Leap of Faith

These are troubled times.

On Tuesday, we awakened to learn an airplane had crashed in the French Alps.  Now we know the crash was a deliberate act by the co-pilot.

That same night, right around the time the copilot sent the plane hurtling into the side of a mountain, I had a dream.  In the dream, I was on a plane with my in-laws (now ex-laws) somewhere over the mountains of Italy, where they live.  And somehow, we all had to parachute down. The problem was that I was afraid, and I said to my 82 year-old mother-in-law, who is usually afraid of everything, "I'm not jumping, are you?"

But for once, my mother-in-law disagreed with me. I say "for once" because my mother-in-law and I always got along like two peas in a pod. Even now, 15 years after her son and I got divorced, we still enjoy long phone conversations.

And when I told her in my dream I was afraid to jump, I figured she would go along with me, as she always has.

But I was wrong.

"Io vado," she said, and she did, along with everybody else, while I stayed on the plane which somehow turned into the kitchen in their mountain home. My dream ended on a happy note with me deciding what to cook for my ex-laws who had somehow magically reappeared in the kitchen.

I don't know about you, but I haven't slept properly since I learned of the crash.  I fall asleep all right but as I sleep, my subconscious twists and turns and writhes around, struggling to make sense of information that doesn't make sense, to find a way out of the tunnel of pain and anger, until it wakes me up and leaves me there, dry-eyed and sleepless, for hours.

I'll admit that my first desire when I learned the copilot acted deliberately was to bring him back to life so I could kill him myself.

The sorrow is too immense to comprehend or digest, whereas the anger comes in bite-size morsels that can smolder and seethe in my being a little at a time.  And so I focus on the anger because it keeps me sane.

I didn't know any of the victims. But I have tried to imagine what it must have felt like to experience those last minutes of terror. And I have imagined, too, just a little, what it must feel like for the family members who have been robbed of a loved one, those grieving people who lie sleepless, like me, imagining, fantasizing about turning back the clock, and then remembering that the clock can't be turned back.

It's all beyond horror, beyond understanding, beyond my powers to comprehend or fix or help. And so I did what I have learned to do when the burden is too great to bear:  I gave it up to God.

I never used to know what that meant.  "Give it up to God" seemed to me more like a political slogan than a strategy for facing life.  Like so many people, I believed in myself, thanks to those essentially human characterisitics of arrogance and low self-esteem.

The arrogance came of thinking that nothing could exist that was beyond my ability to comprehend it. I was a child placing her hands before her eyes to make God disappear.

The low self-esteem was due to believing that even if there were a God, He surely couldn't take an interest in me and my problems, great or small as they might be, because He has more important things to focus on.

Once again, this belief was due to my flawed understanding and my human desire to make God in my own image. Because I am not a multitasker, ergo God must not be a multitasker either. Only now am I starting to understand that God is so great that He has time and energy and wisdom and most of all, love, for all our problems, all our joys, all our thoughts, wishes, and desires. That's what "omniscient" and "omnipotent" mean.

God doesn't have to prioritize.  He's not an executive secretary or even the president of a company.  God is God.  He sees every sparrow that falls.  He knows you had a bad day and He cares.  That rainbow in the sky, that song on the radio, He sent those to you and to you alone.

I won't go into the whole story of the evolution of my faith. Mostly, because I think most people of faith have a similar story.  Whatever you believe, or think you believe, I think each one of us comes to a point in our lives where we reach the edge of the Abyss.

Things happen.  Bad things. Difficult things. Death, disease, cruelty, evil, heartbreak, all those things we thought happened to other people, suddenly they strike our lives with the force of a hurricane. They leave us flattened, with no idea how to go on and no particular desire to do so.

And we come to the very outmost edge, the furthest outcropping of our human potential to cope. We look down, and all we see is nothingness. We look forward, and we don't even see the other side.  We look up, and all we see is the sky, and a black sky at that.

And that's where we have to make a choice.  Jump, or stay where we are, except the ground is falling away beneath us so even staying where we are is no longer an option.

