A prayer to Faith

Dear Faith,

I feel I am coming to know you—to draw lines around you and formulate a sensitivity of response to your call. Yours is a face that I’m coming to know.

You ask of me everything that is hard, everything that is challenging—that challenges me; you disrupt all that lies around me: you ask me to pull up my roots, the small things I’ve built, my petty plans. When I’m sunk in my limited perspective, you offer very little in return. You offer the opportunity to accept that mine is a position of unknowing. The opportunity to accept the things that are not mine to know. Yours is a call to trust in little else other than you. To practice this very particular devotion of movement. You offer me little more than yourself—your wild, expansive self.

I’m coming to know you and I see that with your offer, you split open the world. You invite me to meet you beyond the limitations in which I cage myself, pin myself down in my creaturely need for familiarity and comfort. You call me to challenge my fears and to know beyond all reason, logic, and explanation. Step beyond yourself, you say. Grow your capacity. Extend just beyond yourself—just beyond. I’m waiting for you.

Through you, I see the smallness in me, the smallness of the things of the world. You invite me to want more than just to scrape by, scraping by as, little by little, I settle. You invite me to be more than simple. You invite me to grow through change, up to my potential, into possibility. Possibility, the possible. Transcendence. You call me to own my potential to become. Through you I become transcendent. With you, I transcend myself.

And so, sweet Faith, dear Faith, rigorous, demanding, incomprehensible Faith, to you I say: okay.

Okay, yes. Yes. And, again, I say yes.

Amen.