20th December 2013

"Today nobody will stop with faith; they all go further. It would perhaps be rash to inquire where to, but surely a mark of urbanity and good breeding on my part to assume that everyone does indeed have faith, otherwise it would be odd to talk of going further. In those old days it was different. For then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, not a skill thought to be acquired in either days or weeks. When the old campaigner approached the end, had fought the good fight, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten the fear and trembling that disciplined his youth and which, although the grown man mastered it, no man altogether outgrows..." --Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.

This is a comfort. My ignorance and my searching may not categorically be marks of deficiency; they may be marks simply of a difference in starting-point. Not having faith from the first; having to strive ever to earn it; having to battle continually with my assumptions; having to brave perpetual fear and trembling; having to labor through the void, so unknowing, so blind, and so vulnerable; in all this I am not necessarily just a frail and faithless lost soul, but I am, perhaps, as those old campaigners. This is a comfort. This gives me courage. The old campaigners were surely heroic; their lives were surely meaningful even if their task was never fully accomplished. I feel as if I have suddenly been granted a thousand mighty mentors, and I am, for the hour, not alone.