July 2024 – Faith in the Age of Overwhelm
Unsurprisingly, I’ve been having many conversations this week about national and global politics, about power vs. powerlessness, and survival. With the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the assaults on democracy worldwide, and the uncertainties of our future, it is no wonder that these subjects are part of the therapy conversation. Yet, for all the details and myriad particular concerns, the central questions all essentially seem to boil down to: How do we remain active? And how do we stay centered in the storm?
The article below was written around the beginning of Trump’s presidency, as I was working with clients (and myself) around these questions. The same discussion is returning and I’m seeing how my response, and my suggestion about how clients can orient themselves, has remained the same since 2016. In essence this is: practice grief (there are vast losses that the world at large, and we as individuals, are refusing to, or too overwhelmed, to grieve) and faith. But here I mean faith in a specific sense, being the intentional and conscious choice to assume that the world is, in essence, good not bad, given that the existential question of “Is life/these times good or bad?” cannot be answered simply by data. Change-oriented action, in whatever appropriate form, almost naturally follows on locating ourselves in that matrix of grief and faith. But if we do not root ourselves there, our actions with either be spastic and poorly considered, or frozen.
So, may you find some measure of footing in this stormy and uncertain time, and a faith that allows you the space to grieve what is being lost, in order to find and embrace what still remains.
Past writing on macro politics and individual depression:
(2017) “10 Tips for a Depression Free Election”
(2020) “Tips for the Depressive in Turbulent Times”
(2022) “Depression in Depressing Times”
(2022) “Cherishing Our Own Bafflement”
Past articles on faith:
(2016) “Depression and Faith”
(2020) “Faith as Openness, Faith as Training“
Past articles on grief:
(2024) “The Ghosts of Stalled Grief”
Maintaining balance, sanity, and faith in this age of overwhelm.
Agent Smith:
Why, Mr. Anderson? Why, why? Why do you do it? Why, why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you’re fighting…for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception… Only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can’t win. It’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?
Neo:
Because I choose to.
–(Matrix Revolutions, 2003)
When the election results rolled in last year, I spent the evening in a kind of stunned agitation; but the next day I thought, “Well, this sure is going to mark the limits of my faith.”
The phenomenon of faith is often misunderstood as what the faith is in, rather than what faith is. Faith is not simply a willingness to believe in the concrete reality of a certain teaching or dogma. Faith is also not the suspension of truth in service of our own private and preferred reality. Faith is the choice to believe in goodness, in those places where goodness cannot be proven.
Faith is a volitional act that simultaneously asserts goodness, while also holding that there is no way to objectively prove that very goodness. A “faith” that is provable, or disprovable, that says “life and humans are good, or bad” on the basis of objective facts, is actually not faith, but rather, analysis, or science. Science and faith are completely different things.
Questions such as those around climate change, or economic consequences of different government policies, are not in the realm of faith. We don’t have the right to faith in these areas because, although complex and contentious, these questions have answers that can be proved with observation and data.
Questions of faith are ones like: Is life good or bad? Is this current election a refutation of humanity’s value and worth? Are humans worthy of love? These are the questions that are unanswerable by data or observation. To assert an objective answer to these questions, a concrete yes or no, is to distort the inherently non-rational nature of the question, and, worse, to abrogate our individual responsibility to take a stand. Not a position of what is true, but an overt claim on our assertion of the reality we in effect create in those spaces where there cannot be an objective answer.
If we cannot say whether humans are good or bad, then to choose to believe—and act—in accordance with a faith in goodness is to change our behavior and our relationships, shaping our lives in a way that creates that goodness.
I can tell when I’m falling off this fine point of faith, because when I do, I experience pain. Not that parts of me don’t relish being arrogant, self-righteous, or victimized, but when I dig underneath those, there is grief I’m trying to excommunicate, the pain of cutting myself off from that grief, and maybe more deeply, the pain of removing myself from the world around me. If I’m enjoying my victimhood, then the world has to be victimizer. If I’m obviously in the right, then others have to be in the wrong. Either way, I’m cut off from others, and end up more alone.
Meeting this election, and the macro-level of politics during this time, has pushed hard on those places where I thought I have been strong in a conscious, “volitional” faith. Are humans good? “Yes, of course I have faith in that.” Yet the wash of irrationality, fear, reactionary behavior (from right and left) has brought a klieg light to places within me that hold a kind of anti-faith: “No, humans are not good at all…and that’s just objective fact.”
These places that have been exposed are anti-faithful because they are not choices. They are not volitional acts or stances, but programmed ones, given to us by family or culture or religion (which is exactly what Agent Smith represents). When they come into view, the opportunity is to see them for what they are, and reorient towards faith. “Accepting the reality at hand, I choose to assert, and act in accord with, humans being essentially good.” In faith, we are not so much asserting a belief, as we are asserting a world.
Were you to respond, “Ok, but prove it,” that would be a non-starter, like demanding a proof for love, or beauty. Rather, like Neo as he lay in his crater, in full view of his catastrophe, I would say that I am choosing faith because I refuse to choose defeat. And as humans, apparently, we only have those two choices.
