I had a strange but enlightening conversation with my spouse the other night driving along a quiet late-night highway. We were talking about faith, about the idea that there is a lot going on we don’t understand, and he said, “I have never understood why we are supposed to be logical.” What came out of my mouth surprised me; “That’s because you’re a guy. If you were me, you’d have been told your whole life to be more logical, less emotional.” He pondered it for a split second and said back, “Well that explains a lot.”
Logic, with all the social approval that goes with it – the idea that we could all be homo economicus, making great, data-driven decisions about everything – is a potent societal drug. And with that cocktail of value, superiority, and inerrancy comes a kind of certainty that we can actually predict what needs to happen and be right. Or predict what will happen and be right. Or even predict the next move and be right. To pass the pipe without taking a hit is to stand outside what Western, secular, post-modern, and late capitalist society needs you to do to support its own addiction to logic, and logic’s wingman: certainty.
There is a kind of person (and if you are reading this here, you are probably among us) who just does not want to be forced to accept the choices on offer – the choices about gender, race, money, punishment, jobs, society, relationships, you name it. My kids often say: “I reject the premise of the question.” If you ask me which kind of life I want, and you give me a false dichotomy, I am always going to pick the third option. I will always pick the thing that does not really exist yet – I won’t be straight or gay, I will be that other thing. I won’t take the relationship options you give me, thank you very much, I will make up my own. Job, you say, well here is how I am going to do it and I promise no one will understand it. People always say to me, not kindly, “You have lived a lot of lives.” They are missing the point. I have lived one life – but not the way I was supposed to.
We inhabit the space between stories. The space where the new is forged out of imperfect and humanly messy effort. The place where we depend on each other, on the connective tissue of love that binds us, the place where we will say “I don’t know” a thousand times between sun up and dinner. The place where we find the transcendent and we make friends with it. I know most of the things I want in life are impossible. Yet, in this space between stories, they exist. Peace, freedom, love, healing, a just world, a vital planet, a fair chance, a new way of being, a past better than the one I had, deep connection and thriving.
The secret ingredient, which is what we were talking about when we happened on the drug of logic, is faith. Faith is not what we have been fed about religion (or about atheism either). Faith is the desire to NOT KNOW EVERYTHING and be ok with it. Faith is the part we play in the something greater that is our lives, communities, and humanity. Faith is the ability to step outside the narrative and play a part no one has created yet. And faith is the ability to lovingly let other folks do the same.
Because, boring and predictable stories aside, to take the next step, we need to have the feeling that something’s got us. That we are part of something greater. That we are not alone in our journey and that we are doing something bigger, more transcendent, and deeply meaningful. When we step out to do the next right thing, we are not yet “in” a story – we are making it up as we go along. We are in a space between stories that is a fertile ground for new, better, more life-giving narratives to unfold.
When I sit down to write a book, it is faith that keeps me at the keyboard, not certainty. Certainty would end me up with a very boring, predictable story filled with wooden characters living in a stage set world. When I reach out to a friend, it is faith that helps me listen with curiosity and share myself back. I don’t know what story we are writing but I know that it matters. What we lack when we are certain is the vibrancy and the intensity of experience. I want that, even if it means I am never on solid ground.
When I step out the door in a few minutes to run errands, with two dogs in the car who love to blast the music with the windows open, I think I know what will happen between here and the Post Office, and I am almost never right. If I am honest, I don’t even know what will happen between now and the end of the sentence. Not knowing, the space between, is true freedom. One of my beloved teachers once said, “Freedom is not choice, it is what you bind yourself to with your heart.”
So, I am not selling you the life that happens between the stories, that is yours to choose or not. I am not even selling you faith. However, what I am saying is that the very life of life only happens here and if you want to partake – with the poets, activists, creators of new ideas, and the rest of us who simply don’t fit into the old narrative – you might give it a try. It costs you nothing (except the accolades of a dying culture and a sense of being better than) and it might give you a place for your heart to rest and be filled.