It started with as a fight against rituals and superstitions enforced in the name of religion and for better or worse progressed to a point where I have come to realize everything happening in this world is random and there is little to probably nothing that is really under your control. This is the "enlightenment" that I am running with at the moment. Still conflicted on whether this intentional or unintentional shattering of presumed truths because of thinking too much is a good thing or not. Oh the pure bliss of being in a bubble. I miss it! But do I?
My crisis started when one fine day I asked myself "What next?" Until then I was chasing something or the other - school, college, work, masters, relationship, marriage, and then. Whats next? I thought/think I can resolve this crisis by finding a goal, a purpose to life. But alas, I landed at a question that has no real answer to. I understand that there are plenty of theories to that question but thats all they are - theories.
There exists another resolution to such a crisis - one that exists in most, one that I refused to give weight to, one I feel I might not be able to achieve - Faith. No, this is not about God. God is just one of the many faiths. Faith is belief in something, anything. I would've to believe in an eventuality, in a purpose to reap the its prime benefit - contentment. While I am searching for a faith that "makes sense"or one that I resonate with the most, it is the nature of faith that needs its believers to be blind, to trust it completely, unquestioningly. Can I do it? Right now, the thought of doing such a thing feels like I am settling because lack of reasoning/logic is settlement. May be there exists a middle ground between reason and faith?
I am at a place where such ruminations aren't all consuming. They linger in the background. But I do slightly fear that they may become the foreground. For the most part, I am in the don't-care-a-darn attitude, with a do-what-makes-you-happy motive. So, all is well?
It's been more of a gradual thing: a drip, drip, drip of doubt, disaffection, disease, discomfort. People around me have noticed my general irritability. Now, of course, that's nothing new. I'm generally a cantankerous sort. But even I would have to admit that there has been more of it lately. Not to mention, an almost jealous fascination with the achievements of these young astronauts. Compulsive overexercising. An inability to find calm or satisfaction or fulfillment.
And when you look at all these symptoms, of course it doesn't take a genius to tell you that they all suggest I'm slap bang in the middle of a — I can't even say what kind of crisis! Of course one's read or heard about other people hitting that crisis, and, you know, just like them, you look in all the usual places, resort to all the usual things to try and make yourself feel better. Some of which I can admit to in this room, and some of which I probably shouldn't.
My mother died recently. She saw that something was amiss. She saw that something was missing in her youngest child - Faith. "How's your faith?" she asked me. I'm here to admit to you that I've lost it. And without it, what is there? The loneliness, emptiness and anticlimax of going all that way to the moon to find nothing, but haunting desolation, ghostly silence, gloom. That is what faithlessness is.
As opposed to finding wonder, ecstasy, the miracle of divine creation, God's design and purpose. What am I trying to say? I'm trying to say that the solution to our problems, I think, is not in the in the ingenuity of the rocket, or the science or the technology or even the bravery. No, the answer is in here. Or here, or wherever it is that faith resides. And so, Dean Woods, having ridiculed you for what you and these poor, blocked, lost souls were trying to achieve here in St. George's House, I now find myself full of respect and admiration and not a small part of desperation as I come to say, Help. Help me.
Relevant conversation between Price Philip and his mother on an earlier episode,
Mother: Now, Bubbikins, you mentioned faithlessness. How is your faith?
Son: Dormant.
Mother: That's not good. Let this be a mother's gift to her child. The one piece of advice. Find yourself a faith. It helps. No. Not just helps. It's everything.