Faith as a practice is an important denial. Never denying feelings, however, it denies fear for courage, the lie for truth. It chooses to give and enter into life even when there’s every reason to shrink, take and withdraw. The only exception is for necessary Sabbatical where operant faith rests and recovers.
We discuss faith so much and from so many angles, yet faith—the verb—is an inordinate thing.
Subscribing to faith in things is, like worship, something we all do. We cannot help but trust in things, be they our own abilities and capacities, other people, or God.
This is, however, where good faith is separated out from not-so-good faith or bad faith. Good faith is backed up in truth. It is therefore enshrined in wisdom, which is demonstrating actions as having efficacy from the view of hindsight, or in review, afterwards.
Holding Extraneous Moments in Tension
Faith is the great skill, and very timely, when all of sudden life looms noisily.
That is, when things begin to bombard us and there is only ‘work’ and no joy in that work, we begin to lose our moment’s hope. At this point we have to manufacture hope. We either deny the escarpment of fear that rapidly encroaches—doing so via courage—or we let it perhaps begin to overwhelm us. The former has us manufacturing hope successfully; the latter not so much.
Holding our moments in tension in Emotional Intelligence terms is harnessing ourselves and our social challenges, and meeting them one-by-one.
From one successful moment of practiced good-faith-in-circumstance to another, and then to another, sees us build our confidence so that we can actually bridge this mounting tension, and sustainably so.
Where Faith Meets Wisdom
“Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”
~Matthew 11:19 (NRSV).
It is a principle of wisdom from Matthew 11:19 that wisdom is vindicated by the later recognition of its action—that it is found later as effective. We can usually only tell from afterwards how wise the action was and whether it was based in ‘good faith’ or not.
Good faith is the agency to wisdom as a method for living life.
It can be seen here, then, that both good faith and wisdom—so far as them being action-oriented—are highly temporal in nature. They involve momentary trust. So, it’s up to us to join our moments-of-trust together so we live an effective faith.
Using Good Faith as a ‘Simple’ Method Through Life
There’s never a better supplement to the mode of good faith as a simple approach to life.
This method is naturally not attracting extraneous noise, for it knows and appreciates the quiet life. That is not to say that the quiet life means less work or less challenges. It just means there’s more ability to focus on what’s most important.
Living a good faith is mostly about keeping things simple and living dedicated to the truth as much as possible.
© 2011 S. J. Wickham.
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