Thirst

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My father sent me here on earth to spread the faith. Faith in what? In him. Even if he did deign to include me in the concept through the notion of the trinity, I find it mind-boggling.

I came to this conclusion in no time. Moreover, how often did I say to this or that person in distress, “Your faith has saved you”? Would I have lied to these unfortunate people? The truth is that I tried to outsmart my father. I noticed that the word faith had a strange property: it became sublime, provided it was intransitive. The verb “to believe” obeys an identical law.

To believe in God, to believe that God was made man, to have faith in the resurrection: that all sounds a bit shaky. The things we don’t like to hear also offend our spirit. It sounds stupid because it is. It all remains pretty lowbrow, like in Pascal’s wager: believing in God means placing your bets on him. The philosopher even goes so far as to tell us that no matter the outcome of the raffle, we are sure to win.

And what about me in the middle of all this: do I believe? In the beginning, I agreed to this crazy scheme because I believed in the possibility of changing mankind. Fat lot of good that did. I managed to change maybe three people at the very most. And besides, what an idiotic belief! You really must know nothing about anything to think you can change someone. People change only if it comes from within, and it is extremely rare for them to really want to change. Nine times out of ten, their desire for change is about other people. “This has to change,” a phrase you hear ad nauseam, always signifies that it’s people who ought to change.

Have I changed? Yes, certainly. Not as much as I would have liked. I may be credited for what I really tried to accomplish. I confess I get irritated with people who are constantly telling you they’ve changed when all they’ve really ever known is the desire to change.

I have faith. This faith has no object. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in anything. Believing is beautiful only in the absolute sense of the term. Faith is an attitude and not a contract. There are no boxes to tick. If we knew the nature of the risk that faith consists of, our impulse would not go beyond calculating probability.

How do we know when we have faith? It’s like love, you just know. You don’t need to think about it to figure it out. In gospel music they say “And then I saw her face, yes I’m a believer.” That’s just what it is, and it shows how similar faith and being in love really are: you see a face and suddenly everything changes. You didn’t even gaze at that face, you just caught a glimpse of it. That simple epiphany was enough.

I know that for a lot of people, that face will be mine. I’ve convinced myself that it has no importance whatsoever. And yet, if I want to be perfectly frank, which I do, it leaves me dumbfounded.

You have to accept the mystery: you cannot imagine what other people see in your face.

There is a counterpart that is every bit as mysterious: I look at myself in the mirror. What I see in my face, no one can know. It’s called solitude.