Work in Progress: Faith and Oblivion

Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. – Martin Luther King Jr.

As children, we are taught to dream. We are encouraged to dream and praised for dreaming. We are told that the world and the heavens are ours to fill with dreams, and to dream big enough and often enough to populate the vast sky with the dazzling sparks of our imagination at work.

I dreamed of worlds beyond rainbows, of soaring into the beautiful unknown. I saw a future in my small hands, holding them up at night and watching the enormous shadows they could cast. Even in the darkness, in the embrace of sleep, I dreamed in deep color and woke to bright mornings emptied of yesterday, fresh and new, like turning the page in a coloring book.

I filled my childhood with color, from the waking projections of my imagination to the light behind my closed eyelids and, soon, the rainbow world of sleep. From first light to nightlight, I dreamed, living in God’s world where everything is so beautiful, and so true.

But then, endless time began to fade and was replaced by clocks and calendars, a distinction between “real” and “unreal.” Perpetual summer shrank into winter, seemingly without a promise to return. The colors of my world grew washed out and thin, as black and white and grey crept in from the edges, along with the world of people.

It was a world we all become aware of at a certain point, marking the end of childhood and the beginning of the rest of our lives spent somewhere far away. For some, it comes early, and the feeling of loss underlies all that follows. For others, it comes late, and the prolonged transition only serves to add a deeper sting when eventually, inevitably, it arrives. We all run, even though there is no outrunning it, and for those who hide and succeed in staving off the theft of childhood, the world is a lonely place.

This is a natural process, we are told, when time moves us into a new state of being and understanding. In many ways, this is true. But a cold, cynical world makes us give up one part of childhood that should never have been relinquished: the power of faith, hope and imagination. We leave the world of dreams because we are told there is no more room for dreaming.

We trade a limitless existence for a dog-eat-dog world, where responsibilities outweigh everything else. Obligation is God, and it rules with a tight rein. Dreaming is for dreamers, and dreamers are nobodies, painting with faded colors on a canvas of nothingness.

So, the former child weighs the world of people and chooses what seems to be the straightest, sturdiest path. It is a path that requires little faith. And these paths are held in highest esteem in the world of people.

There is no need for hope in a life ruled by fear. There is no expectation, other than the inevitability of bad, of darkness and of defeat. In this world, no one is free. We are slaves to cynicism, and to the creed that if something can go wrong then it will. We dedicate our lives to building up barriers to protect ourselves: money, power, and even cynicism itself. We believe that these things can help us avoid being hurt, and even ultimately protect us against our biggest fear: death.

But we fear the wrong things. And all along, we have already been protected from that which we should fear, and that which we are always unknowingly struggling against: oblivion. We struggle against the threat of non-existence — the idea that we never existed at all, that our lives are inconsequential, that once our bodies have died our existence has died too. We fear becoming imaginary.

This is what makes faith and hope so fundamentally challenging, so seemingly antithetical.

But could we revisit life through the eyes of our childhood selves, we would experience again the power and sureness of faith. There was no threat of oblivion. There was only life, both seen and unseen, and “seeing” itself was a richer, more complex, more enjoyable gift.

Could we carry that sureness with us into adulthood, we would know that we have already been saved from death and oblivion. We would know, in fact, that life and existence are so true, real and unending that there was never any need to be saved. There is no such thing as death or oblivion, only creation, and transformation. It is a truth so intrinsic that it requires letting go of understanding, and simply being.

If we stopped searching for complexity and instead embraced simplicity, we would then begin to see our salvation visible and tangent in every moment of our lives. Of course there is no oblivion. We exist and persist in love, from that which we receive and that which we give. This is how we live on, endlessly creating the future while living in perfect harmony with the past.

If we could remember what it was like to trust in this basic truth, we could stop being so afraid and start believing again — in ourselves, in the people around us, and in the unfathomable might of God.

There is everything to hope for. There is everything to believe in.