about people.  Especially Jesus Christ.  Faith is when you don’t know why something works, but you trust the person telling you to do it.  The experience of faith is literally like the experience of being a little child.

Second, I found a pretty common experience that we all have because our spiritual experience comes in peaks and troughs.  You have a peak moment where you are communing with the Holy Ghost and you just know things, the way you know tastes and smells.  It just is.  No room for doubt.  The moment fades and you end up in another moment where you don’t feel that confidence at all.  If anything, you actually feel the opposite.  You feel like everything is a lie and meaningless and so on.  But you decide to hold on to the certainty you had before and act accordingly.  This way of having faith is like the stripling warriors, but instead of ‘knowing that our mothers knew it,’ you ‘know that you knew it.”

These two definitions don’t match up exactly with the way Alma and Paul talk about faith, but they are in the ball park.  Which is close enough for me since we are all blind men trying to describe the elephant.

However . . .

I recently read Christ telling the people of his home town that he couldn’t do miracles because of their unbelief.  When we talk about how faith should precede the miracle we usually talk about why it would be bad for you to have miracles without faith.  In other words, we aren’t talking about how how a lack of faith means miracles can’t happen, we are talking about how a lack of faith means miracles shouldn’t happen.  But this is not what Christ says.  He doesn’t refuse to do miracles because of their unbelief.  He says he can’t.   Something about their unbelief blocks him.

You can certainly read this episode as Christ saying his Father won’t permit him (or even his own principles won’t permit him).  People sometimes mean something like that when they say “can’t.”  “Sorry, I can’t go out tonight (my parents won’t let me).” But that’s not the most natural reading.  The most natural reading is that their unbelief literally suppressed his ability to perform miracles on their behalf in some way.

When I read that, all these little hints that my understanding of faith is lacking came flooding back to me.  There are little clues here and there that faith is something like a fluid or a physics-style field.  Is there a quantum particle of hope?  Does the disbelief field fall off as the square of the relationship distance?

It gives me awe.