Losing faith.

continued from here (bottom of the page).

 Losing faith. 

Sunday morning. About quarter ’til eight. Uncle Albert calls. I think it’s going to be about the Bournemouth-Arsenal game at 8:30. It’s not. It’s about church: Where am I?

     “You don’t remember,” I said.

     Nothing on the other end of the line.
     “Two Sundays ago.”
     Nothing 

     “I called you.”

     And nothing.

     “Very early in the morning.”

     Still absolutely nothing.

     “I told you I’d lost my faith.”

     “I do remember,” Uncle Albert said.

     “Ergo,” I said [Stage direction: sententiously]: “Ergo, I am not going to church.”

     “I didn’t think you were serious,” Uncle Albert said.

When, in Orwell’s The Clergyman’s Daughter, Dorothy, the daughter, tells Mr. Warburton that she’s lost her faith, he doesn’t believe it. As far as he’s concerned, she never had any. “You never did believe in it [really],” he says. “But I did, really I did!” she replies. “I know you thought I didn’t - you thought I was just pretending because I was ashamed to own up. But it wasn’t that at all. I believed it just as I believe I am sitting in this [railway] carriage.”

     Warburton still doesn’t believe her. She’s always been “too intelligent” to have faith.

And I, I suppose, have, in Uncle Albert’s eyes, been too naïve to have lost it.

     “Why wouldn’t I have been serious?” I asked. “It was four o’clock in the morning.”

     “I thought maybe you just misplaced it,” he said.

     “What does that mean?”

     More nothing on the other end.

     “Here’s what I think,” I said. “Jack can lose his faith, and you believe it.”

     Then, after a pause, there was something on the other end: “That’s different,” Uncle Albert was saying - insisting. There was that in his voice, insistence (as the near-relation to defensiveness). “It’s different,” he insisted, but when I asked, he wouldn’t say how.

     “Here’s what I think,” I said again. “Jack can lose his faith, and you believe it. But I can’t lose mine. And it’s because he’s serious, right? - and I am not. He’s thoughtful, and I am a funny little madman, who doesn’t know what he knows and what he doesn’t know.”

     “So, no church,” Uncle Albert said.

     “No, no church.”

     “Bournemouth-Arsenal begin at 8:30?”

     “Yes.” And I said I’d pick him up about a quarter after.

Did I say that, in so many words, “I am a funny little madman”? If so, is that what I meant?

     Maybe it is. I know - and you know - that there are people we take seriously, and there are people we don’t take seriously. It’s not because we don’t care for them, the ones we don’t take seriously; it’s not even that we don’t care what they think. But they seem to hold their opinions lightly; then, so do we.

    So, for example, while Jack tries not to take himself too seriously - he wishes he didn’t take himself as seriously as he does - still, at the end of the day, the Presbyterian minister who left on three weeks’ vacation from the Presbyterian Church in Jefferson, North Carolina, and did not return, is judged a serious man. Everyone thinks so, everyone that has ever known him. He can laugh at himself, we all know, but there’s always a hint of bitterness in the laugh, a bite of chickory.

    On the other hand, Ted (for another example) holds onto everything lightly, because anything could get up and fly away at any minute and it’s good to be ready for that. He holds onto what he knows lightly: he could well be wrong. What he knows of Science could be wrong; History he could well be misreading; the philosophers he thinks he does comprehend could be as misguided as psychologists (psychologists could be only as reliable as fortunetellers). Religion could misconstrue God - it’s likely that religion does misconstrue God.

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang

Unlike Science, Philosophy, or Religion, faith (even in Science) doesn’t have to do with what we know but with what we trust. It’s one thing to find out you’ve been wrong about something. It’s another thing to have misplaced your trust.

     And here, it’s not just trust in God, it’s trust in Uncle Albert. (Obviously, I’m the Ted in the example.) When a good Catholic goes to confession, he trusts the priest is listening, that the man on the other side of the screen takes sin seriously, that he can hear where the sinner has gone astray, that he can offer forgiveness and keep a confidence. I guess I expected something similar of Uncle A, not that he could offer forgiveness, but that he took faith seriously and that he listened.

     So much for that.

Arsenal beat Bournemouth 2-1.

11.26.18