OLD AGE MANIFESTO [Su, 10-16-22]

Faith is what gets you up in the morning.

 

Faith in life.

 

Faith is not belief. Belief is knowledge. Knowledge doesn’t get you up in the morning.

 

Modern religious faith is almost always equated with belief, what John A. T.  Robinson called “…believing 49 impossible things before breakfast.”

 

Many people who are trying to be religious think that the more impossible things they believe, the more faithful they are.

 

Faith in belief, in knowledge, developed in the Enlightenment, with the advent of modern science.

 

Now that modern science is giving up on faith in belief, conservative religionists are taking it up. “You must believe right to be saved.”

 

No, salvation comes through faith, that thing that gets you up in the morning, not through belief.

 

Faith is the most important element for brain health.

 

There are other elements of brain health. Some are surprisingly simple, like smiling or yawning. Others are common sense, like exercise and conversation. But faith is the most important. [Andrew Newman, MD, and Mark Robert Waldman, How God Changes Your Brain]

 

Not faith in a religion, but faith in life, that thing that gets you up in the morning.

 

I personally believe that faith in God is the same as faith in life.

 

I have given up on movements

 

Not bowel movements.

 

Social movements. Like race relations.

 

Original sin is just too much with us for movements to last.

 

Perhaps it is more accurate to say that I have given up on that arc of history that presumably bends toward justice. It seems that every time it bends toward justice, it bends back the other way again.

 

Or the mills of the gods. They do “grind exceeding fine,” but all they do is level everything, not just the chaff.

 

But I continue to push on the arc, and work the millstones, not because I have faith in movements, but because I have faith in life, even though my remaining years of this life are few.

 

I continue with faith in life. That it is worth getting up for and going out to joust again, even if it seems like it is only with windmills.

 

I believe in dreaming the impossible dream.

 

I have faith in life.

 

John Robert McFarland