Sacred Faith
Sacred Faith
What is the line between hope and delusion? Where does faith end and delusion begin? Particularly, as people of faith- what does this mean for our emotional health? What is the difference between faith and magical thinking?
Brittanica defines magical thinking as “the belief that one’s ideas, thoughts, actions, words, or use of symbols can influence the course of events in the material world. Magical thinking presumes a causal link between one’s inner, personal experience and the external physical world.” Images of philosophies such as those espoused in The Secret come to mind. I think of the vivid imagination of a child translating into earnest belief in the attainment of something hoped for.
As a person of faith, I hold a deep belief in what I cannot see or fully understand. My life is built on this belief. In fact, Jesus once exalted the posture and faith of children as something for adults to recover. A New Testament author defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” Taking this to its logical conclusion, faith is then a certainty of what we hope for and are hoping in.
I would venture to guess that most of humanity would agree that there are mysteries in the universe that are beyond understanding. Most of us have experienced uncanny and sometimes even miraculous happenings of which there is no logical explanation. We would agree that much of value in life IS unseen- love, joy, connection, even the breath that sustains us. We trust that love is real. We lean into the connections we feel. We continue to breathe air that is invisible and we experience it keeping us alive.
In many ways, hope functions like breath. It swirls in the invisible realm and enters our souls with a rush of sustaining wind. We know that we cannot reason it into being. We cannot fully understand it. But, we dare to trust it.
Do our thoughts, ideas, actions and words influence the course of events in our world? That is what prayer espouses us to believe, after all. A doctrine of prayer holds to a belief in earnest imploring moving the hand of a Great Being to do as asked. A Christian view of prayer believes that we caninfluence God’s actions, but also that we join God in what He is already doing. Prayer has a way of intimately taking us up into the work of God.
Magical thinking? Perhaps. But, good theology nonetheless.
Where does delusion take over faith and hope? Perhaps it is when we grow so attached to an outcome that we do not leave room for the mystery of God to work. Perhaps it is simply the loss of mystery; mystery in how God will work, mystery in what will happen, mystery in the knowledge that God holds all things together.
Maybe we enter the realm of delusion when we do not concede the fact that we might be wrong; when we deny our humanness, our imperfection at seeing, hearing and knowing, our ability to miss something along the way. Perhaps delusion enters when we cannot let go.
Can faith and letting go find themselves coexisting? They must.
We are human. We are finite. We are limited.
We act with the knowledge and understanding we have and we acknowledge that we see incompletely, with limitations, with biases, with our self often wholly at the center of our hope.
The Divine sees the whole picture- who, when, how and the long-term outcomes at play.
Let’s live in humble hope, with faith that embraces the Mystery and lets go of certainty. Let’s not detach from our deepest desires, but rather lift them up, entrusting them to a loving and good Creator who can bring something from nothing and can weave our stories together with the stories of others in ways we could never see coming or even imagine. Let’s let go of control and of our high opinion of our own knowledge. Let’s be people of hope, not delusion.
How we need hope right now.
For hope does not disappoint…