Faith: Our Strength and Weakness

          

 In Language Arts, our most recent assignment was to pick a word or phrase and write an essay defining that word further than the dictionary takes it. I chose faith, and rather than going with the happy stuff, decided to go slightly insane with the topic. I promise you, I am not really this morbid.

In the book The Fault In Our Stars, young cancer patient Hazel Lancaster writes a hopeful and admiring letter to her favorite author, Peter Van Houten, begging him to reveal any information that would complete his book, a masterpiece in which the narrator dies and the story ends midsentence. Van Houten replies, however, with the words, “I fear your faith has been misplaced-but then, faith usually is.”

Van Houten turns out to be an obnoxious alcoholic who will only reveal the fate of his protagonist’s pet hamster, but Hazel was still led astray by his words, taking them with her all the way to Holland to meet him, and then letting them crush her dreams. The picture of what she thought this man really was being torn to shreds, stomped out by the monster of reality.  Yet even that made her stronger inside.

We grow up thinking that faith and belief are the same thing. In a way, I suppose, they are; both of them can apply to a person, or a religion, or a person or deity inside of a religion. Faith doesn’t have to have evidence or anything that supports the thing itself actually existing. On the contrary, it is fed by the believer’s dedication. “Be faithful in small things, because it is in them that your strength lies,” says Mother Teresa. What she says is entirely true, to me. Faith would not be if it weren’t for strength, and vice versa. If a person were to go through life frightened of every small thing that came his or her way, no strength would ever come out of that person, whether physical or mental. Faith is not only a trait of human lives; it is also a requirement for us to succeed happily and safely.

There is no proof that a specific religion exists, so instead of telling about how wondrous faith is now, I will turn to the other side of the story. There is always another part, one that has been hiding in the depths of the shadows, waiting for you to find it and be alarmed and quite shocked at what you see. The dark side of the moon is a place of secrets and mystery, and so is the other side of faith. So is the other side of trust, and believing.

Hazel’s story ends sadly, I will let you know. No story of a cancer patient could end wonderfully unless the cancer is somehow magically cured, and, as Hazel points out at the beginning of her story, she hates cancer books, because it never really gets better.  Her mind does get stronger, however, and as she narrates on, we realize how her faith has helped her along the way, after it pushed her down. This is where I point out that faith may be our greatest asset, but it is also our greatest curse.

Humans can be the most unpredictable creatures on the planet. We build up friendship, and trust bridges, and form the most complex relationships. But, just like in matters of concrete, these seemingly strong things can be crushed, and break, as easily as balsa wood. We have the power to be the kindest beings there are, but also the cruelest and most prone to backstabbing.

The passengers on the Titanic had faith in their crew and captain, which turned out to be their fatal mistake. Lily and James Potter “put their faith in the wrong person,” as Albus Dumbledore put it, describing how Peter Pettigrew turned them over to Lord Voldemort. By trusting your secrets in somebody else’s mind, you are putting something your most precious things in danger, like a life.

The God Complex is one of the last episodes in the sixth season of the British science fiction show Doctor Who. It begins innocently enough; the signature phone box time machine lands in a strange hotel, with rooms that are locked to most, but seem to be designed for a certain person. What the characters soon find out is that it is the fears of that person that are pretty much bottled up and stored in a room, waiting for the victim to stumble inside. “It's not just fear. It's faith. Not just religious faith, faith in something…Find the thing that keeps you brave. I made you expose your faith. Show them what they needed,” the Doctor soon concludes. Faith and strength correlate with one another, but faith is what makes us most vulnerable, and exposes us without the true strength needed to face the world. As I said before, a person cannot live through life frightened of everything, but what if it is faith that makes us so easily fooled and manipulated? Trusting a person with everything, putting faith into him or her, can be a death wish. Instead of a correlating series of lines, this would appear as a complicated web, the lines twisting around in complicated patterns and eventually connecting in random places.

Still, faith doesn’t have to be so morbid. Having faith in a person can be as simple as boosting someone’s confidence, and showing them that you think that he or she can do what may seem to be the impossible.  Anyone going through a hard time could use encouragement, and having faith in a person is like filling a balloon with more helium. The more you add, the higher it soars.

With faith, this world is a place of unique ideas, concepts, trust, and complex inhabitants. As Helen Keller once said, faith is “the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into light”.  Why not? It is a gift of tremendous strength that we can rebuild our relationships on, and become a planet of harmony again. However, just as with every other gift, we must use it sparingly. Sometimes a great gift can become a great enemy, no matter how glorious it seems.