Sometimes (more often than you’d imagine), it is useful to have been a Latin geek. It’s like knowing the secret identity of words, and to some degree that’s a secret decoder ring of what people mean when they tell you something whether they fully know it or not. If you look up fides in an online dictionary, it will usually give you an incorrect post-Christianized definition of faith. But the word is more of a verb than a noun, and means to (be known as) act(ing) in good faith, from which we get words like fidelity and confide. It very much does NOT mean believing in things that are beyond direct knowing or reckoning. Quite the opposite. So to say that you have faith, such as in Jesus, would mean that you act (not just speak, but judge, behave, think – all primary human activities) as if you have that faith, and your consistency in that action would be the strength of your faith. If you don’t do any of that, you don’t have faith, you’re just full of shit more or less. In that relationship, you’d have to assume Jesus is also acting in good faith with you, and that indeed might be as hard to prove as it would be to disprove. Hence why I can’t have any faith in Jesus at all. The spiritual principles I have (had?) faith in are the ones I’ve seen again and again act with the reliability of gravity, such as you get what you give. That seems like Truth, reminders of which can be delivered daily to your phone via a Dalai Lama radiance app, to help you out when (if you’re like me) you feel like a crabby asshole a lot. If you walk around projecting crabby asshole, chances are people are going to treat you like you are one, and the reality of that will be reinforced everywhere constantly, until indeed you will have full faith in the fact that you are a crabby asshole. The way you act will be the way you are treated, the way you think will be reflected back at you like pinging, and you will create your life this way, in how you think and how you act and the peace and love or lack thereof from which you proceed at the center of your Being (and Jesus will not intervene). Beyond that, having faith in actual human beings is tricky business, not an uncomplicated thing for me these days. I have lost much faith in words at all, since many times the person using them doesn’t know what the words mean actually even if they are using them as ends (truth) rather than manipulative tools (lies). An English professor's staple advice: show, don’t tell.
mahalia jackson - I'm going to live the life I sing about in my song
