We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.
Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
Watts’ distinction between faith and belief has become crucial to me recently. Belief is a willed assent to some proposition. Faith describes an encounter. It happens to one; it is not something one can decide to do. That seems to me to underlie statements like this one of Paul’s: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works…” (Ephesians 2:8-9 NIV)
No thing, the ground of being encountered in the loss of the believed certainties, in the emptiness of the apophasis, is just such a gift. J.P. Williams: “When we talk about divinity, though, we’re not trying to exclude a set of things and point to what’s left over: we’re trying to talk about what is beyond all things. We’re not pointing to anything, really, but to the source of all things.”
It is hard to use words. Emptiness is the expanse of what is, dimensionless, preceding space and time, holding “all that is made” like a nut in the hand of Christ, as Julian of Norwich saw. And yet as I once wrote, “We are creatures of the word, we humans. We know ourselves by our names first of all, and our least thought comes ready dressed in words. And yet it is in silence that we draw close to God, becoming open in the stillness to the presence that is always with us, nearer than our own breathing.”
Prayer, it seems to me – prayer as stillness, openness, not as asking for things – is not quite the same as meditation. There is a reason why centering prayer is so called, though it is so similar in practice to vipassana meditation, and there is a reason why the Jesus Prayer is a prayer and not a mantra; and I think that it is in this surrender to what may come – rather than in an irritable reaching for what is expected – that it is found.
I cannot help myself. If I follow the path of self-emptying honestly, through meditation; or if I follow, to the best of my limited understanding, Alan Lightman’s journey Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, I find myself back here, at the mercy of no thing at all, but the wholly beyond – only to be given just that, mercy.
So when we think of mercy, we should be thinking first and foremost of a bond, an infallible link of love that holds the created and uncreated realms together. The mercy of God does not come and go, granted to some and refused to others. Why? Because it is unconditional–always there, underlying everything. It is literally the force that holds everything in existence, the gravitational field in which we live and move and have our being. Just like that little fish swimming desperately in search of water, we too–in the words of Psalm 103–‘swim in mercy as in an endless sea.’ Mercy is God’s innermost being turned outward to sustain the visible and created world in unbreakable love.
Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope
First published on A Long Restlessness
Silent Assemblies 