FAITH

I want to think about something with you. It has to do with the question of faith. Of what it is. It doesn’t matter if you’re religious or secular reading this. I’m speaking of what is it to have faith in something. Before the war I thought I knew…

There has always been a voice in me that everything will be okay. Whether in my career or my life in general, I always knew everything would turn out okay. An autopilot of positivity has navigated me through life’s storms. I’ve been the recipient of reassuring information that things will be fine. Whether it’s the comfort of my mind weighing up evidence and reasoning positive outcomes. Or an emotion that satiates worry. An intuition. Something that simmers. My conscious mind and the wellspring of my inner feelings have always intervened to communicate to me that things will work out. But in the days, weeks and months after October 7th that disappeared completely. Those feelings were gone. Those first months were unprecedented in the atmosphere that descended upon the world. It was different to how things are now. There was simply fear, horror and uncertainty. A vampire gloom blanketed the world. A shroud of poison and an ill spirit choked normality. There was the massacre in Israel. Followed by the pogroms in Russia. And the wolves that prowled. The rug was pulled from under our feet. The world turned. We were trapped on this planet alone with monsters floating through space. Pharoahs chariots were baring down upon us again. And for me, personally, I had nothing. I had none of those old familiar feelings of comfort to guide me. There was nothing. There was no intellectual evidence that everything would be okay. In fact all evidence pointed in the opposite direction - that we had been successfully deceived and were doomed. There were no feelings of grace or tenderness that the world is ultimately a good place. There was no holiness. There was only fear and silence. But not a comforting silence. Not a silence of still lakes and tranquility. It was silence that hurt. It was silence like a knife. It was the emptiest void. But we were about to go to war. The conveyor belt of reality was moving and there was nothing to be done about it. We were on this ride. It was in this universe that I applied a conscious thought alone in my room one night in London. I have nothing. I have no proof that everything will be okay. I have no intuition. I have no feeling of hope. I have no clue that the things I do will yield anything - but I’m going to do them anyway. In that cold, lonely, inert void I put one foot in front of the other and I put my shoulder to the wheel.

I have come to believe this is the only time in my life I’ve ever exercised faith. I thought I’d been exercising it prior to this - but I hadn’t. Because what possible faith is there when you have a feeling that everything will be okay? What possible faith is there when you have reason and logic to stabilise you? All those optimistic thoughts and feelings of grace - they were never faith at all. Because the truth is faith is one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had. Faith doesn’t come with bandages of love. Faith is cold. Faith is horrible. Faith is hard. Faith gives you nothing. Faith gives you no comfort. No reassurance. No balm. No satiation. Faith is a terrible thing to experience. I wouldn’t wish the need to exercise faith on my worst enemy. Comfort? Reassurance? Faith is to act when you have none of that. When the moment came, faith didn’t feel like faith. It didn’t feel like anything. The world was completely empty. But I walked into it anyway.