Which leaves us with just the one option, and at first glance, it doesn't look particularly appealing.

They say that in the early days of the automobile, Henry Ford used to quip, "You can have any color you like, as long as it's black."

The same can be said of our choices at the edge of the Abyss.  You can make any decision you like, as long as it's "jump."

But a halfhearted little jump won't do it.  You're not hopping over a mudpuddle here, or skipping through daisies in a field, or even two-stepping over a speed bump in the road.

What you need, what we all need, is more than a jump; it's a leap.  A leap of faith.

Human understanding, reason, science, those things are the ground we walk on every day. They are the things that make sense to us, that give us our sense of security. But we eventually come to a place where sense doesn't make sense anymore, a place where human understanding ends, where human powers fail, and that is the edge of the Abyss.

The Abyss is the Unknown.  It is all the great mysteries of life we prefer not to think about until they descend on us and flatten us like a pancake.  It is a place we mostly like to avoid.

But when you get there, when you come to the edge of your powers and your understanding, you have no choice but make that leap of faith.

Faith gives you wings to fly over and through the Abyss.  And even then, it is not your human faith that will save you.  Faith just launches you, but as much as you flap those wings, they will not carry you over the Abyss.  Grace will carry you over the Abyss.

We must never forget that it is not by faith, but by Grace we are saved.

What that means is our human abilities are limited.  We like to believe we are all-powerful but that is simply false.  We exist by the grace of God. We live and die and are saved by God's grace and God's grace alone.

That doesn't mean we don't need faith.  God has given humans free will, and even He can't force us to jump into His waiting arms.  Even God can't save us if we don't want to be saved.  And that should scare you because we live in a society where we want to palm off the responsibility for everything, including our own salvation, onto somebody else.

Faith is our admission that we are not all-powerful, it is our declaration to God that we are on His team.  It's like a candidate officially declaring his intention to run.  We officially declare to God, "I believe. I'm in.  Do with me what you will."  

If grace is the train to glory, faith is our ticket to ride.

And so these three remain:  faith, hope and love; but the greatest of these is love.

God's grace is His love for us which, I am going to say honestly right now, I do not understand. We don't deserve it.  We all sin, we all defy God's will, we all commits acts, if not of outright evil, at least of cowardice, which amounts to the same thing.  Because if we are not actively fighting evil, then we are helping it. There is no middle ground.

And yet with all our failings, with our cowardice and arrogance, God loves us, and He wants us to be with Him throughout Eternity.

Go figure.

If you ask me, we're not worth it.  When I hear about particularly evil acts, sometimes I pray to Jesus and I say Jesus, we're not worth it. Just wipe us out and start over.

But so far, Jesus has not heeded that particular plea. Jesus actually seems to believe He knows better than I!! Can you imagine?

I'm joking about it, but if there's one thing I know, it's that I know very little.  Luckily, God does know. Whatever happens in this world, God is on it.

Our human abilities are limited, even faith. But God's grace knows no limits. God's grace will carry us over the Abyss to the other side, whatever the other side may be. We may plop down in another part of this lifetime, safe and sound albeit profoundly changed, or we may continue our journey into the life we were living before we came here, the one without the physical body.

This week I have been in constant prayer.  I don't ask for anything in particular, I just call God's name. It is the opposite of saying His name in vain. I know He knows what to do, I know He is on it, but I need to connect, in some way, to Him.  And so I call His name.

And last night, I finally slept, for the first time since the airplane crashed in France. When I woke up, dawn was just breaking.  And as I saw the light filtering through the trees in the distance, I looked for the sadness inside myself and I couldn't find it.  A voice inside my head said, "They are with God."

Leda grew up in wartime Italy, and she was only able to attend school through the third grade. Then, her mother died and she was needed at home.

I graduated from college cum laude, I was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, I have a master's degree from a prestigious university.

Where there is knowledge, it will pass away.  For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

What my dream told me is that with all my knowledge and all my "smarts" as my father called it, I still need to learn the wisdom and the courage that my mother-in-law came to my dream to show me:  the courage to make that leap of faith.