Exploring Faith

in that quest for certainty in that desire to sort of do the right thing or get to the end or, be good, we want some sort of exterior authority, some system of belief to confirm for us that we're following all the steps and checking everything off the to-do list. And that's a fallacy, certainly.

It's like an undeniable reality. It's not a question of like what you believe in or how adherent you are to your faith. This is just, there's a divinity baked into all of us and, the and also that there are all these false binaries or these systems set up as oppositional.

I don't know, it's just a place to rest really, honestly. It's a place to rest outside of certainty. Try it. You might find it deeply, deeply comforting, even though it promises to resolve absolutely nothing.

But I think in our time, those of us who grow up in doubt, who accept scientific skepticism as a foundational part of our worldview, also are drawn again and again to kinds of faith, to spiritual practice.

And the weird thing about it is that I realized then that understanding modern art really was like a religion, inasmuch as it was a practice before it was a dogma: that you could never really get it by understanding the way one picture had changed another, how Cubism had created Expressionism, which created Surrealism, and so on; that it was a prac... See more

One is that it’s all coming from me: Nothing funny is going on here; there is no spirit moving across the face of the earth. I’m just a pile of DNA, my cerebral cortex is firing off, and that is why my creativity exists, right? It’s all me; it’s only me — which is great, except then, how do you explain the mysterious part that you can’t explain, ab... See more

when we step outside ourselves — that was a creative act, right? It was an act of curiosity.

I have this odd sense that what was outside has become very inside. And that whatever I mean by “God” is, as my Muslim friends say, as close to me as the heartbeat in my neck.

So what’s saving my life right now is the old mantra of staying in the present as best I can and being amazed that life, as it unrolls every single day, is more than scenery as I rush from here to there. That it’s the real deal.

It’s also that what we have referred to as “body” and what we’ve referred to as emotion and spirit, that those things in fact are completely entangled.