Letter #73: The Real Deal

Don't deprive yourself of cookies.

Someday I’d like to write a dictionary of church words. I wasn’t raised religious, so a lot of things I hear in church sound like code to me.

The word “faith” is like that. According to some people it’s all you need to be saved. They talk as if it’s that easy. But faith in what? Jesus? OK…but how exactly, at a practical level, is faith supposed to change my life?

This is where a church dictionary would come in handy. I think the entry for “faith” would say something like: “Faith (Greek pistis), n. The set of all decisions you make about what counts as real.”

You might not even realize you’re making such decisions. Some realities, you don’t get a say in: I can’t decide that the finch outside my window isn’t real without becoming a schizophrenic, or worse, a philosophy professor.

But now consider an entity like “the Amazon warehouse.” I believe Amazon has a warehouse somewhere containing, among other things, cookies. I’ve never seen it. But I act as if it’s there. I press certain buttons and I get cookies at my house. I can’t stop the Amazon warehouse from existing just by refusing to believe. But I can stop myself from getting cookies, which would be a shame.

If I wanted to, I could take a field trip to the Amazon warehouse and lay eyes on it. But not everything is like that. When I was a little kid I used to thank the sun for shining on me. Who was I talking to? It felt like I was talking to more than a hunk of lifeless gas. You could say that feeling was an illusion, if you decided that the only real things are the ones you can measure and see. But that would be a decision about what counts as real—in other words, a statement of faith.

The world compels us to believe in physical things, whereas it lets us choose whether to act as if spiritual things are real. But we experience both kinds of thing. I sense the life of your soul on the other end of the line as I write this, just as surely as I sense the finch’s wings hovering at the edge of my sight.

Sometimes the world delivers gut punches or ignites desires that make the higher truths of God seem distant and hypothetical as the stars. That’s why faith is a decision—a decision to treat the spirit as real when the flesh argues otherwise.

What I like about this is it’s not vague or abstract, like a church word. It’s habitual and concrete, like a virtue. Maybe that’s why the Letter to the Hebrews, in its own definition of faith, says that it makes the things we hope for take on “substance.” What we’re trying to do, in this world of sorrows, is act as if the sun was made for joy—and to decide that joy, as well as sorrow, counts as real.